Future of the icon project

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

[long mail; please bear with me]

Hello, friends of high-quality artwork,

I'll be blunt. The effort to have more and better icons for GNOME made
has, after some flourishing months, withered and nearly died. I'm
responsible for both the inception and the decline of "the icon
project". I had become kind of a GNOME icon maintainer, although that
was never official. Now, I'd like to step down from this position, to
be replaced by an offical GNOME Artwork Maintainer, because I have
become a disgrace to the project I've started myself.

Rationale:

- It's been months since I've last had the time to do a GNOME Icon
  Status Report. I still receive icon submissions, which I'm, alas,
  unable to process because my spare time becomes less and less
  copious every day.

- I fear that my taste is not shared by the community, as icons I've
  taken great care to pick and have refined have been called ugly
  and such.

- People have been angered by my failure to publish GISRs and reply to
  their mail in time.

- I'm also refocussing on the German translations, which need my
  attention; I think I'm still featuring as the de team coordinator.

- Finally, I want to code for GNOME some day, too, I don't want to
  spend all my GNOME life managing artwork.


A possible plan for the future:

- If possible, I'd like to move the stash of current and future GNOME
  icons off of my hard drive into GNOME CVS (gnome-icons), and into a
  better directory structure which represents workflow; I'll have to
  start working on that soon. Icons which have already found their
  place in the main CVS tree will be removed from that module, which
  will make everything easier.

- gnome-icons.sourceforge.net could be autogenerated from a query over
  the CVS gnome-icons module.

- Icon submission should happen via CVS, not by mail to me anymore.

- gnome-icons-list should be revived so reviewing of artwork can
  happen there.

- There should be some kind of official GNOME "icon master".

- The project should extend to encompass the "GNOME PixPacks" spinoff
  I run on my homepage, and all other kinds of GNOME artwork, too.
  Maybe first steps in the direction of a "GNOME Clip Art Gallery" are
  possible next year already.

- The GNOME Project should maybe find some kind of general policy
  about which licence its icons are under.


Whom do I envision as "icon master"? It should be someone

...with enough spare time to do the job, do monthly or bi-monthly
GISRs etc.

...with an understanding of the issues involved in making and
selecting artwork for GNOME

...who is, ideally, a creative artist him/herself

...with the strong will to keep GNOME artwork genuine, consistent and
in line and to prevent "artwork forks" (i.e. help assuring that Helix
GNOME and CVS GNOME look the same, that Evolution and Nautilus use
GNOME-style icons etc.)


Please give me feedback. Barring any surprises, I think that some day
in the next two weeks, I will announce my decision on Gnotices and
hope that someone will volunteer to do the job, and do it well, unlike
me.

mawa
-- 
MEHR