Just a quick note to say I will be at FOSDEM too. I’ll be very interested to meet any other GNOME users from the UK. Hopefully I’m also going to have a few informal meetings with people about gtk-engines, gnome-themes and the website.
Hopefully I’ll be on my new Jabber ID most of the time, so if you need to catch me, it’s <thos at jabber dot org>.
The call for invitations to host GUADEC 2007 has gone out, so…
We’ve already mostly agreed that Birmingham is the most likely location, and Paul Cooper has identified UCE as a possible candidate.
We now need names for those people who are willing to put the time and effort in to organise it. If you are willing to get involved in this way, then please let us all know by posting to the gnome-uk mailing list.
So it had been proposed that we run another splash screen contest for GNOME 2.14, and that task was put to me as maintainer of art.gnome.org. It was also suggested that we run the contest for a GDM theme and default background, and not just a splash screen.
However, I have decided that I will not be running a contest (even despite already getting the art.gnome.org configuration ready). This is because of several reasons:
Firstly, it has always been a very difficult contest to run (too many people with differing opinions), and the winner has always brought out negative comments, and hardly any positive ones. The splash screen contests started as a marketing exercise, but I have never felt very good about the publicity it generated.
Secondly, the splash screen is now seen in so few places. All the major distributors replace it with their own branded graphic. It hardly seems worth going to all the trouble for something that probably only developers will see.
Thirdly, it is very likely that the splash screen will soon be redundant, so it hardly seems worth while running a contest for it.
And lastly, we just had a competition for the GUADEC logo and website, so I suspect people might be getting a bit fed up with competitions by now.
However, Andraes has volunteered to do a new lean and simple splash screen, which would hopefully reflect the excellent work that has gone into speeding up GNOME start up. In fact, it may even only appear on your screen for less a few seconds, so you probably wouldn’t even notice it anyway (it disappears in less than two on my desktop currently). We might even make it generic, so that we don’t need a new splash screen for 2.16, if there still is one by then.