Fedora 11 Retrospective Recap 2009-06-16
Wiki version: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Retrospective_Notes
Invitees: Cross section of people and leads from each group: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Retrospective_Invitees
Attendees: James Laska, Bruno Wolff, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson, John McDonough, Jon Stanley, Jarod Wilson, Todd Zullinger, Ricky Zhou, Steven Moix, Mike McGrath,Jack Aboutboul, Paul Frields, Eric Christensen, John Poelstra, Edward Kirk, Adam Williamson, Máirín Duffy, and Jesse Keating
Unrepresented Teams: Ambassadors, Translation
Location: Global teleconferencing system & Fedora Gobby
When: 2009-06-16 @ 14:00 UTC
== Meeting Guidelines & Agenda ==
1) Each person gets five minutes to say whatever they want. Suggested questions to answer: a) What went well? b) What could have gone better? c) If time and resources were not an issue, what three things would make Fedora 12 our best release ever?
2) While the speaker has the floor nobody can interrupt or correct what they are saying --there are no "wrong" ideas --other participants can seek clarification from speaker after they are done
3) Other attendees will help capture points raised in gobby
4) Open discussion and go forward plans after each person has had an opportunity to speak
== Meeting Outcomes == o Individual feedback (see below) o John Poelstra will create a wiki version of these notes and post link to in email recap to fedora-advisory-board --https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Retrospective_Notes o Jesse suggested checking back in a month to see how we are doing on the things we said we said we wanted to change --email is fine; telephone not required o Jesse strongly urged people on the call to take the proposals from the recent FAD back to their teams --feedback needed ASAP --will affect many parts of Fedora
--https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_Fedora_Development_Cycle_... o John Poelstra encourage attendees to blog about this meeting to give a wider audience an understanding of what the meeting was like and what they thought about it o The Fedora CMS (Zicula) will affect a lot of groups in Fedora --We need a point person to coordinate these efforts for our greatest chance at success --No one has been identified o ADDED AFTER THE FACT by John Poelstra --Anyone is free to tag onto the end of the wiki document to add their own feedback
--https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Retrospective_Notes#Additional_Feed...
== Legend ==
(+) Went well (-) Could have gone better (w) Wish-list--no limits--everyone CAN have a pony
== Jon Stanley (jds2001) - fesco == (+) Feature process went well --good contingency plans (-) X item fell through the cracks (-) Meeting minutes creation failed (+) Started using a minute meeting bot (w) Massive QA testing (w) Earlier freezing/branching for critical packages
== Eric Christensen (Sparks) - docs == (-) Release notes churn at the last minute --some is legitimately unforeseen, other notes just not timely enough (-) docs.fedoraproject.org page doesn't flow well --languages hard to find (+) Turned out more guides and docs than past releases (+) use of Red Hat guides that were relicensed (w) Zikula CMS --will replace the existing docs.fp.o (w) standardize and focus on release notes and meet more users point
== Jarod Wilson (j-rod) - FESCo == (+) Feature process went smoothly--deadlines understood and less confusion (+) No major disagreements within FESCo (-) No major disagreements within FESCo (-) Meeting minutes (-) Collection of public feedback not optimal (need more _constructive_ feedback) (-) Secondary architecture team updates (w) Focused Fedora kernel QA effort--build up community
== John J. McDonough (jjmcd) - docs == (+) people were great (+) use of publican went surprisingly well (+) install guide is the best we've ever had (-) integrating milestones better into schedule (-) pushing to docs.fedoraproject.org is an ugly process --Too many formats (-) Need more packagers on the docs team (w) More engagement with developers/determining who to talk to (w) PackageKit get fixed --problems finding application to click on (w) Problems with wireless on NetworkManager
== Edward Kirk (tk009) - BugZappers == (+) Communication really good about what was going on between all the teams and across the project (+) More people are joining the project and contributing (-) Blocker bugs were not handled very well (-) Problems at the end with Anaconda --identifying blocker bugs before the last minute (w) A more solid, stable release that is technically better than anything else out there
== James Laska (jlaska) - QA == (+) 20 test days--way more than F10 (+) Documentation around test days and how to create live images, etc. (+) Test results reporting (+) Common F11 Bugs --multiple teams were invested in success (+) Community testing (-) No specific test days for Sound (-) No concept of capacity (-) Clarify hand off procedures between Release Engineering & QA for RC --"who has the ball?" (-) Transparency around release readiness decision and whether to slip --public discussion & publish minutes (-) Automation of testing (-) No metrics around health of QA community (w) Micro-communities around each of the features --specific dashboard --blocker bug tracking (w) Community test case management system
== Adam Williamson (adamw) - QA/BugZappers == (-) reading several reviews that Fedora 11 is un-installable (-) unclear how to get in late release notes additions in a cooperative way (+) Test Days were fantastic (+) BugZappers and QA wiki spaces were substantially revised (w) A massive testing lab (w) Improving kernel triage for future releases
== Bruno Wolff - Games Spin == (+) Help from Jeremy Katz to enhance livecd-tools for larger games iso size (+) Rawhide updates come quickly from the mirrors and Koji (+) test days were helpful and gave focus to people (+) New Spin process documentation got developed --specific test instructions are now available (-) Broken installer and video got in the way of testing --painful when rawhide was broken (-) We don't have a process for maintaining recurring spins (w) Less broken stuff (w) Spins process document finished (w) Lots of test days (w) More with live USB with persistent storage
== Jack Aboutboul & Steven Moix - Marketing == (+) Lots of progress restructuring the marketing team (+) Release schedule helped cross team coordination (-) Need to identify task inter dependencies and add them to the schedule (-) Better capture things that get accomplished (+) Inter group communication with Art, Translation, etc. (w) Host mini-meetings with different teams throughout the release cycle (+) Continuous content production --building up and telling stories (w) Fedora Magazine (+) Tracking press reports in different languages (w) Finding a better way to do metrics to identify how far our reach is and understand audience (w) More marketing to younger audiences and greater public awareness
== Ricky Zhou - Websites== (+) two or three people helping consistently with Web team tasks (-) Late changes from marketing and docs team which had minor impact (w) Add a review period so that issues can be identified and corrected before release
== Mairin Duffy - Design == (-) Need to see feedback to the Design list as opposed to sprung on blogs (w) Six more designers on the team! (w) pink pony!!!!11!!
== Jesse Keating - Release Engineering == (+) Better involvement with QA and Triage --improved confidence in QA beating on the trees (+) Did a better job of managing the blocker lists (+) Good help from others verifying blocker bugs (+) Test Days ... more feature owners are requesting targeted testing (+) No last minute compose-related surprises (-) Better communication around what testing needs to be done --improve capture of testing outside of the matrix (mailing lists) (-) Clearer guidelines around code changes (+) FAD Proposals - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_Fedora_Development_Cycle_... (w) earlier review blocker bugs --maybe weekly after we branch (w) automated QA which provides automatic feedback
== Jóhann B. Guðmundsson - QA Team== (w) Taking test days to the next level --improved advertisement --re-use live images for additional testing (w) coordinate with upstream testing (w) litmus testing system added to Fedora --litmus is coded to be quite mozilla-specific (according to jlaska) (w) Use of Fedora QA Trac system to track request from maintainers (w) Host test day without requiring maintainer present (-) lack consensus amongst maintainers if a reporter is supposed to report to our bugzilla or upstream one (w) Daily scheduled testing on components.
== Todd Zullinger -- Websites Team == (+) more complete translations than we've had before (+) Infrastructure team syncing release content earlier than past releases (w) relocate everyone to a tropical island where we can all work together in person
== Mike McGrath - Infrastructure == (+) team is growing (-) multiple release slips hindered work in infrastructure due to freezes --one big slip would be nicer (w) Feature freezes in earlier (w) Contingency plans for core distro functionality (w) Look for key ways that Infrastructure can enable success of QA Team
== Paul Frields == (+) Well coordinated for the releases including slip announcements (+) Ambassadors did a great job behind the scenes --media production --release parties (-) Feedback mechanisms are unclear and point to too many different places --documentation and marketing materials --could anaconda bug reporting mechanism be helped by design team? (w) Marketing, Docs, Website, Design team work on coordinated approach to the Zicula (CMS) --organized and well coordinated fashion (w) More forceful in not allowing late/invasive changes to rawhide and putting them off to next release
I really want to create a wallpaper for f12, but what is the theme? :)
Thomas
On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 19:35 +0200, Thomas Kole wrote:
I really want to create a wallpaper for f12, but what is the theme? :)
If possible, it will be based on the release name which is currently being voted on. Be a little more patient ;-)
Mo, what's the theming process for F12?
My idea based on our previous approaches: 1. sketching the base concepts (ideas accompanied by simple pictures) 2. get initial approach wallpapers into Alpha (concept should be decided upon, wallpaper should look good, but needs not to be polished). This is where we need to get feedback (most of the design team people blogging about it?) and reflect on it. If more concepts are still being discussed over, have them all in the release (automatically change the different concepts so that we users/testers wouldn't need to change them manually?) 3. have most of the artwork covered by Beta (based on the alpha feedback we'll build a theme upon a single selected concept; after this milestone we must not change the concept so that we'll have enough time to fill the holes and do final polishes) 4. polish for RCs and Final so that the release artwork will be awesome and breath taking ;-)
Thomas
Martin
Martin Sourada wrote:
On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 19:35 +0200, Thomas Kole wrote:
I really want to create a wallpaper for f12, but what is the theme? :)
If possible, it will be based on the release name which is currently being voted on. Be a little more patient ;-)
Mo, what's the theming process for F12?
My idea based on our previous approaches:
- sketching the base concepts (ideas accompanied by simple pictures)
- get initial approach wallpapers into Alpha (concept should be decided
upon, wallpaper should look good, but needs not to be polished). This is where we need to get feedback (most of the design team people blogging about it?) and reflect on it. If more concepts are still being discussed over, have them all in the release (automatically change the different concepts so that we users/testers wouldn't need to change them manually?) 3. have most of the artwork covered by Beta (based on the alpha feedback we'll build a theme upon a single selected concept; after this milestone we must not change the concept so that we'll have enough time to fill the holes and do final polishes) 4. polish for RCs and Final so that the release artwork will be awesome and breath taking ;-)
Thomas
Martin
design-team mailing list design-team@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
Thank you :)
Hi Martin,
On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 20:04 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:
Mo, what's the theming process for F12?
My idea based on our previous approaches:
- sketching the base concepts (ideas accompanied by simple pictures)
- get initial approach wallpapers into Alpha (concept should be decided
upon, wallpaper should look good, but needs not to be polished). This is where we need to get feedback (most of the design team people blogging about it?) and reflect on it. If more concepts are still being discussed over, have them all in the release (automatically change the different concepts so that we users/testers wouldn't need to change them manually?) 3. have most of the artwork covered by Beta (based on the alpha feedback we'll build a theme upon a single selected concept; after this milestone we must not change the concept so that we'll have enough time to fill the holes and do final polishes) 4. polish for RCs and Final so that the release artwork will be awesome and breath taking ;-)
That sounds like a reasonable approach to take!
~m
On 06/16/2009 09:04 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 19:35 +0200, Thomas Kole wrote:
I really want to create a wallpaper for f12, but what is the theme? :)
If possible, it will be based on the release name which is currently being voted on. Be a little more patient ;-)
I believe the result is expected to be announced next week at FUDCon.
On 06/16/2009 09:04 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
My idea based on our previous approaches:
- sketching the base concepts (ideas accompanied by simple pictures)
We should decide here about the way to go: like F11, trying to get a concept/metaphor and everybody working toward it or like F8-F10 with an open "competition". I think neither of those worked very well...
- get initial approach wallpapers into Alpha (concept should be decided
upon, wallpaper should look good, but needs not to be polished). This is where we need to get feedback (most of the design team people blogging about it?) and reflect on it. If more concepts are still being discussed over, have them all in the release (automatically change the different concepts so that we users/testers wouldn't need to change them manually?)
According to the schedule, we have Alpha freeze on 2009-08-04 and Alpha release on 2009-08-18.
Maybe we should set a date before the Alpha freeze (a number of weeks after the release name announcement) as a deadline for *concept* submission, so we have the time for a selection before the freeze?
- have most of the artwork covered by Beta (based on the alpha feedback
we'll build a theme upon a single selected concept; after this milestone we must not change the concept so that we'll have enough time to fill the holes and do final polishes)
+1
- polish for RCs and Final so that the release artwork will be awesome
and breath taking ;-)
+1
On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 09:18 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
We should decide here about the way to go: like F11, trying to get a concept/metaphor and everybody working toward it or like F8-F10 with an open "competition". I think neither of those worked very well...
Well, in my humble opinion the process worked best for selecting and finishing the infinity theme, but got somehow broken later... the new one isn't in my opinion working very good as well :-/
First of all we need to make clear it's not competition, but we still need more than one designs and especially those from Samuele, which tend to be awesome and got used for the past two releases. But we need them early in the process. I'd also try again some abstract theme (connected to the release name though) ;-)
I think we could try something midway. With the release name we'll have the base with which to work, but we'll work on more concepts - Round 1. We'll select the best ones for inclusion in Alpha and work towards having "example" wallpapers finished. The final one would be perhaps decided a week or two after releasing Alpha. That would finish Round 2. And we'll all work on that one to have it done for release - which would be Round 3. But again, we need to make sure it's an open cooperation rather than an open competition to encourage people on working on more concepts than just their own ;-)
According to the schedule, we have Alpha freeze on 2009-08-04 and Alpha release on 2009-08-18.
Maybe we should set a date before the Alpha freeze (a number of weeks after the release name announcement) as a deadline for *concept* submission, so we have the time for a selection before the freeze?
Sounds like a good idea (especially considering many people submitting their works just before the deadline or even after that...).
So considering the name will be announced next week at FUDCon and that the alpha freeze is 2009-08-04, perhaps 2009-07-26 would be a reasonable date - that way we'll have more than month for brainstorming and more than week to get the initial wallpaper(s) in.
Martin
On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 09:18 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
On 06/16/2009 09:04 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
My idea based on our previous approaches:
- sketching the base concepts (ideas accompanied by simple pictures)
We should decide here about the way to go: like F11, trying to get a concept/metaphor and everybody working toward it or like F8-F10 with an open "competition". I think neither of those worked very well...
I wonder if we could take an approach instead of creating the base image from scratch this time, to go out and search the best of openly-licensed content and try to provide a thematic selection? That way there is much less pressure on us I think.... because the creative process is not always so consistent in terms of time/effort involved, if we make a selection of things already available perhaps we can deliver on a more predictable schedule? (and get some publicity/exposure to artists who aren't already on the team but already 'get' open licensing - maybe it will help us convince them to join our effort :) )
The theme that unifies the selected images could be derived from the codename. It would be great to have a whole cohesive set of images for users to choose from too instead of just one like we've always done.
This would still involve some effort from us too, to convert/crop photos to the ratios we support and whatnot.
We could have a competitive element to determine which one of the selections is the wallpaper by default?
It might be cool too, to work up a list of personas, each of which we should try to aim a wallpaper at. For example, the Windows XP base set of wallpapers has the flower and the pink wallpaper for girls...
- get initial approach wallpapers into Alpha (concept should be decided
upon, wallpaper should look good, but needs not to be polished). This is where we need to get feedback (most of the design team people blogging about it?) and reflect on it. If more concepts are still being discussed over, have them all in the release (automatically change the different concepts so that we users/testers wouldn't need to change them manually?)
According to the schedule, we have Alpha freeze on 2009-08-04 and Alpha release on 2009-08-18.
That is NOT a lot of time :( When in the schedule is the final codename selection to be made by?
Maybe we should set a date before the Alpha freeze (a number of weeks after the release name announcement) as a deadline for *concept* submission, so we have the time for a selection before the freeze?
- have most of the artwork covered by Beta (based on the alpha feedback
we'll build a theme upon a single selected concept; after this milestone we must not change the concept so that we'll have enough time to fill the holes and do final polishes)
+1
+1
- polish for RCs and Final so that the release artwork will be awesome
and breath taking ;-)
+1
+1
~m
On 06/17/2009 08:39 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
I wonder if we could take an approach instead of creating the base image from scratch this time, to go out and search the best of openly-licensed content and try to provide a thematic selection? That way there is much
And have no default? What we will do, run a wizard at the first login so the user can chose his theme?
less pressure on us I think.... because the creative process is not always so consistent in terms of time/effort involved, if we make a selection of things already available perhaps we can deliver on a more predictable schedule? (and get some publicity/exposure to artists who aren't already on the team but already 'get' open licensing - maybe it will help us convince them to join our effort :) )
Honestly, I am not a big fan of this approach, is like us dropping the ball and acknowledging we are not able to create ourselves something good enough.
The theme that unifies the selected images could be derived from the codename. It would be great to have a whole cohesive set of images for users to choose from too instead of just one like we've always done.
Let's see the codename, but I am skeptical we will be able to find enough quality, Free images for an entire set with different personas.
This would still involve some effort from us too, to convert/crop photos to the ratios we support and whatnot.
We could have a competitive element to determine which one of the selections is the wallpaper by default?
It might be cool too, to work up a list of personas, each of which we should try to aim a wallpaper at. For example, the Windows XP base set of wallpapers has the flower and the pink wallpaper for girls...
I hope we will do something with wallpaper extras for F12.
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 09:42 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
On 06/17/2009 08:39 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
I wonder if we could take an approach instead of creating the base image from scratch this time, to go out and search the best of openly-licensed content and try to provide a thematic selection? That way there is much
And have no default? What we will do, run a wizard at the first login so the user can chose his theme?
We still need a default. We could pick one of the ones we select to be the default one, but have others along the same theme available as options. Adding another dialog I think isn't a good idea.
less pressure on us I think.... because the creative process is not always so consistent in terms of time/effort involved, if we make a selection of things already available perhaps we can deliver on a more predictable schedule? (and get some publicity/exposure to artists who aren't already on the team but already 'get' open licensing - maybe it will help us convince them to join our effort :) )
Honestly, I am not a big fan of this approach, is like us dropping the ball and acknowledging we are not able to create ourselves something good enough.
Well it doesn't mean that we couldn't, for example, take a sourced image we decide should be the default and manipulate it or make some changes to it. Also, we'd still have to create from scratch all the various banners and splashes, etc. Or it could even be we select something we think is awesome and openly-licensed and use it heavily as inspiration, but we can still create an original work.
To be honest, I'm just really exhausted having everything be last-minute and involve so much effort in a short-notice period of time. The problem is, right now, as team lead the buck stops with me so if we're not ready it's my responsibility to drop everything in my life and spend late nights coming up with something. If we didn't have Samuele helping out the past couple of releases we might have something horrible like the F9 background again - but at the same time we can't lean on Samuele all the time either.
It seems like it would be nice, at least for just one release, to take a breather, try out an approach like this, and if we decide we don't like it then there is no reason we shouldn't abandon it.
The main problem for me is that every time the topic of release art comes up, I don't think 'fun' and 'cool', I think 'pain' and get a feeling of dread and despair :( And that's not cool. And after going through all that hard work and time, still we get negative comments (and I understand we can't satisfy everyone, but that on top of having to work so hard and not have much fun, makes it even less enjoyable.) I feel that this problem should be addressed so we can make theming fun again, but I'm not sure how. This was the idea I came up with but I'm very open to other proposed solutions.
Is this fair or am I being overly dramatic?
The theme that unifies the selected images could be derived from the codename. It would be great to have a whole cohesive set of images for users to choose from too instead of just one like we've always done.
Let's see the codename, but I am skeptical we will be able to find enough quality, Free images for an entire set with different personas.
We don't have to have so many. We can aim for, 2 general-purpose, 1 for pink-pony lovers like me, and 1 to appeal to children. Three personas, four images, to me this seems quite do-able?
This would still involve some effort from us too, to convert/crop photos to the ratios we support and whatnot.
We could have a competitive element to determine which one of the selections is the wallpaper by default?
It might be cool too, to work up a list of personas, each of which we should try to aim a wallpaper at. For example, the Windows XP base set of wallpapers has the flower and the pink wallpaper for girls...
I hope we will do something with wallpaper extras for F12.
I know. How did we fail on this in F11, just not enough time / preparation? Do we need a packager to help?
~m
On 06/18/2009 04:55 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 09:42 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
I hope we will do something with wallpaper extras for F12.
I know. How did we fail on this in F11, just not enough time / preparation? Do we need a packager to help?
It was late for F11, maybe for F12 we should start early and make it an official feature, so we are motivated enough towards finishing it?
Martin offered to do the packaging, which should be not harder than the packaging he did for the release wallpapers.
The hard part is, IMO, getting the images (wiki? ssh?) and selecting from the large amount received.
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 17:36 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
It was late for F11, maybe for F12 we should start early and make it an official feature, so we are motivated enough towards finishing it?
Martin offered to do the packaging, which should be not harder than the packaging he did for the release wallpapers.
The hard part is, IMO, getting the images (wiki? ssh?) and selecting from the large amount received.
We first need to decide how exactly we handle it. There are people against the package-based approach as well as those for this approach. I think we partly failed to get a consensus there. If we decide on the package approach and have some rules or whatever how to split the packages, how to name the packages and what to include in the packages, I'll do the packaging work. But that's really the last part and we are far from that IMHO.
Martin
On 06/18/2009 11:42 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 17:36 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
It was late for F11, maybe for F12 we should start early and make it an official feature, so we are motivated enough towards finishing it?
Martin offered to do the packaging, which should be not harder than the packaging he did for the release wallpapers.
The hard part is, IMO, getting the images (wiki? ssh?) and selecting from the large amount received.
We first need to decide how exactly we handle it. There are people against the package-based approach as well as those for this approach. I think we partly failed to get a consensus there. If we decide on the package approach and have some rules or whatever how to split the packages, how to name the packages and what to include in the packages, I'll do the packaging work. But that's really the last part and we are far from that IMHO.
I think a good approach is both a package and an online gallery. Put everything in the online gallery so anyone can use it (not resticted to Fedora or even Linux users) and a selection packaged in the repository.
The ultimate criteria for selection into the package is size: figure-out which is the size limit (20MB, 50MB?) for the package to be *ever* (not right now, but maybe at some point in the future) accepted on the install DVD and select the best until we reach that limit.
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 09:55 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
We still need a default. We could pick one of the ones we select to be the default one, but have others along the same theme available as options. Adding another dialog I think isn't a good idea.
Think of Live CDs. We don't have the space to ship more wallpapers in our default install...
Honestly, I am not a big fan of this approach, is like us dropping the ball and acknowledging we are not able to create ourselves something good enough.
Me neither.
Well it doesn't mean that we couldn't, for example, take a sourced image we decide should be the default and manipulate it or make some changes to it. Also, we'd still have to create from scratch all the various banners and splashes, etc. Or it could even be we select something we think is awesome and openly-licensed and use it heavily as inspiration, but we can still create an original work.
Yeah, we could do that, but are we really that desperate to take our default artwork from outside our team?
To be honest, I'm just really exhausted having everything be last-minute and involve so much effort in a short-notice period of time. The problem is, right now, as team lead the buck stops with me so if we're not ready it's my responsibility to drop everything in my life and spend late nights coming up with something. If we didn't have Samuele helping out the past couple of releases we might have something horrible like the F9 background again - but at the same time we can't lean on Samuele all the time either.
Hm... honestly I think the F9 wallpaper turned out pretty well after all, but there was the issue of us working with two themes at once which didn't work very well - we already had the waves theme and added the sulphur which didn't turned out well, so we reverted back to waves only last minute... The problem with F10 and F11 for me is that it was basically photo manipulation. Huge files with any sort of editing in gimp taking up significant amount of time...
I say it once more, but since I am with the art (now design) team, I consider the Infinity theme the best one. We should go with something simple and abstract for F12 again. It would be much more likely to finish that in time -- and probably even more people could have directly contribute (not everyone wants to download 100MB xcf which takes 1min+ to open and 30s+ to hide/show a layer...).
It seems like it would be nice, at least for just one release, to take a breather, try out an approach like this, and if we decide we don't like it then there is no reason we shouldn't abandon it.
Yeah, we can try it, but I am already tired of having to adjust to different approaches in each release. I've had hard time to follow even the F11 process... We should really select two plans and stick to those for much longer time than one release. And have them properly documented on wiki. One would be the main one, the second one fallback, if something goes wrong. I think the fallback one could be your proposal of basing our work on already finished images taken from outside the team.
The main problem for me is that every time the topic of release art comes up, I don't think 'fun' and 'cool', I think 'pain' and get a feeling of dread and despair :( And that's not cool. And after going through all that hard work and time, still we get negative comments (and I understand we can't satisfy everyone, but that on top of having to work so hard and not have much fun, makes it even less enjoyable.) I feel that this problem should be addressed so we can make theming fun again, but I'm not sure how. This was the idea I came up with but I'm very open to other proposed solutions.
Is this fair or am I being overly dramatic?
What I feel when I think about fedora themes is high entry level and confusion about the process.
We don't have to have so many. We can aim for, 2 general-purpose, 1 for pink-pony lovers like me, and 1 to appeal to children. Three personas, four images, to me this seems quite do-able?
Again. We could have those on DVD install, but definitely not on Live Spins.
Martin
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 22:56 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 09:55 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
We still need a default. We could pick one of the ones we select to be the default one, but have others along the same theme available as options. Adding another dialog I think isn't a good idea.
Think of Live CDs. We don't have the space to ship more wallpapers in our default install...
Don't we ship a small selection GNOME-provided wallpapers in the LiveCD as well? Couldn't we swap those out?
Honestly, I am not a big fan of this approach, is like us dropping the ball and acknowledging we are not able to create ourselves something good enough.
Me neither.
Why do we have to create the wallpaper ourselves?
Well it doesn't mean that we couldn't, for example, take a sourced image we decide should be the default and manipulate it or make some changes to it. Also, we'd still have to create from scratch all the various banners and splashes, etc. Or it could even be we select something we think is awesome and openly-licensed and use it heavily as inspiration, but we can still create an original work.
Yeah, we could do that, but are we really that desperate to take our default artwork from outside our team?
I *am* that desperate. The past 3 releases have been miserable for me personally, and I did literally have to drop everything going on in my life and spend late nights on the wallpaper.
Fedora 9 was the worst. With Samuele's help in F10 and F11 it's been a bit easier but not much. If there is someone passionate and motivated enough to take the responsibility for the theme from me and push for original created work then please do - I do not want to do it!
To be honest, I'm just really exhausted having everything be last-minute and involve so much effort in a short-notice period of time. The problem is, right now, as team lead the buck stops with me so if we're not ready it's my responsibility to drop everything in my life and spend late nights coming up with something. If we didn't have Samuele helping out the past couple of releases we might have something horrible like the F9 background again - but at the same time we can't lean on Samuele all the time either.
Hm... honestly I think the F9 wallpaper turned out pretty well after all, but there was the issue of us working with two themes at once which didn't work very well - we already had the waves theme and added the sulphur which didn't turned out well, so we reverted back to waves only last minute... The problem with F10 and F11 for me is that it was basically photo manipulation. Huge files with any sort of editing in gimp taking up significant amount of time...
I say it once more, but since I am with the art (now design) team, I consider the Infinity theme the best one. We should go with something simple and abstract for F12 again. It would be much more likely to finish that in time -- and probably even more people could have directly contribute (not everyone wants to download 100MB xcf which takes 1min+ to open and 30s+ to hide/show a layer...).
Abstract is fine with me.
It seems like it would be nice, at least for just one release, to take a breather, try out an approach like this, and if we decide we don't like it then there is no reason we shouldn't abandon it.
Yeah, we can try it, but I am already tired of having to adjust to different approaches in each release. I've had hard time to follow even the F11 process... We should really select two plans and stick to those for much longer time than one release. And have them properly documented on wiki. One would be the main one, the second one fallback, if something goes wrong. I think the fallback one could be your proposal of basing our work on already finished images taken from outside the team.
We had *one plan* we followed for *several releases*. There were problems with it so we tried something new: We can't discover the right approach if we don't try different ones, but it has not been a different approach every single release. It was the same approach every release, and a different one for F11.
How could the F11 process have been clearer? It was documented on the wiki: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F11 What are the problems with this? How can we do better next time? I do not think having two processes is going to simplify at all, so I am not sure how well that proposal will help.
It seems there are complaints about the process, then complaints about changing the process in trying to improve it. How can we improve the process that people complain about so much if we can't change it?
Does anyone want to take up the task of writing and maintaining the theme process documentation, and making sure it is well-publicized?
The main problem for me is that every time the topic of release art comes up, I don't think 'fun' and 'cool', I think 'pain' and get a feeling of dread and despair :( And that's not cool. And after going through all that hard work and time, still we get negative comments (and I understand we can't satisfy everyone, but that on top of having to work so hard and not have much fun, makes it even less enjoyable.) I feel that this problem should be addressed so we can make theming fun again, but I'm not sure how. This was the idea I came up with but I'm very open to other proposed solutions.
Is this fair or am I being overly dramatic?
What I feel when I think about fedora themes is high entry level and confusion about the process.
Do you have a better idea? Can you commit to helping make it better?
We don't have to have so many. We can aim for, 2 general-purpose, 1 for pink-pony lovers like me, and 1 to appeal to children. Three personas, four images, to me this seems quite do-able?
Again. We could have those on DVD install, but definitely not on Live Spins.
See my question above.
~m
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 17:28 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 22:56 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 09:55 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
We still need a default. We could pick one of the ones we select to be the default one, but have others along the same theme available as options. Adding another dialog I think isn't a good idea.
Think of Live CDs. We don't have the space to ship more wallpapers in our default install...
Don't we ship a small selection GNOME-provided wallpapers in the LiveCD as well? Couldn't we swap those out?
Honestly, I am not a big fan of this approach, is like us dropping the ball and acknowledging we are not able to create ourselves something good enough.
Me neither.
Why do we have to create the wallpaper ourselves?
Well it doesn't mean that we couldn't, for example, take a sourced image we decide should be the default and manipulate it or make some changes to it. Also, we'd still have to create from scratch all the various banners and splashes, etc. Or it could even be we select something we think is awesome and openly-licensed and use it heavily as inspiration, but we can still create an original work.
Yeah, we could do that, but are we really that desperate to take our default artwork from outside our team?
I *am* that desperate. The past 3 releases have been miserable for me personally, and I did literally have to drop everything going on in my life and spend late nights on the wallpaper.
Maybe I am being a bit unreasonable. I have been thinking about it -
Maybe we can aim to do an abstract, vector-based (please vector-based, the reasons you give for avoiding 100MB+ XCFs is quite sound, Martin) default wallpaper that is an original creation... having it be vector reduces the file size, makes it easier for folks to participate, and make it easy to automate generating all the aspect ratios we need, and makes it way easy to incorporate into the other corresponding artwork.
But, could we have a selection of openly-licensed ready-mades we source from elsewhere that complement it thematically? By default or not... ?
And our fallback plan, if the default creation ends up being another painful ball of stress, is to just pick our favorite of the accompanying ready-mades... that does seem quite sound doesn't it?
I don't know, what do you think?
(And I'm very sorry for being so stress-y over this... it's quite a sore topic for me and I should have thought more before sending my last reply.)
~m
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 18:00 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Maybe I am being a bit unreasonable. I have been thinking about it -
Maybe we can aim to do an abstract, vector-based (please vector-based, the reasons you give for avoiding 100MB+ XCFs is quite sound, Martin) default wallpaper that is an original creation... having it be vector reduces the file size, makes it easier for folks to participate, and make it easy to automate generating all the aspect ratios we need, and makes it way easy to incorporate into the other corresponding artwork.
But, could we have a selection of openly-licensed ready-mades we source from elsewhere that complement it thematically? By default or not... ?
And our fallback plan, if the default creation ends up being another painful ball of stress, is to just pick our favorite of the accompanying ready-mades... that does seem quite sound doesn't it?
I don't know, what do you think?
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea to me.
(And I'm very sorry for being so stress-y over this... it's quite a sore topic for me and I should have thought more before sending my last reply.)
I completely understand your sentiments about this. One of the things I remember from the past releases are your all-nighters that saved us from disasters, especially considering you are doing it in your spare time...
~m
Martin
On 06/18/2009 05:39 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 18:00 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Maybe I am being a bit unreasonable. I have been thinking about it -
Maybe we can aim to do an abstract, vector-based (please vector-based, the reasons you give for avoiding 100MB+ XCFs is quite sound, Martin) default wallpaper that is an original creation... having it be vector reduces the file size, makes it easier for folks to participate, and make it easy to automate generating all the aspect ratios we need, and makes it way easy to incorporate into the other corresponding artwork.
But, could we have a selection of openly-licensed ready-mades we source from elsewhere that complement it thematically? By default or not... ?
And our fallback plan, if the default creation ends up being another painful ball of stress, is to just pick our favorite of the accompanying ready-mades... that does seem quite sound doesn't it?
I don't know, what do you think?
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea to me.
+1 as well
(And I'm very sorry for being so stress-y over this... it's quite a sore topic for me and I should have thought more before sending my last reply.)
I completely understand your sentiments about this. One of the things I remember from the past releases are your all-nighters that saved us from disasters, especially considering you are doing it in your spare time...
~m
Martin
This is just me speaking, but for some reason, I really think I prefer the multiple submission method where we come up with our own ideas and push it through. However, I think where it failed is when people who made submissions seemed to back off on the development late in the game and then people like Mo had to pick up all the slack because it was still underdeveloped. We need people dedicated to their own themes, if we take this approach, until the end and are carrying their own flag until minute zero. However, I am open to finding a new method that hopefully works better and doesn't have s scrambling at the end.
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 17:28 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 22:56 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 09:55 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
We still need a default. We could pick one of the ones we select to be the default one, but have others along the same theme available as options. Adding another dialog I think isn't a good idea.
Think of Live CDs. We don't have the space to ship more wallpapers in our default install...
Don't we ship a small selection GNOME-provided wallpapers in the LiveCD as well? Couldn't we swap those out?
That's a question rather for the Desktop team... Also we should think about KDE as well. I recall they usually have even more space problems than the Desktop spin... Not sure about the other spins.
Honestly, I am not a big fan of this approach, is like us dropping the ball and acknowledging we are not able to create ourselves something good enough.
Me neither.
Why do we have to create the wallpaper ourselves?
Why should we take the wallpaper from outside? I think that since we took over from Diana the release artwork job, we've built quite a good reputation of always coming up with awesome original works. I am not necessarily against using works of people outside the team, but I feel it would be like admitting we aren't able to create it ourselves. I still believe that not to be the case.
I *am* that desperate. The past 3 releases have been miserable for me personally, and I did literally have to drop everything going on in my life and spend late nights on the wallpaper.
Yeah, I know... It's been really hard for you and I am most grateful that you did what we failed to do. But we should rather think why. In F9 it was because we tried to do two things at once (the Round based approach and later tried to mingle it with release name) and failed in that - and had to do the things anew late in the process. In F10 we failed because Samuele didn't correctly understood how to properly reuse works of others and we again had to replace most of the artwork at last minute :-/ In F11 we tried a new concept and again tried to do too much things at once. Plus, Samuele came up with new idea 5 minutes past twelve. We *really* need to avoid that.
My point is -- learn from the mistakes of past and but be also aware in what we were good at. In all cases where we failed, we failed because we had to redo the artwork anew late at the process. We should really avoid this.
Fedora 9 was the worst. With Samuele's help in F10 and F11 it's been a bit easier but not much. If there is someone passionate and motivated enough to take the responsibility for the theme from me and push for original created work then please do - I do not want to do it!
Yeah, we totally need people to actually do more than just submit ideas...
We had *one plan* we followed for *several releases*. There were problems with it so we tried something new: We can't discover the right approach if we don't try different ones, but it has not been a different approach every single release. It was the same approach every release, and a different one for F11.
I think that plan worked pretty good until we tried to mingle it together with release name (in F9)... In F10 we reverted back to it, but failed, I wonder what exactly went wrong...
How could the F11 process have been clearer? It was documented on the wiki: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F11 What are the problems with this? How can we do better next time? I do not think having two processes is going to simplify at all, so I am not sure how well that proposal will help.
The problem was that it was completely different and people weren't fully prepared for that. Also the communication within the team seemed to be a little bit off (or maybe it was just me not reading the mails properly?). I'm not sure. Confusion sure comes to mind, but I fail to pinpoint the exact reason for that :/ If I recall correctly I frequently didn't know how far we are -- i.e. what is already created and what still isn't, which artwork is supposed to be official and which isn't...
Perhaps we could use a simple bug track to track our tasks? Or would it be an overkill? I can see the advantages of people being able to more closely follow the process and also people claiming tasks knowing that others didn't claiming those yet. Plus people would have better idea of how far we are. But it would pose additional work on us...
As for having two processes -- yeah, it's probably a bad idea, what I had in mind something like having some kind of fallback if the process itself fails... Well, if don't base our artwork on release name, we could keep it for more than one release, if necessary. But it would feel awkward if it would be based on the release name... Or perhaps have a completely new artwork with every odd release and have an improved/slightly changed version of the previous one with every even release? Are we really have problems with time, or is it just because we tend to do the things last minute? Or is it lack of people?
It seems there are complaints about the process, then complaints about changing the process in trying to improve it. How can we improve the process that people complain about so much if we can't change it?
I think, we often have problems when we change the process completely. It seems to take some time for people to adjust... Perhaps analyzing what parts of the current process are worst and how to improve them would be a better approach than trying a completely new process again?
Does anyone want to take up the task of writing and maintaining the theme process documentation, and making sure it is well-publicized?
We need to decide on the process first, than documenting it... I can put together a draft of what outlined before tomorrow if people think about it as a good idea. We can even put different drafts together (although it seems I and Nicu are not fans of your idea, it does not mean it might not turn up to be the best after all) and then discuss what might be best. FUDCon is next week and the release name will be supposedly reported there, so we still have some time to decide on the process for F12.
The main problem for me is that every time the topic of release art comes up, I don't think 'fun' and 'cool', I think 'pain' and get a feeling of dread and despair :( And that's not cool. And after going through all that hard work and time, still we get negative comments (and I understand we can't satisfy everyone, but that on top of having to work so hard and not have much fun, makes it even less enjoyable.) I feel that this problem should be addressed so we can make theming fun again, but I'm not sure how. This was the idea I came up with but I'm very open to other proposed solutions.
Is this fair or am I being overly dramatic?
What I feel when I think about fedora themes is high entry level and confusion about the process.
Do you have a better idea? Can you commit to helping make it better?
See above. But to summarize and perhaps add something more: * try to change the process slowly rather than radically, based on experience from previous release(s) * after each release is done, hold a session (on irc with summary posted on the list and wiki, or on the list only?) to discuss what went right and what went wrong and what can we do about it * better track what needs to be done and who's working on what * create rather abstract themes than photo manip. * have a direct link to the current release artwork process from our front page * be stricter about deadlines * don't expect Mo will do the dirty work. Our artwork must be a community effort, not our leader's all nighters (yeah, I am also to blame here, but at least I've tried to help with the wallpapers a little)
Martin
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 00:31 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:
My point is -- learn from the mistakes of past and but be also aware in what we were good at. In all cases where we failed, we failed because we had to redo the artwork anew late at the process. We should really avoid this.
This is a good point. Although I wonder how much you can really control a creative process. I think the thing that scared me the most about the late nights - I could spend hours and hours and hours and have to throw it away. There wasn't any guarantee after x hours there would even be anything usable.
Yeah, we totally need people to actually do more than just submit ideas...
How do we encourage the follow through we need? :-/
I think that plan worked pretty good until we tried to mingle it together with release name (in F9)... In F10 we reverted back to it, but failed, I wonder what exactly went wrong...
Ah okay you are right! I forgot about that.
Perhaps we could use a simple bug track to track our tasks? Or would it be an overkill? I can see the advantages of people being able to more closely follow the process and also people claiming tasks knowing that others didn't claiming those yet. Plus people would have better idea of how far we are. But it would pose additional work on us...
I think this is a good idea. Maybe for each piece of artwork that we need, that's in the schedule with a deadline, we open a trac bug in our new trac instance Paul had set up for us? That might work well.
As for having two processes -- yeah, it's probably a bad idea, what I had in mind something like having some kind of fallback if the process itself fails... Well, if don't base our artwork on release name, we could keep it for more than one release, if necessary. But it would feel awkward if it would be based on the release name... Or perhaps have a completely new artwork with every odd release and have an improved/slightly changed version of the previous one with every even release? Are we really have problems with time, or is it just because we tend to do the things last minute? Or is it lack of people?
I think it's a combo of:
- the creative process is hard to control, and it's hard to know how long something is going to take or what odd directions it might take
- lack of people
- outside of the team folks tend to be very critical of the artwork no matter what and it's demotivating.
And I don't think there is so much we can do about the first and last.
It seems there are complaints about the process, then complaints about changing the process in trying to improve it. How can we improve the process that people complain about so much if we can't change it?
I think, we often have problems when we change the process completely. It seems to take some time for people to adjust... Perhaps analyzing what parts of the current process are worst and how to improve them would be a better approach than trying a completely new process again?
Does anyone want to take up the task of writing and maintaining the theme process documentation, and making sure it is well-publicized?
We need to decide on the process first, than documenting it... I can put together a draft of what outlined before tomorrow if people think about it as a good idea. We can even put different drafts together (although it seems I and Nicu are not fans of your idea, it does not mean it might not turn up to be the best after all) and then discuss what might be best. FUDCon is next week and the release name will be supposedly reported there, so we still have some time to decide on the process for F12.
I think I really like the requirement that the default be:
- original - vector - abstract - theme-related
And that we pick, let's say as originally proposed, 4 works from the creative commons / openly-licensed community that are related to the theme as well and have the following breakdown:
- 2 general appeal / any age group - 1 appeal to children - 1 appeal to women
The main problem for me is that every time the topic of release art comes up, I don't think 'fun' and 'cool', I think 'pain' and get a feeling of dread and despair :( And that's not cool. And after going through all that hard work and time, still we get negative comments (and I understand we can't satisfy everyone, but that on top of having to work so hard and not have much fun, makes it even less enjoyable.) I feel that this problem should be addressed so we can make theming fun again, but I'm not sure how. This was the idea I came up with but I'm very open to other proposed solutions.
Is this fair or am I being overly dramatic?
What I feel when I think about fedora themes is high entry level and confusion about the process.
Do you have a better idea? Can you commit to helping make it better?
See above. But to summarize and perhaps add something more: * try to change the process slowly rather than radically, based on experience from previous release(s)
Is the above proposal slow enough? We're keeping the inspired-by-the-release-name theme, but clamping it down a bit more by requiring vector artwork and abstractness.
We could handle the 4 broader-community readymades as a separate project.
* after each release is done, hold a session (on irc with summary posted on the list and wiki, or on the list only?) to discuss what went right and what went wrong and what can we do about it
That sounds good.
* better track what needs to be done and who's working on what
I think maybe the trac ticketing system can be a big help here.
* create rather abstract themes than photo manip.
+999
* have a direct link to the current release artwork process from our front page
Good idea... and we should also make sure that when we figure out the process, we get some publicity around it:
- process announced in Fedora Weekly news & Fedora Forum - process announced on Planet fpo - each phase of the process announced in FWN & on Planet FPO & Fedora Forum - maybe some kind of podcast, www.fpo banner, some kinds of publicity that way to get people involved, similar to how Michael did the fpo banner to solicit picture book submission - Any other venues I'm not thinking of?
* be stricter about deadlines
+1
* don't expect Mo will do the dirty work. Our artwork must be a community effort, not our leader's all nighters (yeah, I am also to blame here, but at least I've tried to help with the wallpapers a little)
Yes please :) :) :)
And thank you for your patience with me :)
~m
Perhaps we could use a simple bug track to track our tasks? Or would it be an overkill? I can see the advantages of people being able to more closely follow the process and also people claiming tasks knowing that others didn't claiming those yet. Plus people would have better idea of how far we are. But it would pose additional work on us...
I think this is a good idea. Maybe for each piece of artwork that we need, that's in the schedule with a deadline, we open a trac bug in our new trac instance Paul had set up for us? That might work well.
I have worked before with a bug tracker on previous projects. with creative people I've had positive and negative results. So I think it depends on the people we're working with how this will go. I personally over-use bug trackers a bit as I plan whole projects in them even if I'm the only one working on it (it makes nice documentation afterwards). But in general a big: +1
What we do need to monitor is how people are responding to the bug tracker. I know that some bug trackers can be couple to mailing lists. That would be an idea but it would overflow email dramatically (in my last project i had about 100 emails a day from the issue tracker). But that would be the choice of the user ofcourse.
~yope
On 06/19/2009 05:12 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
I think I really like the requirement that the default be:
- original
- vector
- abstract
- theme-related
+1 from me, I am for such a default.
And that we pick, let's say as originally proposed, 4 works from the creative commons / openly-licensed community that are related to the theme as well and have the following breakdown:
- 2 general appeal / any age group
- 1 appeal to children
- 1 appeal to women
In my observation, people like to do wallpapers and arre quite attached to them. If we try to get people in our team to collaborate on one single design, in the and everyone will try his own. Look also at the DesignService queue: we point newcomers there, and it seems like everybody and his dog tries a version of the Security Spin wallpaper. Because it is a wallpaper and they like doing that.
So I think we should channel this energy in our benefit: leave people design wallpapers and use those if they are good enough.
It can work like this: member of the team propose designs for this small thematic collection, be it their original work, adaptation or taken from an external Free source. Set a deadline and from this pool of proposals we select the four "personas" above.
I can see having something like this: - one abstract, vector, theme-related as default; - 4 additional specialised, also available by default; - a larger "extras" package (but not very large) yummable from the repository and *maybe* also on the install DVD; - a huge gallery with *everything* available online, where people can browse with Firefox and use it's "set image as desktop background" option.
Good idea... and we should also make sure that when we figure out the process, we get some publicity around it:
- process announced in Fedora Weekly news& Fedora Forum
- process announced on Planet fpo
- each phase of the process announced in FWN& on Planet FPO& Fedora
Forum
- maybe some kind of podcast, www.fpo banner, some kinds of publicity
that way to get people involved, similar to how Michael did the fpo banner to solicit picture book submission
I guess I am in charge about the FWN part (and all of us about the Planet) part. I try to cover each week the current status, but maybe it is not visible enough. When we consider the plan ready and final, I propose we (I) talk with the editors and run a special feature.
For the podcast, we just have to get someone interviewing Mo :D
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 09:42 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
- a huge gallery with *everything* available online, where people can
browse with Firefox and use it's "set image as desktop background" option.
I wonder if we could integrate it into the desktop even more. Yeah, we can for example add wallpaper extras page to our default bookmarks but I'd like this to not be tied to firefox. It's not default on KDE spin, on XFCE Spin it seems Midori will be the default (not sure what's the default now), I am not sure about LXDE, etc. Yeah, we can start with firefox because it already has this somehow implemented (how does it work in various environments? I haven't actually ever tried it, so I don't know how/if it works e.g. in KDE, XFCE or LXDE), but IMHO we should aim for web-browser-less approach in the long run -- probably some backend for handling the communication with servers and various front-ends for different desktops environments to manage the end-user interaction.
Martin
On 06/19/2009 12:46 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 09:42 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
- a huge gallery with *everything* available online, where people can
browse with Firefox and use it's "set image as desktop background" option.
I wonder if we could integrate it into the desktop even more. Yeah, we can for example add wallpaper extras page to our default bookmarks but
Adding the gallery inside the wiki is not friendly for users, especially if we plan to have a lot more images, we would need something with browsing and search capabilities, like a proper gallery software.
I'd like this to not be tied to firefox. It's not default on KDE spin, on XFCE Spin it seems Midori will be the default (not sure what's the default now), I am not sure about LXDE, etc. Yeah, we can start with firefox because it already has this somehow implemented (how does it work in various environments? I haven't actually ever tried it, so I
It is not tied to Firefox, all popular browser have something like this, Epiphany has it, even Internet Explorer on Windows has it...
don't know how/if it works e.g. in KDE, XFCE or LXDE), but IMHO we should aim for web-browser-less approach in the long run -- probably some backend for handling the communication with servers and various front-ends for different desktops environments to manage the end-user interaction.
I would like the large galley to be accessible with just a browser, so even people on Windows can benefit from it (we can have on top of that some specialized tools, with RSS and stuff).
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 13:08 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
On 06/19/2009 12:46 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 09:42 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
- a huge gallery with *everything* available online, where people can
browse with Firefox and use it's "set image as desktop background" option.
I wonder if we could integrate it into the desktop even more. Yeah, we can for example add wallpaper extras page to our default bookmarks but
Adding the gallery inside the wiki is not friendly for users, especially if we plan to have a lot more images, we would need something with browsing and search capabilities, like a proper gallery software.
I was speaking in general. The wiki is really not very friendly for this...
I'd like this to not be tied to firefox. It's not default on KDE spin, on XFCE Spin it seems Midori will be the default (not sure what's the default now), I am not sure about LXDE, etc. Yeah, we can start with firefox because it already has this somehow implemented (how does it work in various environments? I haven't actually ever tried it, so I
It is not tied to Firefox, all popular browser have something like this, Epiphany has it, even Internet Explorer on Windows has it...
Midori does not have it, or at least I don't see such option anywhere ;-)
I would like the large galley to be accessible with just a browser, so even people on Windows can benefit from it (we can have on top of that some specialized tools, with RSS and stuff).
I'd like to have it both accessible from browser as well as from elsewhere. While browser makes it easy to set it for your background, you'd need another application to set it for gdm as well,... Think also about uploading - the app could handle both. Just like there are both people using webmail and people using client for their e-mail, there definitely will be people preferring to upload their images via web browser, as well as people wanting some desktop client to do that and the same goes for the other way round (downloading and setting it as background).
While web-browser can only download and set it as your background, the client can be much more powerful in that it can in principle offer to make the background available for all users, set it as default, display images from more locations at once (think e.g. art.gnome.org), do some dynamic sorting based on the image tags (usually faster/more convenient than dynamic web pages), cache the thumbnails (so that you need to download only new/changed thumbnails), ...
Martin
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 13:08 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
On 06/19/2009 12:46 PM, Martin Sourada wrote:
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 09:42 +0300, Nicu Buculei wrote:
- a huge gallery with *everything* available online, where people can
browse with Firefox and use it's "set image as desktop background" option.
I wonder if we could integrate it into the desktop even more. Yeah, we can for example add wallpaper extras page to our default bookmarks but
Adding the gallery inside the wiki is not friendly for users, especially if we plan to have a lot more images, we would need something with browsing and search capabilities, like a proper gallery software.
Should we request a gallery2 install of the infrastructure team?
i've been playing around with one in my dreamhost acconut - you can mount a gallery2 album webdav and drag & drop files which seems highly awesome. There's a lot of convenient upload methods supported.
~m
On 06/19/2009 05:57 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Should we request a gallery2 install of the infrastructure team?
i've been playing around with one in my dreamhost acconut - you can mount a gallery2 album webdav and drag& drop files which seems highly awesome. There's a lot of convenient upload methods supported.
From a functionality point of view, Gallery2 is the most advanced FOSS solution so probably its our first option.
I think is a good idea to ask the infrastructure team to set a *test* instance so we can play with it a couple of weeks and decide it it fill our needs (I have a test instance of Gallery2 too in my dreamhost account, but we better try a shared instance and work all of us with it to stress its capabilities).
On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 22:12 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 00:31 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:
My point is -- learn from the mistakes of past and but be also aware in what we were good at. In all cases where we failed, we failed because we had to redo the artwork anew late at the process. We should really avoid this.
This is a good point. Although I wonder how much you can really control a creative process. I think the thing that scared me the most about the late nights - I could spend hours and hours and hours and have to throw it away. There wasn't any guarantee after x hours there would even be anything usable.
Yeah, I also wonder if we are really able to control it. Perhaps the new members joining the design team might help in achieving that goal. More available people is always a good thing.
Yeah, we totally need people to actually do more than just submit ideas...
How do we encourage the follow through we need? :-/
That's a hard one... I really don't know how to encourage people to help through the whole process... Publicising might help a bit, also working on an abstract theme in inkscape also means more people should be able to help.
I think this is a good idea. Maybe for each piece of artwork that we need, that's in the schedule with a deadline, we open a trac bug in our new trac instance Paul had set up for us? That might work well.
+1.
I think it's a combo of:
- the creative process is hard to control, and it's hard to know how
long something is going to take or what odd directions it might take
lack of people
outside of the team folks tend to be very critical of the artwork no
matter what and it's demotivating.
And I don't think there is so much we can do about the first and last.
Agreed :-/
I think I really like the requirement that the default be:
- original
- vector
- abstract
- theme-related
+1.
And that we pick, let's say as originally proposed, 4 works from the creative commons / openly-licensed community that are related to the theme as well and have the following breakdown:
- 2 general appeal / any age group
- 1 appeal to children
- 1 appeal to women
+1
Is the above proposal slow enough? We're keeping the inspired-by-the-release-name theme, but clamping it down a bit more by requiring vector artwork and abstractness.
I think so.
We could handle the 4 broader-community readymades as a separate project.
Sounds like good approach to me.
* have a direct link to the current release artwork process from our front pageGood idea... and we should also make sure that when we figure out the process, we get some publicity around it:
- process announced in Fedora Weekly news & Fedora Forum
+1
- process announced on Planet fpo
+1
- each phase of the process announced in FWN & on Planet FPO & Fedora
Forum
+1
- maybe some kind of podcast, www.fpo banner, some kinds of publicity
that way to get people involved, similar to how Michael did the fpo banner to solicit picture book submission
That's and interesting idea. There's always place for banners on the fpo front page and in our blogs ;-). Some sort of "Get Involved" directing to our front page would perhaps help to get more people. Though we'd need to combine it with a good design of our front page. I haven't checked it lately, but the art team front page used to be pretty hard to navigate...
Maybe we should divide the page into Join Us! (with some teasers to motivate people to join and link to the steps on how to join?) section and Our Projects (release artwork, webpages design, wallpaper extras, echo project, nodoka, design queue, ...) section? Plus perhaps a teaser somewhere towards the begining of the page for the project that we focus currently the most on (usually the release artwork). We totally need to promote the design team better... Maybe the Marketing Team might help us with it?
~m
Martin
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:12:24PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
I think it's a combo of:
- the creative process is hard to control, and it's hard to know how
long something is going to take or what odd directions it might take
lack of people
outside of the team folks tend to be very critical of the artwork no
matter what and it's demotivating.
And I don't think there is so much we can do about the first and last.
Sorry to pull this out of context, but I wanted to wax philosophical for a moment. (I pontificate. It's what I do.)
Here's what I tell myself from time to time: "I try my best to excel at what I'm doing. I have no power over other people's happiness. I can only control my own, and that only somewhat."
A little hippy-dippy I guess, but it's important to tell myself that once in a while when I encounter a bunch of negativity that brings me down.
Paul
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:12:24PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 00:31 +0200, Martin Sourada wrote:
My point is -- learn from the mistakes of past and but be also aware in what we were good at. In all cases where we failed, we failed because we had to redo the artwork anew late at the process. We should really avoid this.
This is a good point. Although I wonder how much you can really control a creative process. I think the thing that scared me the most about the late nights - I could spend hours and hours and hours and have to throw it away. There wasn't any guarantee after x hours there would even be anything usable.
Yeah, we totally need people to actually do more than just submit ideas...
How do we encourage the follow through we need? :-/
There is a release schedule that we've tried to use previously as a way of making sure everyone knows what tasks are at hand, and when they reasonably need to be done so no one has to pull all-nighters or get stressed about our design components. What if we had a Design Team meeting with John Poelstra to set up these dates, and then give him permission to remind the team of upcoming dates?
Alternatively, or in addition, we could set tickets in the Design Team's Trac instance that would help the team look at an easy dashboard for what remains to be done for F12 design. I'm of two minds about the Trac instance, because I don't want the team to feel forced to use it, because it's Yet Another Tool (possibly). At the same time, it's a *very useful* tool that many other groups are using for tracking their work queues.
And hey, on a positive note, let's keep in mind that a couple things did go very well in F11's cycle -- for instance, as we wanted, there was a desktop background ready for the Beta. That was an improvement over previous releases and you guys should take some credit for it.
Perhaps we could use a simple bug track to track our tasks? Or would it be an overkill? I can see the advantages of people being able to more closely follow the process and also people claiming tasks knowing that others didn't claiming those yet. Plus people would have better idea of how far we are. But it would pose additional work on us...
I think this is a good idea. Maybe for each piece of artwork that we need, that's in the schedule with a deadline, we open a trac bug in our new trac instance Paul had set up for us? That might work well.
What if there was a dedicated Design Team meeting once every week or two to check status against the artwork schedule? The Trac instance gets more useful if the team agrees to review the queue on a regular basis to see that things are moving forward. I know it seems like less fun than the creative process, but I'm really keen on making sure that we don't avalanche toward the end of the cycle with all the snowballs falling on one or two people. Would the team be willing to do this?
[...snip...]
See above. But to summarize and perhaps add something more: * try to change the process slowly rather than radically, based on experience from previous release(s)
Is the above proposal slow enough? We're keeping the inspired-by-the-release-name theme, but clamping it down a bit more by requiring vector artwork and abstractness.
We could handle the 4 broader-community readymades as a separate project.
Does this mean that there would be a fallback to some default theme or background if we miss the particular deadlines? In other words, is the plan to build a safety net that is something other than the dreaded all-nighter(s)?
[...snip...]
* better track what needs to be done and who's working on whatI think maybe the trac ticketing system can be a big help here.
I would hope so too -- if the things that are filed there are brought back up on a regular basis, so that it's not just adding the work of filing tickets without any other benefit. That's probably the basis for my mixed feelings about Trac -- I was hoping it would help the team for everyone to agree that both filing tickets, and reviewing the queue regularly, were worth doing.
[...snip...]
* be stricter about deadlines+1
I think this ticket review process would really help -- there are no surprises for anyone. And if something falls on the floor for lack of attention, then it's fair to simply let it do so. And having a fallback means that there's no catastrophe, and no one's held hostage to unreasonable expectations.
* don't expect Mo will do the dirty work. Our artwork must be a community effort, not our leader's all nighters (yeah, I am also to blame here, but at least I've tried to help with the wallpapers a little)Yes please :) :) :)
And thank you for your patience with me :)
It's good that the team is having this conversation. If everyone can agree on a set of solutions, I know there are people around to help empower the team to put them to work, including John and me. We want you guys to have the tools you need to succeed, and you guys provide the creativity.
On 06/20/2009 01:27 AM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:12:24PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
We could handle the 4 broader-community readymades as a separate project.
Does this mean that there would be a fallback to some default theme or background if we miss the particular deadlines? In other words, is the plan to build a safety net that is something other than the dreaded all-nighter(s)?
Even it this was not the intention behind it (the intention is to cover the needs/tastes of a larger user base), yes, it can work like this: if at the last moment we find the "default" wallpaper is not good enough as a default, we can switch it with one of the 4.
However, those 4 will probably not fill the bill for the default (abstract, vector, themed), since we will encourage people to go crazy for the alternatives.
* be stricter about deadlines+1
I think this ticket review process would really help -- there are no surprises for anyone. And if something falls on the floor for lack of attention, then it's fair to simply let it do so. And having a fallback means that there's no catastrophe, and no one's held hostage to unreasonable expectations.
Hope we will get to talk more about it at FUDCon, but here is my latest idea: run the new wallpaper system as an official feature for F12 (the feature is not the wallpaper, but the process), this will help us get better exposure (and maybe more contributors) and also make us more strict with the deadlines.
Nicu Buculei said the following on 06/22/2009 12:17 AM Pacific Time:
On 06/20/2009 01:27 AM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:12:24PM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
We could handle the 4 broader-community readymades as a separate project.
Does this mean that there would be a fallback to some default theme or background if we miss the particular deadlines? In other words, is the plan to build a safety net that is something other than the dreaded all-nighter(s)?
Even it this was not the intention behind it (the intention is to cover the needs/tastes of a larger user base), yes, it can work like this: if at the last moment we find the "default" wallpaper is not good enough as a default, we can switch it with one of the 4.
However, those 4 will probably not fill the bill for the default (abstract, vector, themed), since we will encourage people to go crazy for the alternatives.
* be stricter about deadlines+1
I think this ticket review process would really help -- there are no surprises for anyone. And if something falls on the floor for lack of attention, then it's fair to simply let it do so. And having a fallback means that there's no catastrophe, and no one's held hostage to unreasonable expectations.
Hope we will get to talk more about it at FUDCon, but here is my latest idea: run the new wallpaper system as an official feature for F12 (the feature is not the wallpaper, but the process), this will help us get better exposure (and maybe more contributors) and also make us more strict with the deadlines.
This would mean that all the artwork would need to be done by Feature Freeze on 2009-07-28.
Also note that the what was previously targeted for "being completed by the Beta release" is now the "alpha release" because of https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Milestone_Adjustment_Proposal
John
On 06/23/2009 10:58 PM, � Duffy wrote:
On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 16:34 -0700, John Poelstra wrote:
This would mean that all the artwork would need to be done by Feature Freeze on 2009-07-28.
This doesn't seem realistic to me?
~m
design-team mailing list design-team@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
+1
That'd give us a little over a month for the whole process
On Tuesday 16 June 2009 20:04:36 Martin Sourada wrote:
On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 19:35 +0200, Thomas Kole wrote:
I really want to create a wallpaper for f12, but what is the theme? :)
If possible, it will be based on the release name which is currently being voted on. Be a little more patient ;-)
Mo, what's the theming process for F12?
My idea based on our previous approaches:
- sketching the base concepts (ideas accompanied by simple pictures)
- get initial approach wallpapers into Alpha (concept should be decided
upon, wallpaper should look good, but needs not to be polished). This is where we need to get feedback (most of the design team people blogging about it?) and reflect on it. If more concepts are still being discussed over, have them all in the release (automatically change the different concepts so that we users/testers wouldn't need to change them manually?) 3. have most of the artwork covered by Beta (based on the alpha feedback we'll build a theme upon a single selected concept; after this milestone we must not change the concept so that we'll have enough time to fill the holes and do final polishes) 4. polish for RCs and Final so that the release artwork will be awesome and breath taking ;-)
Thomas
+1
That's exactly what we discussed inside KDE SIG! Please check my mail about sharing brand with upstream to possibly combine it with your proposal.
Thanks
Jaroslav
Martin
On 06/16/2009 07:55 PM, John Poelstra wrote:
== Mairin Duffy - Design == (-) Need to see feedback to the Design list as opposed to sprung on blogs (w) Six more designers on the team! (w) pink pony!!!!11!!
I would not paint the F11 experience is such a pink light... we tried to go with a process, going with it until it was too late (Beta), then it was torpedoed and went on a different route completely out of the proposed process.
It seems either way we tried, we end in flame wars so massive, they *almost* drive key contributors into giving up. Something is broken here.
design-team@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Jaroslav Reznik -
John Poelstra -
Joost Elfering -
Martin Sourada -
Michael Beckwith -
Máirín Duffy -
Nicu Buculei -
Paul W. Frields -
Thomas Kole