GNOME News

Wie man eine Idee endgültig begräbt

30.07.2010 19:30 In meinem derzeitigen 12-Wochen-Projekt in der d-school kamen wir im brainstorming sehr schnell auf eine wunderschön einfache Lösung für unser Problem, die mangelnde Motivation der Mitarbeiter unseres Projektpartners. Bereits der erste Prototyp, ein Satz Buzzer, mit dem die Kunden ihre Zufriedenheit anzeigen sollten, wurde von uns liebevoll aus Styropor, Stoff und Ipad gebastelt. Unser erster Test mit einem unserer Teammitglieder brachte jedoch nicht den gewünschten Erfolg. Im Gegenteil, Martin war zunehmend verärgert, dass seine Anstrengungen sich nicht in höherer Zufriedenheit unserer Testkunden zeigte. Obwohl wir ihn in unserer Präsentation eine Woche später bereits als verworfene Idee anführten, tauchte er bei der nächsten Ideen-Auswahlrunde wieder auf. Der Prototyp gefiel uns so sehr, dass wir uns einfach nicht von ihm trennen wollten. Ein kurzes Gespräch mit Madeleine, einer D-School Studentin mit Hauptfach Psychologie, brachte weitere grundlegende Fehler der Idee zum Vorschein. Kurz gesagt, irgendwie mussten wir uns von der Idee verabschieden, um uns auf andere und Erfolg versprechendere Ideen zu konzentrieren, die uns zuerst weniger sexy erschienen. Um den Abschied diesmal endgültig vollziehen zu können, entschlossen wir uns, die Idee im Garten der D-School offiziell zu begraben. Die Bilder zeigen deutlich die Trauer aller Teammitglieder. Die Teammitglieder bei der "Beerdigung" Das "Ideengrab" Was kann man daraus lernen? Ich glaube es ist wichtig, Ideen, die man liebt, obwohl sie nicht funktionieren, in irgendeiner Form von Ritual zu begraben, um einen definitiven Schlussstrich zu ziehen und sich nicht weiter von anderen, besseren Lösungen abzulenken. Das muss nicht unbedingt ein Begräbnis im D-School Stil sein. Ein großer Ideen-Papierkorb, oder eine spezielle Ecke für verworfene Ideen kann ausreichen, wenn das Begraben mit Zustimmung aller in irgendeiner Form zelebriert wird, und ein “Abschied” von dieser eigentlich so geliebten Idee stattfindet.

The first two GUADEC Open Design Thinking Workshops

30.07.2010 19:30  The first two Workshops in Design Thinking are over, and in summary they were a huge success. Workhop participants Altogether, in two days 30 people of the Gnome community were taught how to apply Design Thinking and came up with six surprising solutions. The teams were comprised of developers as well as usability people and users. The initial challenge we prepared for the workshop was: How might we simplify the handling of digital information? This question implies how to store, archive and find digital information in a more comfortable way. The participants went through the entire Design Thinking Process in two and a half hours. The results range from an instant tagging system for cameras, new categories in the interface, a search engine for personal data, to an additional drawing device with shape recognition. In the second workshop the participants came up with a user interface which forces users to actually tag their photos. Those ideas were prototyped in rough and rapid manner. After proudly-presenting their prototypes, a last feedback session rounded off an exhausting but fun workshop at GUADEC. The E-Voyeur - Finding pictures through a drawing device with shape recognition Prototype of LifeTag - a camera with an instant tagging system before files are uploaded on the computer In response to the good feedback and a lot of people who couldn’t make it to the first two workshops, we decided to actually give a . Make sure you sign up at participants list right in the main hall, or drop a mail to cbuss src gnome org. Follow the Design Workshop on Twitter to get updates from the team: We are talking about the Workshop again in the Lightning Talk session on Friday. Also hear the voices of and , two of the participants who were blogging about us.

D12 – Abschlusspräsentationen der 12-Wochen Projekte der HPI D-School

30.07.2010 19:30 Am Freitag dem 16. Juli 2010 findet an der HPI School of Design Thinking die Abschlusspräsentation unserer 12-Wochen Projekte statt. Ab 14.00 Uhr ist jeder eingeladen, sich die Ergebnisse der acht Projekte im HPI Hörsaal 1 auf dem Campus Griebnitzsee in Potsdam anzusehen. Im Anschluss gibt es die Möglichkeit sich beim Get-Together im Foyer mit den Studenten zu unterhalten. Die Teams präsentieren nach 12 Wochen nun ihre Lösungen zu folgenden Fragestellungen: Life Sign Monitoring „Wie können wir Trägern von medizinischen Implantaten mit Hilfe von relevanten Echtzeit Informationen über ihre Vitalfunktionen den Alltag erleichtern und ihren Lebensstandard erhöhen?” Connected Life Shop „Wie könnte ein Telekom-Shop aussehen, der vernetztes Leben erlebbar macht?” Vision Summit „Wie können wir die Stadt Berlin besser in das Konferenzerlebnis „Social Innovation“ bei den Teilnehmern des Vision Summit integrieren?” Wholesale Shopping „Wie könnte der Großhandel für Business- Kunden einen resonanzfähigen und emotionalen Nutzen anbieten, der einen Mehrwert darstellt?” Spaza Shop Logistics „Wie kann die letzte Meile bei der Spaza-Shop-Zulieferung zur unternehmerischen Erfahrung für Spaza-Shop-Besitzer werden?” Berlin Broadcast Fee „Wie können wir die junge Berliner Bevölkerung motivieren, Rundfunkgebühren zu zahlen?” E-Mobility „Wie können wir es Bewohnern städtischer und ländlicher Regionen ermöglichen, einsitzige Elektroautos in ihre Mobilitätsketten einzubinden?” Airport Security „Wie können wir bei Verkehrsflughäfen in Zukunft die Sicherheitsstandards gewährleisten und gleichzeitig die Abfertigung der Fluggäste effizienter und komfortabler machen?” Wie immer ist mit interessantem und spannenden Präsentationsstil zu rechnen. Besucher sollten sich zuvor unter anmelden.

Mehr Harmonie im Team – mit dem Check-In

30.07.2010 19:30 Teamarbeit macht Spaß, kann aber auch beschwerlich und anstrengend sein. Wenn man intensiv zusammenarbeitet gehören Reibung und Spannungen einfach dazu. Oft unterscheiden sich Ansichten, Ziele und Vorgehensweisen der Teammitglieder. Oft führen fehlendes Verständnis und Engagement der anderen zu Demotivation und Enttäuschung. Wieso bringt Sie sich heute nicht ein? Wieso reagiert Er heute so gereizt? Manchmal könnte man meinen, es läge an der allgemeinen Stimmung im Team oder vielleicht sogar dem Projekt an sich. Fälschlicherweise, denn es könnten genausgut die persönlichen Umstände des einzelnen Teammitgliedes sein. Um diesen Phänomen vorzubeugen, beginnen wir bei inventedhere jedes Meeting mit einem Ritual, dem sogenannten Check-In: Zu Beginn des Meetings beschreibt jedes Mitglied kurz seinen eigenen Gemütszustand. Bin ich entspannt? Habe ich genug geschlafen oder bin ich anderweitig im Stress? Vier Sätze genügen, um den anderen mitzuteilen, wie meine momentane Verfassung ist. Verhalte ich mich dann  unangebracht, kann der Rest des Teams das entsprechend einordnen ohne es auf sich selbst zu beziehen.  So steigert der Check-in die Empathie im Team und sorgt für mehr Harmonie und gegenseitiges Verständnis bei der Arbeit. Eine Check-Out Runde am Ende des Meetings hilft um über das eigene Verhalten im Team zu reflektieren.

Design Thinking Workshop at GUADEC in The Hague

30.07.2010 19:30  We are going to give a Design Thinking Workshop at GUADEC this year. We are a group of fellow students from the . Outside of the classes at D-School we are doing workshops and offer consulting services based on Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a user-centric method that leverages the creative potential of interdisciplinary teams. It is very agile and fun to apply, as play is a crucial element of the process. It has proven to be very successful in designing highly user-centric products, experiences and services at places like the D-School in Potsdam, the d.school at Standford University and especially at IDEO, an internationally successful design consultancy. You might have seen pictures of rooms stuffed with whiteboards, all of them covered in colorful post-its, low-res prototypes and toys everywhere … where you can immediately imagine the fun teams must have had working in this environment … this is what Design Thinking often looks like. GNOME people and the GNOME project could highly benefit from this method not only in tailoring the platform to users-needs . Our team is very much looking forward to the workshop and will be ready and well-prepared with fun and demanding challenges tailored to the needs of the community. Be prepared to listen and understand real users and their needs. Get ready to brainstorm wild ideas. Finally get your hands on paper, scissors, glue and LEGO, to rapid-prototype your best ideas. We will be working on 2 challenging topics from the GNOME universe. All in all we hope to introduce you and the GNOME project to the methodology of Design Thinking. We will offer the Workshop to the community for free as in beer. Only we would be happy to get a small donation to cover our expenses for the workshop material like the Post-Its and brainfood. If you want to join, please drop us a quick E-Mail so we can reserve one of the 20 places for you. Also tell us if you prefer Monday or Tuesday. Both Workshops start at 9:30 in the morning. Please contact: cbuss AT src\GNOME/org. Or you feel lucky and come straight to where the BoFs are. There will also be a Lighting Talk on Friday where we will talk about the essentials of Design Thinking and present the results of the Workshop. You can also check out or blog,  which is now in German. However, as we were blogging initially in English, check out our older posts on Design Thinking to get a first impression of the method and how the workshop will be like: 1.  2.  3.  Find out more about us at  . Also make sure you follow us on twitter , to get updates on the workshop

Lightning talk on hamster graphics lib @ GUADEC

30.07.2010 16:15  And all about the graphics lib . There is tutorial, reference, and of course code itself – try out the demos, read the code, have fun !

Clutter @ GUADEC 2010

29.07.2010 17:30 like all years, the Clutter team is attending — this time in lovel Den Hague, NL. we have various talks: Clutter: a State of the Union — by Emmanuele Bassi, detailing the progress done in the development of Clutter in the past year; Everything You Ever Wanted to Do With Clutter — by Chris Lord, Damien Lespiau and Neil Roberts, about cool projects that leverage rarely used features of Clutter; Cluttersmith a Visual Clutter Based Design and Development Aid — by Øyvind Kolås, presenting Cluttersmith. we'll also be hanging around a lot in the conference venue, and you can definitely grab us if you want to talk, or complain or just show the love for Clutter. have fun in Den Hague!

GNOME 3.0 in March 2011

28.07.2010 18:45 Hello all, A few release team members talked with various people during the first few days at GUADEC to get a better feeling of where we stand on our road to GNOME 3.0. We held a meeting later and decided that GNOME 3.0 should be postponed to March 2011 to make sure this release will have the high quality we all expect. Our community wants to be proud of what we will release as 3.0, and moreover, we don't want to disappoint our users who are excited about our goals for GNOME 3.0. We will still release a stable version of GNOME in September, and we'll call it 2.32. We encourage maintainers to add a configure flag to easily make their modules use GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3, or to create a gnome-2-32 branch where the 2.32 work will be done. Thanks to the hard work the community has been doing in the last few months, we have achieved a lot for GNOME 3 and we therefore want to also release a GNOME 3 Beta in September. This will clearly send a signal that we want people to start playing with GNOME 3, and this will help build even more momentum before the release. Finally, it's important that everybody keeps focusing on making the GNOME 3 vision a reality: the additional time that we have until March 2010 should be used carefully and we encourage maintainers to target achievable goals during this new cycle. Cheers, Frederic

Issue 94

26.07.2010 18:00 This week… 2276 commits, in 205 projects, by 233 happy hackers . Handling of contacts in Empathy has been switched to use libfolks, this will enable future enhanchements, such as support for metacontacts . Carlos Garcia Campos ported the byzanz applet to use the new D-Bus based panel applet library. Gtk-vnc has switched over to use GIO for socket connections and DNS resolution. Giovanni Campagna contributed a base API for system status indicators in GNOME Shell . James Liggett implemented a tags pane in the Anjuta git plugin. In the ongoing transitions, Nautilus has been ported to GSettings, Eog has been switched to GTK+ 3, and accounts-dialog is being ported to gdbus. Preliminary support for adding new annotations has been added to Evince . Toms Bauģis changed hamster search to use SQLite full text search. David Pellicer contributed a few more keyboard layouts to Caribou. The function name completion tooltips used in Gnumeric have been improved by Andreas J. Guelzow. Evolution-rss default renderer has been switched to be WebKit. Nate Stedman merged his branch adding suport for themes in Ease. Benjamin Otte continued stripping GTK+ of old GDK drawing functions and classes . Richard Hughes split off a new libcolor-glib library out of gnome-color-manager. Totem youtube plugin has been updated to work after the latest Youtube page format changes. In GSOC land Jamie Nicol has added to Rhythmbox the possibility to scrobble to both Last.fm and Libre.fm, Michal Hruby ported zeitgeist-datahub to Vala, Karlo Jež added a hover menu for quick task manipulation in Getting Things GNOME, and more… Top projects Project Commits tracker 214 gnome-color-manager 126 empathy 99 gtk+ 86 evolution 66 ease 61 rygel 58 nautilus 57 gtkglext 57 gegl 50 Top authors Author Commits Modules Richard Hughes 131 gnome-color-manager, gnome-packagekit Fran Diéguez 121 rhythmbox, gedit, empathy and others Jürg Billeter 70 tracker, vala Travis Reitter 65 empathy, jhbuild Benjamin Otte 61 gtk+, glib Mukund Sivaraman 57 gtkglext, babl Martyn Russell 57 tracker, gnomeweb-wml Nate Stedman 56 ease Philip Van Hoof 55 tracker Alexander Larsson 51 nautilus

Stormy’s Update: Week of July 19, 2010

26.07.2010 14:45  Tomboy Online on the big screen at OSCON. Photo by PaulScott56 http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulscott56/4815513721/ OSCON! Gave that was a call to all those who care about free software to start thinking about our freedoms when it comes to web services. At OSCON I was on a panel about financial incentives in open source.  I met a couple of people from Malaysia involved in promoting free software there. After mentioning them in many talks, it was great to actually meet them! Also at OSCON, organized web services and free software lightning talks and met with many people including Jennifer Minor from – they use GNOME in educational scientific devices. Went out with GNOME folks organized by ! Traveled to the Hague to attend next week. Attended GNOME Board Meeting in the Hague on Sunday. It was a very productive day. We got through a very impressive agenda discussing many issues from bank accounts to hackfests to annual goals. Look for the minutes after GUADEC for more details. Tomboy Online on the big screen at OSCON. Photo by PaulScott56 http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulscott56/4815513721/ OSCON! Gave that was a call to all those who care about free software to start thinking about our freedoms when it comes to web services. At OSCON I was on a panel about financial incentives in open source.  I met a couple of people from Malaysia involved in promoting free software there. After mentioning them in many talks, it was great to actually meet them! Also at OSCON, organized web services and free software lightning talks and met with many people including Jennifer Minor from – they use GNOME in educational scientific devices. Went out with GNOME folks organized by ! Traveled to the Hague to attend next week. Attended GNOME Board Meeting in the Hague on Sunday. It was a very productive day. We got through a very impressive agenda discussing many issues from bank accounts to hackfests to annual goals. Look for the minutes after GUADEC for more details.

Banshee 1.7.3 Released

22.07.2010 16:30  , part of the active-development 1.7 series leading to 1.8, has been released. Read the for more info.

Stormy’s Update: Week of July 12, 2010

19.07.2010 23:15  Organized GNOME Advisory Board meeting to discuss topics and plan for our in person meeting at GUADEC. We meet all day on Tuesday. We’ll have some updates and we’ll give each of the advisory board members a chance to present ideas on where we can all collaborate. Set up and sent out agenda for the GUADEC meeting. Attended GNOME Asia meeting. Briefly met Amanda from Project Harmony. Will catch up with her at LinuxCon. Arranged travel for LinuxCon. Reserved hotel for Grace Hopper. Submitted some expense reports. Attended GNOME Board of Directors meeting. Had 1:1 with Rosanna. Met with a few advisory board members 1:1. Followed up with some sponsor work for GUADEC. Had a bunch of brief discussions about various issues. Had a meeting to discuss the format of the Open Desktop Day at GUADEC. Prepared for OSCON. Set up interviews with the KDE and GNOME boards for the people that submitted bids to host the Desktop Summit 2011. Had some good quality family time. This week: Attending OSCON: Keynote, panel and organizing lightning talks plus several get togethers and meetings. Traveling to The Hague. Working on LinuxCon keynote. Last minute GUADEC preparations. Missing my family.

Issue 93

18.07.2010 21:15 This week… 3273 commits, in 181 projects, by 295 happy hackers . Toms Bauģis added to hamster he possibility to click on a time bar in the overview to get to the detailed day view . The Bastard Mode option of Quadrapassel has been renamed to “choose difficult blocks”, but it’s still a real bastard. Fernando Herrera added Mallard documentation to Dots, the interactive braille transcribing application. The calendar backend in evolution-mapi has been made fully asynchronous. Thomas Wood added region and city comboboxes to the new date and time control center panel. Aleksander Morgado contributed a feature to enable or disable selected books in devhelp . Nate Stedman replaced the system call by the usage of libarchive when saving documents in Ease. GThumb has been updated to preserve the EXIF data after lossless rotations. Vinagre has been migrated to GtkApplication . Arx Cruz added a new password dialog to Zenity. The three-point-oh branch of cheese has been merged, rewriting Cheese in Vala and making advantage of Clutter. Paolo Bacchilega ported file-roller to use GSettings. Seed has been updated to build against the gtk 2 or gtk 3 versions of WebKit, at user choice. John Stowers created a gtk-3.0 branch of pygtk, to prepare a pygtk version that, while not based on gobject introspection, would still be a step towards GNOME 3. Aaron Bockover changed the Amazon proxy URIs of Banshee to some supporting geo-IP redirection, redirecting users to the Amazon stores appropriate for their countries. Benjamin Otte has been working hard on the “rendering-cleanup” branch of GTK+ 3, chopping much of the old drawing system, where cairo usage is more appropriate now. In GSOC land, Dragos Dena finished the snippets editor for Anjuta, Jamie Nicol almost finished implementing Last.fm radio playback in Rhythmbox, Luca Invernizzi completed the couchdb backend of Getting Things GNOME, and others also worked, of course… Top projects Project Commits monkey-bubble 681 gtk+ 288 tracker 269 cheese 71 nemiver 68 banshee 62 pygtk 61 f-spot 54 grilo-plugins 54 evolution-data-server 54 Top authors Author Commits Modules Martin Baulig 318 monkey-bubble Javier Jardón 135 gtk+, caribou, rygel and others Benjamin Otte 107 gtk+, jhbuild Philip Van Hoof 87 tracker Jürg Billeter 86 tracker, vala Aleksander Morgado 85 tracker, devhelp Frederic Peters 78 jhbuild, devhelp, gnome-nettool and others John Stowers 63 pygtk, pygobject Kjartan Maraas 62 monkey-bubble, evolution-data-server, evolution and others Dodji Seketeli 60 nemiver This is an artefact of monkey-bubble importing libgnome and libgnomeui history to get a copy of gnome-scores.c

GStreamer Conference 2010 timetable now online

16.07.2010 17:15 The timetable for the GStreamer Conference 2010 in Cambridge, UK is now online. You find the and the . We hope to see you all here in October!.

GStreamer Python Bindings 0.10.19 and FFmpeg plugin 0.10.11 stable releases

16.07.2010 01:00  The GStreamer team announces new releases of the GStreamer Python bindings and the FFmpeg plugin module for the 0.10 GStreamer stable release series. Check out release notes for , , or download tarballs for , ,