+ GNOME Foundation
+ Providing a Free Desktop for the World
+ October, November, December 2010
+
During Q3 2010 The GNOME membership and elections committee received 12 applications for a new foundation membership and 41 applications for renewals of a membership. Out of those, 41 were processed. During the same period, 14 members did not renew their membership and thus dropped out. We ended up with 351 members.
+ +We ended up with 7 new members:
+ +From October to December, 7240 reports (bugs + feature requests) were opened and 7152 were closed. Top bug closers were Fabio Durán Verdugo (686 reports), Akhil Laddha (484 reports), Milan Crha (252), Bastien Nocera (234) and Felipe Besoaín Pino (224).
+ +Top bug reporters were William Jon McCann (89 reports), Bastien Nocera (80), Milan Crha (80), Akhil Laddha (76) and Matthias Clasen (73).
+ +Apart from business as usual there has been no other activity.
+ +The documentation team started pushing harder on the new Mallard-based desktop help. Two interns from the Outreach Program for Women, Tiffany Antopolski and Natalia Ruz, have been hard at work ensuring the Gnome 3 desktop will be well-documented.
+ +As part of the Google Code-in, Jason Lo worked on converting the Character Map help to Mallard.
+ +Andre Klapper and Barbara Tobias have joined Phil and April in working on the Evolution documentation rewrite. Andre has done a significant amount of planning..
+ +Shaun attended the AEGIS conference and the accompanying Gnome accessibility hackfest. He advised accessibility team members on creating topic-oriented help, and began working on accessibility for the desktop help.
+ +In December, writers and developers met in Berlin for the development documentation and tools hackfest. A new set of demo tutorials was created to help familiarize developers with the Gnome developer platform. Work is ongoing.
+ +Phil began work on the new documentation style guide, and converted the usability team's new HIG material to Mallard.
+On October 16, Gil Forcada presented results of the GNOME I18N Survey which was referred to in the previous report. A brief analysis of the results were included.
+ +Discussion on the possibility and feasibility of translating schema files within separated gettext domains or catalogs emerged from the survey analysis debate, as well as the point of localizing certain types of strings that are usually not user-visible. Especially the price of splitting limited resources within smaller translation teams was compared with the eventual need to make significant changes to the current GNOME i18n infrastructure and also to various module build systems.
+ +With regard to the Release Team's second proposal for moduleset reorganization from October 7, which would allow various software projects outside of the GNOME infrastructure to become officially endorsed GNOME software, members of the GNOME Translation Project expressed strong preference for working on l10n support within the GNOME official i18n and SCM infrastructure.
+ +In the debate which spread over the gnome-18n and desktop-devel-list groups, GNOME translators were mainly concerned about translation quality, string freeze periods and release schedules, about expecting developers or maintainers to integrate translations manually to their respective repositories in a suitable, timely manner, and generally about changing the current module requirements by dropping them and/or making them optional for official GNOME software and GNOME developers.
+ +Several proposals were made to (require to) allow the DL infrastructure on l10n.gnome.org auto-commit translations to code repositories not hosted on git.gnome.org, to migrate from the DL application altogether and replace it with Transifex, and generally to specify l10n requirements for official modules more narrowly and precisely. No final resolution was made in this regard.
+ +The Sysadmin team work on a Damned Lies auto-commit, providing translators a way to manage l10n support without interacting with Git system directly, was resumed during October and November. Furthermore, GTP members discussed options to integrate automatic QA checking with l10n.gnome.org.
+ +Application Design
+ +Ongoing work on design work took place around Nautilus. A new round of mockups were created, as well as specifications for icon view layouts. Cosimo Cecchi implemented designs for a new sidebar and connect to server dialog. Several design concepts were developed for Epiphany as a result of discussions with developers at GUADEC. Some redesign proposals were created for Evolution. Hylke Bons revised his voice recorder designs following interest from a developer. These are being implemented.
+ +GNOME 3 Theming
+ +Lapo Calamandrei developed the GNOME 3 window manager theme.
+ +GNOME Design Team
+ +Thanks to the creation of Sparkleshare, the GNOME designers started using a public version control repository for storing and collaborating on design work. The design team started holding weekly design office hours on #gnome-design.
+ +GNOME 3 Core Desktop Designs
+ +Designs for the new GNOME 3 Control Center got underway: specifications were created for the background chooser, screensaver, power, time and date chooser, tablets and web accounts panels. New designs for the GNOME Shell date and calender widget.
+ +Human Interface Guidelines
+ +Drafted some initial GNOME 3 UI patterns for further discussion.
+ +There seemed to be a stronger presence of women at GUADEC this year. We held the first women’s dinner at GUADEC which was attended by 15 women. Everyone really enjoyed meeting and talking to each other. Marina Zhurakhinskaya made short presentations to the GNOME Advisory Board and at the Annual General Meeting about the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) efforts.
+ +We announced the OPW internships for December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011 dates on September 15. Máirín Duffy designed a catchy flyer for the program. Many members of the community helped spread the word by micro-blogging, blogging, sending information to the universities, and handing out flyers at conferences.
+ +We are currently in the middle of the application process with the application deadline on October 25 and accepted participants announcement on November 3. We have already received a good number of applications and inquiries. We should be able to accept at least five participants, with three being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation and two being sponsored by Google. The following page contains all the information about the program: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2010
+ +Stormy Peters attended the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing on September 28 - October 2. She organized the first Free and Open Source Software booth at the conference and participated in the Open Source Track. At the booth, they handed out 180 flyers about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women as well as lots of GNOME stickers - the logo on a field of grass was the most popular. Heidi Ellis also attended - her class at Western New England College is working on Caribou as part of GNOME’s a11y and HFOSS program.
+ +The FSF Womens' Caucus' “Bringing free software to girls and young women” outreach program with the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts and Red Hat has started. Máirín Duffy taught the first class session on October 15. The class will run on a weekly basis through mid-December. Red Hat produced live USB keys with the GNOME-based Fedora Design Suite that were distributed to the girls. Their first project involved photomanipulation with Gimp. Future projects will involve Gimp, Inkscape, and other creative tools. This page contains more information about the course: http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Women%27s_Caucus/Girl_Scouts_Free_Software_Outreach
+ +In the next quarter, we look forward to working with the OPW internships participants and introducing them to the community.
+ +The Sysadmin team has seen some major changes over the last quarter, primarily the hiring of a part-time System Administrator Christer Edwards. Christer can now be considered a liason between the general community and the team. Any questions or concerns regarding the progress of bugzilla issues, or project ideas can be directed through him.
+ +In addition to the above, the team has been primarily focused on a few specific tasks:
+ +First, the team has been putting a lot of attention into everyone's favorite new project, Snowy, which is moving along nicely. The alpha testing has been open and the stable public release is anticipated around the release of GNOME 3.0.
+ +Second, a baseline was set for server reporting and the noise was significantly cut down. This allows us to better monitor the daily health of the servers and catch issues early.
+ +Thirdly, a monitoring solution is being put in place to keep us apprised of outages. This includes core services such as mail and DNS as well as web services, load, etc. This is still in progress, but the final solution should give us early notice on any outages which we can hopefully act on before they affect the general community.
+ +Lastly, some new services were implemented for community use such as a public Gobby service, and Collabtive, a Project Management web service currently being tested. We've also started publishing scheduled maintenance on the http://blogs.gnome.org/Sysadmin. Anyone needing access to these services can contact Christer or the other team members.
+ +In the next quarter we look forward to continued improvements in documenting procedures, standardization and expansion.
+ +The Accessibility Team continued improving the user experience with GNOME 2, while at the same preparing for the GNOME 3 release:
+ +When not working on code, the team was busily preparing for October's AEGIS Conference and associated A11y Hackfest in Sevilla.
+ +Going into the fourth quarter, the team plans to focus on GNOME 3.0.
+ +For more detailed information on the Accessibility Team's work this quarter, please see the team wiki.
+ +Copyright © 2005-2011 The GNOME Project.