Re: Free Desktop Communities come together at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 17:05 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Philip Van Hoof<pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:

> >> It was a hard decision because, there is real interest in making KDE
> >> and GNOME work well together. While this is also an important goal,
> >> but we don't need to co-locate every year for this. We might have
> >> hackfests together with KDE/GNOME in the future.
> >
> > When? Because if this date still isn't decided yet, then it's quite
> > likely that it just wont happen at all.
> 
> Wait!. You haven't heard much about the hackfests, because, they
> aren't decided on what & where yet. But it was discussed tbh.

Keep me in touch. I'd certainly want to join that hackfest, if time
permits. Especially if the semantic desktop people are joining that
hackfest would it be very interesting for me and other Tracker
team-members to sit together with them once more.

We still have many things to discuss, cooperate and agree on.

> >> Board voted for not co-locating it next year, but consider co-locating
> >> in the future. Every body(board) had some opinions, thoughts behind
> >> voting for that. I felt no one in the comments/poll said that they
> >> wanted only 'KDE/GNOME Desktop summit' and not GUADEC alone. But the
> >> people who voted against it, definitely wanted only GUADEC.
> >
> > This is a very confusing, non-coherent explanation for a decision that
> > goes against something that is quite clear in the poll's results.
> 
> Firstly, the last statement started with 'I felt'. Its my personal
> opinion on the results of poll, like every one had their own and that
> wasn't the explanation for the decision during the board meeting.

Ok, but you combined "I felt <something>" with a punctuation. Then you
wrote "But the people who voted against it, 'definitely' wanted only
GUADEC." (it's still quoted, go look ^).

Wouldn't it be more accurate to write?:

   I felt that the people who voted against it might have wanted to only
   have a GUADEC next year, and I felt that there is a possibility that
   the people within that group of 56% are not all very decisive about
   their 'yes' vote.

And then I would answer: "yeah, sure. I feel that there's a possibility
that tomorrow all newborn pigs will have wings.".  Let's just ask the
community instead of having feelings about their opinions, shall we?

> Philip, this is not a vote, where every body entered their opinion. In
> my view, this represents a sample of the entire community. We can't
> derive boolean results out of this survey.

I wasn't saying that. I was saying that nonetheless 56% of the people
who did know about the poll (and most people apparently didn't) selected
the option on the poll to do a co-located conference again *next* year.

Maybe if the foundation's board would more clearly articulate why
exactly we can't do a co-located event *next* year, they'll convince the
community about their decision? Why didn't they?

Personal opinion on this:

"GNOME 3.0" and "focus" are not convincing for me, to be honest. About
not making profits the community has already, in the poll, voiced its
opinion:

"* 44% said we should do it even if we lose profit, 32% said no"

By the way, nobody has yet explained why a co-located event is per
definition not profitable. Taking this year as an example is not a good
explanation. With the financial crisis in mind you can't "just" say that
we didn't find a lot of sponsors "just" because we co-located.

>  i.e, I wont be able to
> choose YES or NO from these. The 140 GNOME people part of a bigger
> community who just had a chance to say their opinion. But there is an
> another part of people who didnt have  time/chance to see this to
> enter a vote or what ever.

Exactly. Why not?

> But when a poll like this was ran, I would use this to see, what is
> the view from a sample of the community. I felt that its divided.

> Even a voting on a bigger group is done, its going to be divided.

Like how the git vs bzr vote was going to be divided, you mean?

> It surely wont be 90% vs 10% or lesser or whatever..

Let's see? For the small sample we have 56% yeses.

> A part of the community is for it and a part of the
> community is against it. Both the parts of the community  aren't
> negligible.

Note that both parts have multiple opportunities. I for example think
that "GNOME 3.0 - focus" should be done at smaller hackfests and at for
example the Boston Summit.

DesktopSummit/GUADEC is for meeting people. People rarely code at that
event. GNOME 3.0 needs engineering at this moment.

"Meeting people" is a reason why you do co-located conferences.

[CUT - old reply content]

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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