Our host at CDOT (Centre for Development of Open Technology), Chris Tyler, organized a lunchtime talk where Shaun McCance explained the evolution of GNOME and showed the upcoming GNOME 3, followed by a session of Q&A. The audience was very interested in our next version and they made plenty of questions.

From left to right: Tiffany, Jim, Shaun, Ryan, Johannes, Phil and Natalia.

In the user help the following documentation has been worked:

• Having a GNOME session (working with the shell)
  • Starting applications (different ways of launching apps), windows
    handling (organisation, maximization, etc.), workspaces (“what the
    hell are workspaces?“), opening files (Tiffany Antopolski)
• System settings
  • Accessibility (Shaun McCance)
  • File organization and back-ups (Tiffany Antopolski)
  • Hardware setting and troubleshooting (Jim Bull)
  • Look and feel (Natalia Ruz)
  • Mouse and touchpad (Natalia Ruz)
  • Mouse and touchpad (Natalia Ruz)
  • Power management (Phil Bull)
  • Printing (Jim Campbell)
  • Searching (Tiffany Antopolski)
  • Session management (Phil Bull)
  • Users handling (Jim Campbell)
  • Session fingerprint authentication (Paul W. Frieds):

Also, Shaun McCance also did some changes in Yelp to make it more appealing when showing documentation.

On the other hand, there was a cleanup of modules under gnome-devel-docs. Johannes Schmid has been working on demos in several languages for getting started with GNOME and I have been working updating and completing the platform overview.

The organization has been quite good, Ryan Lortie even managed to receive us with two warms days in Toronto :-) And, every morning we get muffins thanks to Syllogist (also known as Shaun McCance’s start-up).

Other posts:

• Gnome 3 documentation hackfest, by Jim Campbell
• Mallard can do that?!, by Shaun McCance
• Desktop Help, by Phil Bull
• User Help hackfest, by Phil Bull
• Yelp it!, by Tiffany Antopolski

If you would like to contribute, join us at #docs (irc.gnome.org), the pizza is still warm.

Thanks to the feedback of some teams, a draft of GNOME Foundation 2011 budget and plans (from October 2010 to September 2011) is available to be reviewed. There are two documents: a summary with short explanations of every item and a spreadsheet with the consolidated items.

If your team has an activity in mind (hackfest, conference, or another GNOME related activity or idea), you can send your plan (with goals, deliverables and budget required) to the board or foundation-list to discuss it.

For people still hesitating if run or not, you should consider:

• What are the results you would like to see?
• Be aware of the results that other board members (and the community) would like to see
• Do not block tasks (for my personal taste, responsiveness matters)
• It takes time (read Federico’s Board member mini-howto and Paul’s post A Peek Under the Covers)

As simple as that.

There are good things, such as being a facilitator for getting things done, collect and provide good information for taking better decisions, encourage and follow other people ideas, “extend” the board to reach other communities (diversity is good).

Sometimes, it can be overwhelmed. There are plenty of discussions on the board mailing list. There are only 9 people subscribed and all of them must follow and participate in the discussions, because it is part of their role. For instance, if you are motivated and you start 5 threads with good ideas, the next time you will check your email you might have easily 20 replies to follow up, and so on. And an idea without execution does not worth. However, it is much better to feel overwhelmed that does not receive any reply at all.

On the other hand, the board is different than other parts/teams of the project. Usually, when you are hacking on a project, and other hackers are busy in their own life, you can continue your work and take decisions (meritocracy rules). With respect to the board, if there is not enough votes to take a decision, simply you get stuck on that item. There are workarounds, but basically you must insist.

As everything, it has ups and downs, but -as Vincent said- you can make a difference.