Some thoughts on Guadec III.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hey guys,

   Here are some thoughts on GUADEC III.  I think that we have enough
time to prepare.

   The idea that I had was that we should take the opportunity of the
GUADEC meeting to address the issues that GNOME will be facing this
year, so the files here reflect this tendency.

   I do not have time to work on the conference, but I figured I could
help get the ball rolling.  Maybe Juantomás and Tim can use these
documents as a starting point for the call for papers and volunteers.

Miguel.




* Challenges for GNOME in 2002

	In 2002, what are the challenges that GNOME will be
	addressing, how can we best prepare for them?  

	I think that to get the most out of the GUADEC 3 conference we
	should keep in mind what those challenges are, and how the
	GUADEC 3 conference can be used to address those topics.

	* Migration to the GNOME 2.x platform.

	* API stabilization, maintaining backwards compatibility.

	* Release engineering of the releases.

	* Unified suite of productivity applications.

	* Developer tools.

		* Anjuta

		* Good API inline documentation.

		* Good inline API documentation browser.

	* Nautilus is most people's idea of GNOME: how can we improve
	  it, how can we make it a better desktop shell. 

	* Training developers for the new platform.

	* Developer Documentation, Developer Documentation, Developer
	  Documentation, Developer Documentation, Developer
	  Documentation.

	* Maintaining our Web Site.

	* Simplification of the GNOME installation process.  Can we
	  avoid depending on distributions and/or Ximian on package
	  software?

	* Multimedia: how can we make sure that the right
	  applications/hooks are being added to the GNOME desktop?

	* Patents in Europe.

	* Test Suites, regression tests.

	* Adoption of technologies by goverments.

* Audience

	The GNOME developer community has grown from the original
	days, where a developer could keep track of all of the
	development efforts that were happening in the GNOME world.

	Tutorials on the new GNOME 2.x technologies as well as talks
	explaining particularly hairy bits of the platform need to be
	done not only from the perspective of `upgrading' from GNOME
	1.x, but a lot of it is targeted to newcomers.

* Open door to non-GNOME core developers.

	In the past GUADEC was an event mainly targeted to developers
	of the GNOME platform.  

	Maybe we should open up our doors to developers that are only
	planning on using the GNOME 2.x platform and allow them to any
	of the meetings.  

* User's oriented day

	A day devoted mostly to demoing, showing and exploring GNOME. 

	A focus mostly on showing what we have got so far.




* Talks

	Talks should be aimed at describing the precise status of a
	project, introducing a new project, showing a cool technology
	done with GNOME.

	It has been a long time since people could *see* everything
	that is being done in GNOME.  We should make a call for papers
	or a call for prototypes and have people submit talks or demos
	of their hacks.


* Tutorials

	This is a list of topics that I believe people might be
	interested in listening to, or technologies that we believe
	would benefit the audience of developers.


	* The GNOME 2.x development Platform.

		This probably should be made up of various
		pieces/tutorials. 

		Required introductory talk:

			How all the pieces fit together in GNOME 2.x

		Followed with in-depth tutorials on the various
		topics:

			Gtk+ 2.0, Accessibility, Pango, Bonobo, Glade,
			libxml.

	* Packaging your application

		A tutorial on how to package and distribute
		applications using Autoconf, Automake, Gettext,
		xml-tools, libtool, Gtk-doc setup, scrollkeeper.

		How to set up Gtk-doc, how to setup documentation,
		things to keep in mind, tips, tricks, regression test
		suites. 

	* Rapid application development with Perl and Python.

		Focus on scripting language developers, and the
		GNOME APIs as exposed to them from the scripting
		languages.

	* Extending Nautilus

		A tutorial on improving Nautilus, with various 
		degrees of complexity:

		* Advanced: Hacking the Nautilus core, the GNOME VFS
		  core.  Targeted to hard core C hackers

		* Medium: Developing plugins, views, sidebars.

		* Simple: Extending and customizing nautilus through
		  scripts, themes, url-handlers.

	* Extending Evolution

		* Advanced: 

		* Medium:

* Workshops

	We should have time allocated for people who are working on
	the various different projects to get together.
	
	A forum where someone can say `Hey, I wrote this XXX tool that
	would solve this YYY problem, lets work together a way of
	integrating these solutions'.

	As an example, Bastien Nocera has been working on a simple
	program that can show a sample of a font in the screen.  It
	would be nice to have a forum where we can discuss how to
	integrate this into the platform (so that when a user
	double-clicks on a font file in Nautilus for example, they can
	see it).

	I do not have a good idea of what kinds of workshops we need,
	but a place where people could focus on talking, discussing
	and hack on a particular project.

* Financing

	We need to figure out soon how much money can be raised to
	organize this conference.  Long gone are the days where
	companies had a lot of money to spare, so I predict that this
	year we will have a smaller budget to fly developers to the
	conference.

	We should figure out a definite list of tutorials, talks and
	workshops that we will organize as well as a list of people
	that can attend the conference on their own.

	The options for attending are going to Madrid or Sevilla, both
	should have hotels which are pretty inexpensive, and they
	should both be reasonably cheap. 

	We should consider whether it is a possibility to do some
	tutorials for people interested in GNOME that are willing to
	pay in order to fly more hackers to the conference.