Solaris Desktop Summit – Day 1

December 1, 2005 8:26 am General

It’s amazing the assumptions you build up while communicating with people across the globe through email and IRC. More often than not, those people are completely different than the person you pictured them to be. But that’s been the cool part about the desktop summit so far. The people have been incredible and I’ve met some wonderfully motivated people. Every session I go back thinking ‘Okay, I need to talk to X, Y and Z next’ – man, it’s wonderful to be around so many talented, clueful people.

The day started off with a round table introduction of the people involved. It was fantastic with lots of new faces to meet. John has single handedly managed to get contributions from right across the software stack – everyone from GNOME, JDS, Mozilla, X, KISS, Solaris, Install, Documentation, Usability, Design, Sun Ray, i18n and Java. Lots of new faces, lots of new ideas.

It’s always nice to break the ice with the introduction ‘Apparently GNOME sucks – I’m here to fix it’. So much of the introductions were confined to the interest of a given person and a real hobby horse attitude. We need to be more diverse and open with our thinking. No software is safe – we’re going to find the nits, and fine comb them out.

After the round table, we started off trying to identify who we all believed to be the target market for our software, along with their requirements and what we personally were doing to approach that. With the diversity of all the people across different organizations we came up with a pretty complete list of users – office workers, mobile users, system administrators, server o administrators, desktop users, developers, technical and non-technical users, exporation users, VP/marketing, enterprise customers, university students, education, non-native english speakers, government and gamers. The list we gathered is probably a whole heap of circles intersecting each other, but it’s a nice start. It gives us a reference, and a great talking point.

The sessions continued with everyone showing us what they were up to, and what issues they’ve come across. We even got into a ‘X is dead’ minor flame discussion. We’re going to shelf that for a rainy day, tomorrow. I met a whole heap of really excellent people – people to bounce ideas off and get really excited with. I had this interesting conversation with Brian who talked about the infectiousness of a typical GUADEC – very much hoping to turn up the excitement and get that effect with this meeting.

So far the conference has been excellent – to the extent of wanting and needing to do this on at least a bi-yearly basis. Tomorrow brings the break out sessions where we take a set of topics – community relations, java on the desktop, single system adminstration, usability studies, death of X, install, sizzle, printing, sunray dtu with gpu and gripes – and start investigating them from a usability perspective trying to identify the tasks/problem areas we need to work on.

P.S. If anyone is living in the Bay Area – please get in touch with me so we can meet up for a beer and a bit of a chat. I’m thinking of organizing a general pub session early next week for some OpenSolaris dudes – I’ll let people know the details when I figure out a good location.

P.P.S. Dear VPs – thanks for funding the summit. While we may just look like a whole bunch of pissheads out on a social – this whole exercise has been immensely useful.

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