I find it quite funny that:

• while Kjartan and I were speaking about how fixing bugs is important, John posted about "GNOME 2.16: Polish, polish, polish" for the first time;
• while I'm thinking of some secret plans about setting small goals, Elijah is talking about the difficulty to get some focus on specific goals.

I thought a bit about John's proposition, but I don't think it will work: we all have our agenda for GNOME and forcing everyone to just fix bugs is nearly impossible. I'd love to do so, but I'm not sure it can be done. But there's something else we can do.

I believe we need some global and concrete goals. For the past few release cycles, everyone has been working in a corner, with some (limited) interactions with other people. GNOME is a project, made of lots of small projects. We're working on the small projects, but maybe we've move too far away from the GNOME project. We need to work together again. Think cooperation. Think integration. Think consistency.

A good first step is to set small concrete goals that we should all try to achieve. The goals can vary a lot, don't need to be ambitious, don't need to be about code. But they need to be achievable in a small timeframe. Let me give you some examples of goals:

• use "Finish" instead of "Close" where appropriate;
• make drag and drop to the trash delete the dropped object (an idea that's been here for a long time);
• move to GOption and get rid of popt;
• migrate to gnome-doc-utils;
• make file choosers have a preview widget when it can be useful;
• etc.

If we can do all this, then it will be fantastic. Those are all small steps. But a lot of small steps is great move forward. And it will make us work together. I believe this will help us, as a project.

Now, what are my secret plans for GNOME 2.16? The GG project, the GNOME Goals: find such a goal every two weeks and make people achieve those goals.

Lucas: improving our relationship with potential new contributors is indeed most important. I buy your analysis on the barriers. Let me comment on the various barriers:

• psychological (self-esteem? unclear initial steps? project is too big?): from what I have seen (on mailing lists, but also at some events), a lot of people just think GNOME is too big for them. And most of the time, they don't know how to start. GNOME Love is a good way to destroy this myth. But to make this effort even more effective, I think we need to spread the word. This is where local groups are important: there are a lot of events where GNOME is represented and if at all those events, local groups can talk about the GNOME Love and show a concrete example on how to contribute, then this is a big win.
• social (community is not receptive? contributions not being considered?): we have a first problem here, since it's hard for a maintainer to find time to contribute and to review contributions (be it code or ideas). It just takes too much time... I'm interested in a magical recipe to help with this.
• technical (bad platform docs? gobject is too complicated? don't know C programming?): it seems the most difficult part is to get a first build of GNOME. jhbuild is great, but I'm sure a lot of people would love to download a simple script that would do all the jhbuild configuration for them. Might be a nice python project :-) The waited-by-everyone library.gnome.org will also help here, I believe. I don't know what's its status, though.
• cultural (don't speak english? doesn't have local group to share knowledge/information?): local groups are really important since they can spread the word. We should definitely help them as much as possible so they don't have to do a lot of work to start. Go, GNOME-BR, go! :-)

Quim: don't you have a global vision of the GNOME websites and the online channels we are using? When I read this, I think you have the vision :-) You can be the one. I agree that it's kind of difficult to find the right place to discuss this since there are a lot of people involved, but I would think gnome-web-list is the right place. Just announce it everywhere, like on the Planet. Try this:

Are you interested in the GNOME websites? If so, subscribe to gnome-web-list!

:-)