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Tuesday 2 May 2006

Summer of Code: submit your applications!

I'm really excited by this year's Summer of Code: we have tons of great ideas and after only a few hours, we already received some applications for projects.

Every student should apply and submit a GNOME project (deadline is May 8th). And don't worry if you're not deeply familiar with the GNOME community, since this is an ideal way to get involved in GNOME: you'll have a project with specific goals, a mentor will be here to guide you, you'll get to know how the community works, and, hopefully, the results of the project will be used in the GNOME universe.

I'm eagerly waiting to see everyone rocking!

[13:29] | [GNOME] | [#379]

Thursday 20 April 2006

DOAP love and software map

Nearly a month ago, Simon Rozet contacted me to know how to get involved in GNOME or GNOME-FR. After a bit of discussion, it turned out he was quite interested in working on a DOAP-powered software map. He started doing some stuff, and he produced a small tarball with some scripts that can produce webpages, a bit like what Apache is doing.

I'm pretty sure he would love to get feedback on this, so people should definitely download the tarball and improve everything in there. It's just a quick draft and it's not perfect, so there's surely room to improve. It would definitely rock to get something like this on our website!

[20:53] | [GNOME] | [#377] | [2 comments]

Desktop track at the RMLL

The RMLL are a big free software event in France. Last year, GNOME-FR held a booth there and it was a really huge success (definitely one of the best booths we ever had). We'll most probably be here again, with rocking GNOME-FR people.

There's also some news for this year's event: there's a desktop track. I can't imagine having a great GNOME booth without having some excellent GNOME talks, so everyone who wants to visit France at the beginning of July and who is ready to talk about GNOME, from a technical point of view or from a user-oriented point of view should propose a talk. There are only 15 talk slots, and we'll share this with other projects, but I guess we should definitely aim at having at least 4 talks.

Did I mention France is really a country you should visit at least once? Contact me if you're interested.

[08:43] | [GNOME] | [#376]

Sunday 9 April 2006

GNOME Goal #2

Weehee! GNOME Goal #1 was a big success, with lots of people helping. Right now, only six modules are marked as to do. Rock! Thanks to, in no particular order: Michael Terry, Ruben Vermeersch, Matthias Clasen, Luis Menina, Luca Cavalli, Tommi Vainikainen, Philip Van Hoof, Christian Persch, Sébastien Bacher, Thomas Thurman, Lucas Rocha, Thomas Andersen, Michael Plump, Christian Kirbach, Przemysław Grzegorczyk and a lot of other people (sorry, I'm sure I'm forgetting to mention someone here). Now GNOME is GOption-powered!

But let's continue. I originally thought it'd be great to have a goal based on features. But Behdad and Christian were great and wrote complete pages for some of the goals, which are some nice things we should really do. So, what's special about this second GNOME Goal? Well, it's a combo GNOME Goal: you get two goals for one. The first one is to install theme-friendly icons, because every application has the right to be correctly themed! The second goal is to help our translators, so they don't have to check out an entire module to add a translation. And it's really easy to do this since you only have to put a LINGUAS file, with some other small changes.

Like for the first GNOME Goal, the wiki pages contain all the informations that you need to complete the goals for a module. And everybody is, again, welcome to contribute! It's easy, so don't hesitate and join all the people patching GNOME!

It seems some people already started working on these goals, so you should definitely try to fix one or two modules as soon as possible, while it's still possible ;-)

[18:17] | [GNOME] | [#372] | [2 comments]

Monday 3 April 2006

Join the fun, join the forums!

I'm not a big fan of forums. Probably because I very much prefer mailing lists. Or Usenet.

But since a few weeks, I'm trying something new: I've registered on the GNOME Forums (and on the french-speaking GNOME forums too) and I'm trying to participate there. I was already nearly convinced I should do it when Claus sent me a (fairly long) mail explaining that it would be great to try the forums. It was a bit hard at first, but I'm starting to get used to using forums (I find they work better for me when there are some RSS feeds).

I have some goals in doing this:

  • help people: it's really important to have good support. I fondly remember the days, when I started wanting to contribute to GNOME: I joined #gnome-help for a while since it was a good way to contribute. Our users will always need some support, and so we need people helping in this area.
  • meet some users: I often hear people saying that the developers are not listening for users, or similar stuff. To be honest, a normal user won't open a bug in bugzilla. But he will post a question on a forum. Using the forums is a great way to get feedback from users, be it negative feedback or positive feedback.
  • figure out if we have (or will have) a great non-technical user community. I love the GNOME community, but right now, it's mostly a community of contributors. We love our users. We want more people to use our software. So why don't we try to create a huge user community, where everyone could feel the GNOME love?

And you, do you have an account on the GNOME forums? You really should!

[19:29] | [GNOME] | [#371] | [4 comments]

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by Vincent