You might remember this:

It's been a long time coming, but if the proposal that was presented at GUADEC caught your attention and if you're curious to know more about GNOME 3.0, you will definitely want to read the detailed planning that the release team prepared. While the GUADEC proposal was mainly about the idea of doing GNOME 3.0, we also hoped that it would bootstrap a new period where people would begin serious planning about it. And it did happened: before, people tended to only propose ideas on paper; after GUADEC, we started seeing more concrete roadmaps, proposals and code.

I strongly believe the planning we've been working on is the right way to do things, and I surely hope it will be well-received by the community. I don't want to summarize the mail here, so just check it out (interestingly, it breaks in the web archives because of a line starting with From and the mail is split in two: second part here) or check the wiki version, read the thread that it will create, or look at Andre's post or Lucas' post about all this.