community – Page 5 – Lucas Rocha

GNOME @ Google Summer of Code 2008

As you probably know, Google is organizing one more edition of their Summer of Code (GSoC) program.

GNOME has participated in all GSoC editions as a mentoring organization with some nice results in terms of contributions and new contributors. So, we want to participate this year too!

Our first organization kickoff meeting will happen on March 6 at 18h UTC in the #soc-admin channel (irc.gnome.org). We’re looking for volunteers to help us to organize GNOME’s participation in GSoC 2008. So, if you want to help in any way, join us!

List of tasks published!

For those interested in participating in the GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility, you probably want to have a look at the list of tasks that has just been published in the program’s website.

So, now what? Read the program rules very carefully and claim one of the available tasks. Proposals acceptance is open now! Go Go Go!

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility

As Behdad has already said, we’ve been working on this cool GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility for the past three months. The program organized and promoted by the GNOME Foundation and sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Canonical, Google, and Novell. Read the program’s press release. The tasks will be published on March 1st.

This is a very nice opportunity to contribute to a highly relevant part of GNOME. Participate!

Our GHOP hero

This blog post is just to say Thank You to our GHOP admin hero Andre Klapper! He did most of the daily admin work on the GNOME side of this interesting Google program. I’m sure I can say that on behalf of the other GHOP admins in GNOME. Thanks dude!

New GNOME T-Shirt!

Andreas suggested on marketing-list to update the design of our t-shirt on Hackerthreads. I’ve contacted them and now they have a brand-new t-shirt available in their online store! Hackerthreads will be donating a portion of proceeds of the shirt sales to the GNOME Foundation.

Buy now! :-)

GNOME Foundation Board, 2008

Now that the final results of the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors Elections were published, it’s a good time to thank everyone who voted in me. I’m really surprised about the number of votes I got! Be sure that I’ll give my best.

I think we’ve got a very good team on Board and I’m very excited about our 2008 plans. We’ve already started to work on some really cool things!

GNOME 2.22 Roadmap Released

The GNOME Roadmap for 2.22 (and partially for 2.24 and future 2.x releases) is available at:

http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap

The GNOME Roadmap is a big-picture view of functionality we expect GNOME to include in short-term and long-term future. The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members.

We hope this roadmap increases the awereness about the future steps of the project inside and outside the community and helps us to look forward and plan where we want to go.

To have access to the Roadmap of previous stable releases, go to:

http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Archive

To know more about our Roadmap process, go to:

http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Process

Big thanks to everyone who contributed with information and reviews!

People menu: online desktop and instant messaging in GNOME

Just after GUADEC, I made some general comments about this whole “online desktop” idea that was nicely presented by Havoc and Bryan in Birmingham. My main argument is that we should not have a separate “online desktop mode” but try to turn our desktop into a web-aware environment.

Now that Empathy has been proposed for GNOME 2.22, I think it’s time to start thinking about interesting ways of integrating the instant messaging stuff and online desktop stack in the desktop (note that there’s no garantee that Empathy and online desktop will be accepted as official modules but, as a strong supported, I still think it makes sense to bring those ideas at this moment). In my opinion, we should take advantage of the fact that Empathy is a framework-ish aproach for instant messaging (not simply a standalone application) to bring a seamless integration of its features in the desktop environment.

So, I had this idea (that should be more detailed and discussed) of a possible (and feasible) way of integrating Empathy and online desktop stuff in the desktop: a People menu in main menu bar.

People menu mockup

Some general comments:

The People menu should be optional and only activated if online desktop and/or Empathy are available. There will be many users who still want to use their favorite messenger and don’t want to use this online desktop thing anyway
The “About me” would run the “About me” capplet which would need to have some additional features for setting up messenger accounts and defining your web presence on several online services (online desktop integration)
The “Contacts” menu item could run an application like Soylent with easy access to your messenger and Evolution contacts to start different communication ways (e-mail, chat, video call, etc)
The “Messenger” menu item would connect you to your configured messenger services and show an icon the notification area
The “Home page” would open the browser in your GNOME online desktop home page
The “Web activities” would start the now called Mugshot client which notifies you about the web activities of your friends
The “Web board” would activate the Bigboard sidepanel with lots of cool web stuff (I think Web board is a more appropriate name from the user point of view)
The “Recent talks” is obvious :-)

This is just an initial/rough idea with the aim of setting some kind of direction on how we could integrate instant messaging and online desktop in GNOME. There are still many things to discuss and decide.

Comments?

N810 announced!

As other Nokians have already announced, the N810 was officialy announced! Some highlights from the Hildon side:

Saner API and a more maintainable and closer-to-upstream GTK+ 2.10.x;
Much improved theming infrastructure;
Open source extensible input method framework;
Control Panel is more maintainable after a full rewrite;
Hildon Desktop uses indirect rendering to take advantage of alpha masks from the themes, has a new plugin system (with optional Python support) and brings an improved task launching and switching experience.

From my “user experience” with this device, I think the keyboard improves a lot the messaging and web browsing experience, the GPS is an excelent addition and the general UI polishing brings a smoother interaction with the device.

Last but not least, this is a device full of hacking possibilities! Yay!

GNOME Roadmap – Information requests for 2.22 sent!

As part of our roadmap process, we’ve sent the roadmap information requests to all module maintainers/developers. If you are a maintainer/developer of a GNOME official module and haven’t received the cited message, just let us know about which modules we’ve missed.

As usual, as soon as we have a first draft of the GNOME 2.22 roadmap, we’ll heat up some discussions in desktop-devel-list about this and the future stable releases of GNOME in order to get feeback about the roadmap, discuss about potential cross-module plans, and so on.

Fortunately, quite many modules have been proposed for GNOME 2.22 and some interesting and challenging discussions have already started in desktop-devel-list.

One of the major community goals for 2.22 is to have as many people as possible reminding Vincent Untz about his thesis! Go, Vincent, Go! :-P