Some news from Gwenview world:

New mailing-list

One year ago, I decided to replace Gwenview mailing list with a forum. The idea behind that move being that forums were more adapted for user support.

Gwenview forum is doing quite well: there are more users helping each others there than what used to happen on the mailing-list. I assume this is because there are more users on KDE forums.

One thing happened during this cycle, though: a new contributor, Benjamin Löwe, joined and has been very active on Gwenview. Therefore I decided it would be a good idea to create a developer mailing-list: gwenview-devel.

Gwenview 2.10.0 is dead, long live Gwenview 4.10.0!

Until now Gwenview has always been using its own version number, which was the same as KDE SC version number, except the major was 2 instead of 4. For example, the version of Gwenview which came KDE SC 4.9.5 was 2.9.5.

This made sense to me because the version of Gwenview shipped with KDE SC 4.0.0 was the first major rewrite of Gwenview: so I bumped the version number to 2.0.0.

Even if it made sense to me, people were often confused by these two version numbers. Furthermore, Benjamin pointed out that since we used 2.y.z in the "FIXED-IN" Bugzilla field, our fixes did not show up in KDE SC release changelogs. Therefore I decided to bump the version to 4.10.0. No more confusion!

More reviews

Benjamin and I have been busy fixing as much bugs as possible for the 4.10.0 release. I am quite happy that almost all the latest commits have gone through review before landing in the KDE/4.10 branch.

I believe doing more reviews will help improve the quality of Gwenview code and avoid regressions. To this end I decided to start asking for review for my own code as well. Gwenview has been mostly a one-man project until now, so I committed directly to master. Now that the bus factor has been multiplied by 2, it is possible to get all code reviewed before it lands in master.

That's it for now, time to plan 4.11!

(PS: I am going to FOSDEM, see you in Brussels!)

RT @freeculture: Announcing the Empowermentors Collective for Women of Color & Queer People of Color in #freeculture and #freesoftwa ...

It seems very incredible, but I’ve already arrived at my third week of this wonderful adventure that this OPW is representing for me.

Almost a quarter of this trip is over and I’m here to tell what I’ve done.

Marketing work is hidden, but I knew it. All the subtle details you see, even those you don’t notice, require painstaking labor, and there is much I’ve done, much I’m working on and, of course, much I’ve planned to do.

Article about Keyboard data.

GNOME desktop is released in many localized versions. GNOME developers refer to a database to predict which keyboard layouts are relevant to a user. The developers are collecting data to fix database bugs and to improve localization.

This is the post I’ve written (thanks to Allan for his patience!) and this is the project page.

 Next article instead will concern Andrea Veri, who has joined GNOME as a part-time SysAdmin: we’ve already discussed the key elements of this post, and write it will be one of the tasks I’ll devote the next few days.

Interviews! Interviews!

I’ve been asked by Karen to help her in preparing some interviews to very cool GNOME 3 users.

And the first one is really really cool: Greg Kroah-Hartman.

 What I’ve done is to compose a draft for a questionnaire, divided in three sections: the first one with some general questions about how and when the interviewee began to use GNOME3, which part of GNOME 3 she/he likes most, if they use extensions, and so on.

The second part strictly depends on interviewee, there are questions involving her/his interests; the third part consists of tips for newcomers and the request for a quote: I believe our interviewees are inspiring people, and I like to ask them who/what has been inspiring for them.

I’ve sent everything to Greg, I hope to make this interview public very soon, I’m very excited and proud of this work.

Many thanks to Karen for making my questions smarter – she is an awesome donna. -

Now I’m planning to interview Brett Legree, I’m wondering what can I ask a nuclear engineer!

Outreach project.

This is probably the project that will ask my effort during all my OPW.

Sriram asked me to do marketing research about newcomers: to list key elements in successful outreach.

What I’ve found is that, generally, a successful outreach depends from a good mentorship.

As Sriram has brilliantly summarized, you need a human touch.

But this is only the first step to plenty understand how can GNOME Community becoming as welcoming as it desires to be.

I was planning to prepare a survey to submit to newcomers, current and past OPW and SoC interns, but Marina suggested me to contact Kevin Carrillo, who reached out to several open source communities with a survey in late 2012, focusing on outreach activities, and got hundreds of responses.

We got in touch and now we’ll work together for a while.

I don’t know where we’ll arrive, but we’re going.

FoG meme.

More than a project, this is an idea I had.

I was drinking a cup of tea from my GNOME mug, and I thought that could be funny make and share a G+ post showing the mug and linking FoG campaign (this is my post).

I work very much to this post, that in my idea should be re-shared like a “meme”.

Unfortunately, at moment this post is still unsatisfying, is lacking of groove and even if Juanjo Marin spent some of his night-time time to work on it with me, I’m not sure this project will be completed.

Ok, I suppose that for this time is really enough!

If you like, you could put an eye on my sandbox, where I write-up my ideas…

For all the rest…stay tuned, news are arriving!

RT @gnusolidario: #IWEEE 2013 resume and pics #freesoftware #GNUHealth #ehealth #phealth http://t.co/kMqJeUGi

In response to the USPTO's call for comments on how to enhance software patent quality, Groklaw has a draft of a response to the USPTO's Topic 1 question, on "how to improve clarity of claim boundaries that define the scope of patent protection for claims that use functional language". We'd like your input before we finalize our comment. Do you see a way to improve it? Make it clearer and more accessible to non-programmers? Any further references you think would be useful?

We are going to respond to the USPTO's Topic 2 question as well, but the deadline for Topic 1 looms, so we'll start with Topic 1 for now and I'll post the Topic 2 draft later. The first roundtable panel will be February 12th, so I'd like to submit by that date.