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GNOME Journal Issue 17 out!

I’m two days late blogging about the latest release of GNOME Journal (and thanks to Danni for mentioning it!).

This is a very special issue written by women in the open source community. It’s the first time we’ve done a themed issue and all articles are by women in the open source community. Also, with the exception of Danni and Stormy who have written for GNOME Journal before, all are first time writers for GJ!

Women in open source (and the IT industry in general) is a topic I’m passionate about, having seen it first hand in a few different ways. My wife worked in the IT industry (at the same employer I did) for 8 years and I also helped manage the Geek Squad at Best Buy for a number of years before leaving 2 years ago. Having over 10,000 computer technicians there was definitely a lack of diversity and talent, including women, which is / was a focus area for the organization.

I’m proud to have helped manage the release (though it was a bit later than I had hoped due to my lack of time management skills). The idea for this issue came from the GNOME Women community, and they found the writers and drove this issue. Thank you!

We have eight articles in this issue (a record!):

  • Telepathy, Empathy and Mission Control 5 in GNOME 2.28
  • Telepathy Overview
  • The Un-Scary Screwdriver
  • Where are they now? The Participants of the 2006 Women’s Summer Outreach Program
  • Easy Breezy Beautiful GNOME Shell
  • GNOME desktop testing automation and how to use Mago
  • Epiphany from a – not so experienced – user perspective
  • An Interview with Leslie Hawthorn

We also had a number of new editors help out, and I’d like to personally thank Zonker and Sumana for all their help in making this release happen.

Go read it now!

Google Wave

Almost two months ago, Nigel Tao posted on his blog offering Google Wave invites to the GNOME community. I commented and requested some invites for the Documentation Team, with Nigel graciously granting the request, and he asked for some feedback after using Wave for the last month and a half or so.

Some of the feedback that I shared with him, in no particular order:

  • We in the Docs team have used Wave to do document planning. (Before writing anything, the most important thing you can do is plan, plan plan). Wave has been really useful that each member of the team will edit the Wave with the topics for the help file we plan to write, and then use the reply feature in the Wave to add comments. Especially being a distributed team, with two of us in the US and 2 in Europe, it’s been helpful. A wiki page would work about the same, but the fact that you can have the main Wave used for the document and see the feedback and comments in-line is nice.
  • We really haven’t used Wave for real-time collaboration, with the exception of doing last month’s meeting minutes for our monthly team meeting. I do like Wave for a use case like that better than Gobby, especially with Wave’s ability to add bullets and formatting.
  • One nice thing about Wave when doing documentation planning was how easy it was to add the lead developer of an app we were doing the planning for. He was then able to review what we were planning, and add feedback and suggestions.
  • One of the challenges in using Wave at this point in time, is the limited number of people using it. I think as it expands and grows, the use cases and adoption will grow exponentially.
  • Other things I’ve used Wave for include some of the GNOME Marketing hackfest planning and projectmallard.org planning. It’s helpful, and as mentioned above, I prefer Wave over a wiki, especially when formatting text such as bullets.

One thing that took me a while to figure out, which I finally figured out with a suggestion from a friend via Twitter, was how to do public searches. I’m interested in buying a Droid phone, and I did a search for “Droid” waves which was pretty cool when the search results came back and I could see all the public Waves about Droid.

Is Wave an email killer? In my opinion, not yet, but it has potential. Wave, to me, has awesome potential for group communication, but I’m not sure I’d use it over email for one to one communication.

(And yes, I’m aware of the irony of using a “proprietary” tool to do open source work. It was a test, and I like doing stuff on the cutting edge, so no comments in the blog about this please).

Thanks again Nigel!

Marketing Hackfest (Part 1)

I’m overdue in recapping some of my thoughts of the Marketing Hackfest. Overall, the hackfest was a success and now we begin the hard work in recapping everything we talked about, making it actionable and doing the work!

One of the best things about the hackfest, in my opinion, was the cross-section of people who attended. Each individual had different strengths and views of GNOME and it served to remind me of the different groups who use GNOME and how they use it.

I spent a lot of time at the whiteboard helping facilitate and I’m still sorting through all the notes we discussed. Somewhere Shaun has some video as well.

A lot of our discussion was centered on GNOME 3.0 and how we can communicate to our users and our downstream partners of the features and benefits of GNOME 3.0. If you think back to the email Vincent Untz sent this past April on behalf of the Release Team, GNOME 3.0 has three goals:

  • Revamp our User Experience
  • Streamlining of the Platform
  • Promotion of GNOME

That third goal is why we got together and the bulk of what we discussed. We touched on what GNOME 3.0 is; GNOME’s overall branding; marketing GNOME to users and how to improve our partnerships with downstream distributions such as Fedora, OpenSolaris, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

But it wasn’t all just discussion ’round the campfire! We did a lot of work on creating materials for volunteers who host a GNOME booth at a conference. We wrote the copy for a new brochure explaining what GNOME is; created a Frequently Asked Questions for those hosting a booth with answers to questions they should expect from conference attendees; and wrote core messages and speaking points when talking to attendees.

We also discussed in detail the Friends of GNOME program and did some work on an upcoming fundraising drive.

And lastly we’ve started to work on presentation materials for volunteers who may want to give a presentation on GNOME. We still have a ways to go to finish this work, but using the awesome template Vinicius created, we envision having a number of presentations available that can be used as building blocks for someone who wants to give a presentation on GNOME. Some of these include:

  • GNOME History (5 minutes)
  • GNOME 3.0 (5 minutes)
  • Getting started using GNOME (5 minutes)
  • Getting started developing GNOME (5 minutes)
  • GNOME 3.0 (45 minutes)

And lots of others – the above are just examples of templates with content someone could take and mix and match together to put together the bulk of a presentation they might want to give.

Lastly, we also spent some time talking about the GNOME Marketing community and how we can work together, communicate effectively, mentor new members and tackle some of our action items. We’ll start by having IRC Meetings where we can recap some of the discussion topics from the hackfest, discuss ideas from the community on improving how we market GNOME and hopefully have some of the community members volunteer to tackle some of the action items and next steps in creating marketing materials for GNOME. Look for the announcement in the next couple of days to help pick a time for that meeting, and similar to the Bug Squad, we’ll use Doodle.com to try and find a time that works for as many people as possible.

More to come!

GNOME 3.0 talk this weekend!

My scheduled talk at the Penguins Unbound LUG in St. Paul, MN has been moved up one week to this Saturday, November 14th at 10:00 a.m. (Minnebar, the Minnesota Barcamp was recently announced for November 21st conflicting with the meeting).

I will be presenting “An Introduction to GNOME 3.0” talking about GNOME, its history, and where GNOME is going with the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release next year. If you’re in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area come join in the fun.

I look forward to seeing you there!

GNOME Marketing Hackfest & Chicago GNOME Meetup

We are just days away from the Marketing Hackfest in Chicago, IL. Thanks to Novell and Google’s sponsorship, nine of us are converging in Google’s Chicago office for two days.

While we’re there, we’d like to invite any Chicago GNOME users and developers to join us for a drink or bite to eat Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at the Rock Bottom Brewery at One West Grand Ave.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Sponsored by GNOME

Mallard Documentation

Did anyone watch The Office last Thursday night? Early in the episode, Dwight gives Jim a wood duck with a walkie-talkie built-in so Dwight can spy on Jim.

Jim: Thanks for the duck

Dwight: It’s not a duck, it’s a mallard!

This had me chuckling thinking about Mallard documentation. For the record, mallards are a much more beautiful duck than wood ducks.

There’s been a lot going on in the world of GNOME documentation. Mallard has been getting a lot of buzz, in the #docs IRC channel, on Twitter and identi.ca, the mailing list and blogs. People have taken notice of the new Empathy documentation with its new layout and focus on topic based documentation.

Here’s just a few of the things going on:

  • We’ve expanded our monthly GNOME Docs meetings, and we’re practically meeting every other week now. We’ll be having a working session in our next meeting November 8th focused on what a new GNOME User Guide (Shaun hates calling it a User Guide!) will look like for GNOME 3.0. Shaun came back from the Boston Summit with lots of ideas and discussions around user help and the work we’ll need to do for GNOME 3.0.
  • Milo Casagrande, author of the new Empathy help, recently blogged about his experience in writing the Empathy help. He includes the process he went through, writing per page topics and also includes code samples. If you’re looking into getting involved in writing GNOME documentation, his blog is a must read.
  • For the GNOME 2.29 cycle, I’m committed to writing new Tomboy help in Mallard as well as adding help to Banshee for the first time. I’m starting with Tomboy as its help is a bit more basic than Banshee which has more advanced features. I’ve created a docs branch in Tomboy’s GNOME git and have been adding pages over the last week or two to get up to speed on Mallard. I have to say, writing docs in Mallard is ten times easier than Docbook. The XML markup just makes sense and is so much simpler than Docbook.
  • For Banshee, I have a git branch on Gitorious. I’ve checked out the code again after not working on it for a couple of months and have started working on it.
  • Nigel hooked some members of the Docs team up with Google Wave invites. It’s been interesting trying out Wave for collaboration for Docs writing. Not so much writing the actual documentation, but it’s been helpful for planning the pages, which is the most important part of any writing. With us half a world apart we haven’t really had a chance to use Wave for real time collaboration which I think it’s more suited for, but it’s been helpful. At this point a wiki would probably work just as well, but I do like the threaded view which makes it easier to see when changes or updates were made in Wave.
  • Shaun is off working feverishly on a new Yelp help browser for GNOME 3.0. Details are scarce at this point, but he seems excited.
  • We’ve also launched ProjectMallard.org. It’s our goal that the Mallard XML schema is used in more than just GNOME. It’s early in Mallard’s development so no big announcements, but it’s helpful to think about user help in FOSS on a greater scale. The webpage is just a place holder at this point, but we have plans to add information on what Mallard is, how to get started including code samples, tools, specifications, extensions and more.
  • We’re planning on having a GNOME Docs meetup in Chicago on November 9th prior to the marketing hackfest. Jim Campbell from XFCE might stop by but unfortunately Nixternal of KDE fame will be out of town.

Now is a great time to get involved with GNOME Documentation. Stop by on IRC in #docs on GimpNET or join the mailing list, we’d love to share what is going on with Mallard and how we are planning to make user help a better experience.

GNOME Marketing Hackfest

Three weeks from today members of the GNOME Marketing team will converge on Chicago for two days of work, brainstorming and fun.

With thanks to Google for hosting us and Novell for sponsoring us, we’ll set aside two days to work on:

  • GNOME Presentation materials. We want to make it easy for for volunteers to represent GNOME at conferences, including presentations, booth materials such as banners and brochures for the GNOME Event Box and more.
  • Writing and reviewing content for the new www.gnome.org
  • GNOME 3.0 planning
  • …and more!

We have information up regarding the hackfest on the GNOME Wiki, including our hackfest goals, location information, attendees and more. (This page is a first draft, more details soon and thanks to everyone who has contributed to the page).

Want to come? Now is the time to sign up! The GNOME Travel Committee has been approving applications the last couple of days, and we have room for more. Plan on coming, but haven’t added your name to the wiki page? Please do!

We’ll also be having a GNOME Meetup Tuesday night, so if you’re in the Chicago area check back soon for location details. Chicago has a thriving FOSS community and I’m looking forward to visiting Chicago again.

See you there!

GNOME Journal

I’ve been feeling a bit down about GNOME Journal since our last planned issue for October fell apart at the last minute. There were a number of reasons and nobody’s fault but after the great success we’ve seen this year in having multiple issues published after not having published in 2008 I was afraid we were losing momentum again. (I’m very excited about our next issue, Women in GNOME, but was concerned about issues after that).

I am glad to have been proven wrong, and in the process, re-energized about GNOME Journal.

I had the opportunity to have lunch with Stormy earlier this week and mentioned to her that one of our authors, after seeing his article just not be ready, ask if there were any other articles he could write. After reviewing our article brainstorming list, I was stumped for ideas to give him as a number of the ideas were out of date. Having mentioned this to Stormy, she quickly added about a dozen ideas later in the week!

Then, out of the blue yesterday, Sumana jumped in and helped to update and re-organize our wiki pages and sent an email to the list mentioning the updates and some ideas for future issues.

After sending out my normal request for updates on the upcoming issue, two new volunteers sent emails within minutes of my email offering to help as well.

This is what I love about the GNOME community!

Now is a great time to get involved with GNOME Journal and here are a few different ideas on how to participate:

  • Have an idea for an article you’d like to see? Add it here.
  • Want to write an article? Need an idea? See the same list. And if you’re not comfortable writing an article by yourself, collaboration is always encouraged! Send an email to the list and I know a number of writers, including myself, would be more than happy to co-write an article.
  • Help edit an article for a writer. Review the article structure, review spelling and grammar and if possible add the needed markup for our CMS.

I’m still hopeful we’ll move from our current CMS (Textpattern) to WordPress-MU on blogs.gnome.org later this year. (Jeff Waugh – still need your help if you’re available!) Once that migration starts to occur we’ll also be looking for help and ideas around what WordPress plugins could enhance the GNOME Journal experience.

Utah Open Source Conference

Christer Edwards (aka Zelut) recently represented GNOME at the Utah Open Source Conference. He’s got some great pictures up and has some good things to say about GNOME, including that he’s getting involved more (which is great to see!)

Read his full blog post (with pictures) here.

Christer and I were also recently talking about how we can expand GNOME usergroups in the US – he’s got some great ideas and experience. Still formulating my thoughts, expect a blog post soon on that as well.

GNOME Marketing Hackfest

We are in the final phases of planning a Marketing Hackfest to be held in Chicago, IL USA Tuesday and Wednesday, November 10th and 11th.

Google has been gracious to host us at their offices in Chicago and Novell is also helping with sponsorship.

Is this something you’d be interested in? Join the Marketing mailing list and let us know!

We’re finalizing the agenda now, but we have lots of stuff to work on, including:

  • Case studies of GNOME success stories
  • The new GNOME.org website
  • Presentation materials
  • GNOME 3.0 marketing campaign
  • GNOME Event box materials including posters, brochures and more

And that’s just a sampling! If you’re good with art, writing or editing we’d love to have you there. Nothing is quite like a hackfest and feeling the energy created by working together in the same room getting stuff done.