Re: Foundation IRC meeting, January 30th

[Og Maciel <ogmaciel gnome org>]

As per my comment on #foundation, am forwarding here my comments about
specific topics discussed during the meeting.

GNOME Foundation meeting
Sat. Jan 30, 2010

GNOME Panel Applets

During the GNOME Foundation meeting I brought up my concern with the
following scenarion:

User Mongo is a casual desktop user that came to rely on several
applets to keep up with the weather, email notifications, and the
time. He's also been using the Hamster applet to track his time and
the keyboard layout switcher when he's doing translations for some of
the open source projects he works on.

One day he wakes up and is greeted by his system's package management
system informing that there are updates available, including GNOME 3.0
bits. He clicks on the "Update" button and after several minutes is
notified that his system is up to date and (perhaps?) that he should
restart his system. He does so and once the system is back up he is
surprised that most of his applets are gone. He tries to add them back
to the panel using the same process he's used in the past but to no
avail. After several frustrating minutes, Mongo is feeling very upset.

Anyhow, my main objective describing this scenario is to alert against
the potential alienation of our user base when things simply vanish
from their systems without a clear explanation. It would be wise then
to have some type of notification to the user explaining:
a) that some of his applets (maybe enumerate them too) have been
removed from the panel due to x, y, and z;
b) assuming there is a work around for adding individual applets back
to the panel, provide steps on how to do it;
c) offer a way for the user to file an issue requesting that said
applet get "ported" to take advantage of the notification system
included with 3.0;

If we can answer these 3 bullets now or soon, it would be appropriate
to start educating our users about the upcoming changes and how to
properly deal with them by providing clear documentation in all the
"main entrance" web sites and systems our uses are bound to reach out
when in doubt.

Co-located Hackfests

It was brought up by zana and seconded by others that a co-located
hackfest prior to a possible co-located bigger event such as GUADEC
would make more sense, as we could get people from different
communities discussing and collaborating on similar issues, sharing
their pains/knowledge and trying to pool together processes and ideas
for dealing with them. Then, a co-located GUADEC could schedule
co-located sessions where these teams would present their findings,
etc, etc.

I am planning to write up a proposal for a co-located localization
hackfest where we could gather a few representatives from different
communities (think KDE, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, etc) to discuss about the
types of issues their respective projects are facing, how they've
solved it, what is there to be improved, etc. The objective is to shed
a light on what some of the common issues are and share general
knowledge that will hopefully improve their own processes.
-- 
Og B. Maciel

omaciel foresightlinux org
ogmaciel gnome org
ogmaciel ubuntu com

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