We are just days away from the Marketing Hackfest in Chicago, IL. Thanks to Novell and Google’s sponsorship, nine of us are converging in Google’s Chicago office for two days.
While we’re there, we’d like to invite any Chicago GNOME users and developers to join us for a drink or bite to eat Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at the Rock Bottom Brewery at One West Grand Ave.
I look forward to seeing you there!
Did anyone watch The Office last Thursday night? Early in the episode, Dwight gives Jim a wood duck with a walkie-talkie built-in so Dwight can spy on Jim.
Jim: Thanks for the duck
Dwight: It’s not a duck, it’s a mallard!
This had me chuckling thinking about Mallard documentation. For the record, mallards are a much more beautiful duck than wood ducks.
There’s been a lot going on in the world of GNOME documentation. Mallard has been getting a lot of buzz, in the #docs IRC channel, on Twitter and identi.ca, the mailing list and blogs. People have taken notice of the new Empathy documentation with its new layout and focus on topic based documentation.
Here’s just a few of the things going on:
Now is a great time to get involved with GNOME Documentation. Stop by on IRC in #docs on GimpNET or join the mailing list, we’d love to share what is going on with Mallard and how we are planning to make user help a better experience.
Three weeks from today members of the GNOME Marketing team will converge on Chicago for two days of work, brainstorming and fun.
With thanks to Google for hosting us and Novell for sponsoring us, we’ll set aside two days to work on:
We have information up regarding the hackfest on the GNOME Wiki, including our hackfest goals, location information, attendees and more. (This page is a first draft, more details soon and thanks to everyone who has contributed to the page).
Want to come? Now is the time to sign up! The GNOME Travel Committee has been approving applications the last couple of days, and we have room for more. Plan on coming, but haven’t added your name to the wiki page? Please do!
We’ll also be having a GNOME Meetup Tuesday night, so if you’re in the Chicago area check back soon for location details. Chicago has a thriving FOSS community and I’m looking forward to visiting Chicago again.
See you there!
I’ve been feeling a bit down about GNOME Journal since our last planned issue for October fell apart at the last minute. There were a number of reasons and nobody’s fault but after the great success we’ve seen this year in having multiple issues published after not having published in 2008 I was afraid we were losing momentum again. (I’m very excited about our next issue, Women in GNOME, but was concerned about issues after that).
I am glad to have been proven wrong, and in the process, re-energized about GNOME Journal.
I had the opportunity to have lunch with Stormy earlier this week and mentioned to her that one of our authors, after seeing his article just not be ready, ask if there were any other articles he could write. After reviewing our article brainstorming list, I was stumped for ideas to give him as a number of the ideas were out of date. Having mentioned this to Stormy, she quickly added about a dozen ideas later in the week!
Then, out of the blue yesterday, Sumana jumped in and helped to update and re-organize our wiki pages and sent an email to the list mentioning the updates and some ideas for future issues.
After sending out my normal request for updates on the upcoming issue, two new volunteers sent emails within minutes of my email offering to help as well.
This is what I love about the GNOME community!
Now is a great time to get involved with GNOME Journal and here are a few different ideas on how to participate:
I’m still hopeful we’ll move from our current CMS (Textpattern) to WordPress-MU on blogs.gnome.org later this year. (Jeff Waugh – still need your help if you’re available!) Once that migration starts to occur we’ll also be looking for help and ideas around what WordPress plugins could enhance the GNOME Journal experience.
Christer Edwards (aka Zelut) recently represented GNOME at the Utah Open Source Conference. He’s got some great pictures up and has some good things to say about GNOME, including that he’s getting involved more (which is great to see!)
Read his full blog post (with pictures) here.
Christer and I were also recently talking about how we can expand GNOME usergroups in the US – he’s got some great ideas and experience. Still formulating my thoughts, expect a blog post soon on that as well.
We are in the final phases of planning a Marketing Hackfest to be held in Chicago, IL USA Tuesday and Wednesday, November 10th and 11th.
Google has been gracious to host us at their offices in Chicago and Novell is also helping with sponsorship.
Is this something you’d be interested in? Join the Marketing mailing list and let us know!
We’re finalizing the agenda now, but we have lots of stuff to work on, including:
And that’s just a sampling! If you’re good with art, writing or editing we’d love to have you there. Nothing is quite like a hackfest and feeling the energy created by working together in the same room getting stuff done.
It’s that time of year to start thinking about the GNOME Annual report and recapping all the wonderful activities the GNOME community has been involved in over the past year.
Lucas has done an awesome job over the last few years and this year has asked me to help with coordinating the annual report.
The annual report is one of the first things I ever contributed to GNOME (as an editor) and I hope I can do as good a job as Lucas has done.
With that said, we need your help! As I mentioned in the kickoff email, we need help with:
If you have ideas for articles that should be included, links and information for the authors, or any new ideas, please let me know or feel free to edit the GNOME Annual Report 2009 wiki page!
And just like Lucas has done in past years, don’t be surprised if I reach out to you individually to help.
(This is the first in a series of blogs posts about Ohio Linux Fest)
I gave a talk this weekend at Ohio Linux Fest titled “An Introduction to GNOME 3.0”. The purpose of my talk was, which I hope to do a few more times this year, is to start introducing the community to the changes coming in GNOME 3.0. Change is hard, especially when we’re talking about a change to the user interface, and I believe the sooner we start engaging and educating the community, the more helpful it will be.
The presentation focuses on three things:
One thing I hope attendees take away is that GNOME 3.0 is more than just GNOME Shell. I believe the call to action in the GNOME 3.0 community that Vincent and the release team started back in April and that continued at GUADEC really motivated a number of teams to see what they could do to contribute to GNOME 3.0. In the presentation I talk about Accessibility, Documentation, Marketing, the GNOME Developer Platform, the GNOME Activity Journal and Zeitgeist, Tomboy Online and GNOME Shell (including a demo).
I spent a lot of time reading Presentation Zen these last few months and used the concepts the book advocates. In addition to the presentation, I also provided a handout (available as a PDF on my website as well) for attendees to take away that goes into a little more detail and cites and attributes all of my sources.
I’ve uploaded my slides, images, and the handout on the GNOME Marketing wiki, all available in one archive. This material is available under a Creative Commons Share-alike 3.0 license. I’m sure I’ve got a few things wrong here and there, and I look forward to any feedback anyone has.
I’ll be giving this talk in November in St. Paul, MN at the Penguins Unbound LUG, and I’m hoping to reach out to a few more LUGs in the Midwest, as well as submit it as a talk at SCALE next February. If you’d like me to come give a talk somewhere, let me know via email or my blog.
I’ll be in Columbus, Ohio this weekend for Ohio Linux Fest. It will be my first time attending OLF, though I did book a flight last year and had to cancel at the last minute.
I’ll be giving a talk – “An Introduction GNOME 3.0” where I’ll cover what GNOME is, how it started, touch on the recent 2.28 release, and what may be coming in GNOME 3.0. I’ll post my presentation, both the handout and the slides, next week on the GNOME Marketing wiki. (Nothing like procrastinating to get it done).
I’m sure I’ll make a few mistakes, especially as I plan on demoing GNOME Shell, so feedback is welcome. If you’re there, stop by and say hi!
GNOME 2.28 came out right on time yesterday! Improvements include Bluetooth support, tons of feature enhancements in Empathy (and all new documentation using Mallard!), and Webkit in Epiphany. But don’t take my word for it – go read the release notes!
Speaking of release notes, it was the first time I’ve helped write them, and and it was pretty cool to see the GNOME community working together from a front row seat. A special thanks to Dannielle for giving me pointers on how to get started, Frederic and Andre for all my questions during the process in the #docs channel, and everyone who helped review them and gave feedback to make them better. It was also pretty neat to see the translators at work – everytime I’d refresh the website to proofread or do a git pull there were more and more translations available. And one last thank you to Bastien and Guillame for providing quotes in the press release, which is the first time we’ve included quotes from developers as far as I know (or at least in recent memory).
I’ve enjoyed reading the various coverage on the web, but I did want to correct one small point that some are reporting – the decision to make GNOME 2.30 into GNOME 3.0 won’t be made until November, so it’s not a safe assumption that 2.28 is the last 2.x release. The release team will consider a number of factors, and it’s possible 2.32 could be 3.0 instead.
Congrats again to all the GNOME developers, contributors, and translators for a job well done.