While people are still working on fixing bugs, updating translations, writing documentation or testing GNOME 2.25, there's one task which is in need of some love: the release notes. I don't know exactly why, but we often forget about them until, well, a couple of weeks before the .0 release. Davyd has agreed to lead the effort for this cycle, which is a good news! And the other good news is that it's not really hard to help with this effort! Here's what you can do:

• look at what has been gathered so far, and add missing items;
• think about a theme for this release which will help structure the release notes (this can also be used for the image that will be put on the front page of our website);
• help decide what are the major features we want to highlight;
• take some screenshots of user-visible changes (reminder: you should use a default upstream GNOME configuration for that; the most important thing is the theme);
• write some good text about this;
• proofread the work of others.

At GUADEC last year, we decided that roadmap-list was the mailing list to coordinate the work on the release notes. So feel free to join the list and to propose your help there!

I can't stress out enough how the release notes are an essential part of a release: we've observed quite a few times already how good release notes help people be happy about a release, while less good release notes left people unsatisfied. And, well, that's not really surprising: without some good communication, even the best things are not that attractive ;-) I'm pretty sure we all have various examples for this, and I'm still trying to decide if this is a bad thing or a good thing. It might seem bad if you look at things only from, say, a technical point of view because, well, this is not supposed to matter compared to code; but on the other hand, being able to explain things to most people... isn't this another way to be open?

Anyway, I'm digressing :-) I just wanted everybody to know about this opportunity to jump in and help make GNOME 2.26 do some big splash!

I came back from FOSDEM on Sunday evening, completely burnt out. Not because it was bad, quite the contrary: it was a blast, really. Especially since there were all those familiar faces, some of which I hadn't seen in a long while. I didn't really help with any booth (except the openSUSE one, for an hour or so), or devroom, which was quite a change from the previous years. Instead, I had tons of discussions with many different people on a large set of topics, and it felt extremely productive to me. Of course, the bad thing is that I came back with many more things to do ;-)

The openSUSE booth was well alive, thanks to Martin who made sure everything would be ready. There was a computer to try SUSE Studio, and to create some images on USB keys and it attracted a lot of people. Stickers and DVDs were of course available, and some people even got a great t-shirt! It was also good to be able to talk to Henne, Andrew, Zonker and others.

Image from faerie_eriu (Creative Commons BY-SA)

As for the GNOME community, I can only say it rocked! When I look at the past and remember the GNOME presence we had in the previous years at FOSDEM, I can only say that I'm impressed with the progress we've done:

• Andreas had made a great design for the t-shirts (I can't find any picture of the t-shirt yet), and Baptiste Mille-Mathias did all the hard work to get them printed. It was quite cool to see people wearing the GNOME t-shirt on Sunday :-)
• Baptiste also took care of stickers, and so we had 5000 stickers to distribute. And those stickers, wow... I love them: simple and beautiful. I loved them so much that I took a good bunch of them and walked around to give them away to people I met or on other booths.
• Reinout and Lionel did a fantastic work organizing and manning the booth, with the help of a few other people.
• Thanks to Olivier Le Thanh, we had the GNOME Beer Event on Saturday which got a good attendance and was really a great place to be for random chats.
• I didn't see much of the GNOME devroom, but I'm sure that Christophe did a good job there -- at least, I heard of some talks in positive ways :-)
• Frédéric has the GNOME group photo in his camera, and since he loves being pinged on IRC, don't hesitate to do so and request the photo to be posted!

Really good stuff. Make sure to hug all those people to thank them for their hard work!

Oh, and my "Bits from your GNOME team" talk in the openSUSE devroom went okay. Especially if you consider the fact that I could have fallen asleep while delivering it...