Schedule Philosophy

The emphasis this year will be even more focused on BOFs and hacking. Day 1 will be dedicated to speed talks and BOFs that might yield hacking on Day 2 and Day 3. Day 2, for those not hacking, will focus on BOFs for things like marketing, QA, and ISVs, which are generally more policy-oriented than hacking-oriented (not that the QA guys can't hack :)

On the last day, we'll spill over from the first couple days, and at the end of the day, review the results of the hacking and BOFing in the closing.

Room Notes

We have a permanent hacking room, so hacking is no longer on the schedule- it is always going on in the third room.

Day 1 (Saturday October 8th)

The GtkTeamPrintingBreakout is in 56-154 (across the way from the Stata Center)

Day 2 (Sunday October 9th)

  • Hours

    Room 124

    Room 144

    9:30-10am

    coffee, recovery (hallway)

    10-10:30am

    Marketing BOF

    Performance BOF - Dtrace (then profile-a-thon hacking in 154)

    10:45-11:30

    Marketing BOF

    IM/Presence BOF (then hacking in 154)

    11:45-12:30

    D-Bus Bindings Overview and What's Left For 1.0

    Usability BOF I

    12:30-2:00

    Lunch at BostonSummit/NearbyRestaurants

    2:00-2:45

    ISV BOF(../BreakoutSessions)

    Future of Banshee, Ubiquitous GNOME iPod Support

    3:00-3:30

    ISVs, cont.

    open

    3:45-4:30

    Building a great community website

    gnome for admins, UnixPowerForDesktop

    4:45-5:30

    open

    Integration (Evo, Fspot, Evince, GOffice, Presence) BOF

    5:30

    Dinner, drinking at BostonSummit/NearbyRestaurants

Day 3 (Monday October 10th)

The Rooms

We have four rooms reserved for the event.

  • Kirsch Auditorium on Saturday and Monday (10:30->1:30 or so Saturday, 2:00->5:30 pm Monday).

  • Three approximately 50 seat classrooms with tables (rooms 124, 144 and 154) all three days.

There is also a lot of hall space with tables and chairs, and outdoor patio space with wireless. There will be no hacking room with hardware, unfortunately- please bring laptops and be willing to share with others! The network connection takes about ten minutes to activate, and remains active for the duration of the Summit.

Each room will have projectors; we'll try to bring two extras and as many power cords as we can scrounge. But if you can bring your own power cords, that would also be good.

Meta Hacking -- making hackfests efficient

JonathanBlandford: It seems like hackfests at these kind of events often devolve into people checking IRC, chatting, and reading mail. While there's nothing wrong with that per se, it seems like it would be more productive to have more planning going into it. One thing we've done with some success at Red Hat is to have a dedicated hackfest, with everyone working on one code base at the same time. In these, we've had a coordinator, a fixed goal and a fixed timeframe (say 6 hours). We've broken the project into a set of tasks and given them to each person. A good example of this was the initial work on evince, which came out of such a hackfest.

I'd love to see a couple of larger sessions, of maybe 6-8 people, all working towards a common goal in a fixed timeframe. It would help if those running the project did their homework ahead of time and had something prepared for those joining in. We could start on it at the beginning of the hackfest, and do a presentation at the end to the rest of the group, showing off exactly what got done.

Proposed Hackfest Topics

  • Print dialog replacement (feature suggestion)

  • Search user interface. Beagle needs a real user interface. One mockup has been posted here: (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dashboard-hackers/2005-September/msg00093.html)

  • Profile-a-thon. Find some things that are slow throughout the desktop. Hack the culprit app to run the slow part a thousand times in a loop. Run sysprof or some other profiler while that loop is running. At the end of the Summit, present your findings. There is probably not enough time to actually fix things during the Summit, but it would be interesting to start finding patterns that cause slowness.

Proposed Topics

Please sign your name to topics you'd like to attend

demos

Last year's demos included beagle, annodex, and kernel/inotify. Proposed topics this year: (Fill 'em in, folks)

  • RobertFischer will talk about the Peer Agent system http://www.peeragent.org: its benefits to user privacy, its current Java implementation, and how it can e integrated with Mono and Gnome in the future.

  • TorLillqvist can demonstrate Evolution running on Windows. Perhaps other GNOME applications? Please mail suggestions with applications that might be relatively easy to port (now when the GNOME libraries are available) and useful.

  • BradyAnderson and CalvinGaisford will demonstrate iFolder running peer-to-peer as well as client server. We will be happy to discuss iFolder's architecture and how it compares to Microsoft's WinFS.

Performance

There has been a strong indicated interest in a performance 'track' at this year's summit. Some proposed talks have included:

  • dtrace (john rice) - give people a flavour of what dtrace can do with some live demos, then open it up and get suggestions as to how we use it to hack on gnome performance. Frederico should be happy, after a little pain I've got 2.12 built and running on a development OpenSolaris build which we can use to hack on with dtrace :)

  • instrumenting gtk (FedericoMenaQuintero) - I want to present the status of GtkWidgetProfiler, some general ideas on what takes up the majority of GTK+'s running time, and some tips on instrumenting things in general.

  • robert love's poignant guide to performance

  • hold a profile-a-thon during the hackfest!

technology

Last year's tech talks included gtk+, language bindings, file chooser extensions, dbus, QA, e-d-s, printing, version control, and x.org.

This year's proposals:

  • D-Bus Language Bindings - J5 (Python) and Colin Walters (GLib) battle it out to see which bindings will reign supreme

  • GNOME for Systems Administrators. JeffWaugh: Let's talk about making GNOME beautiful for a very important class of momentum users.

user interface / usability

This year's proposals:

  • NoChromeGnome (JeffWaugh: a proposal i'm preparing, which would be cool to present if i can get there)

  • Visual Style in Desktop Linux - Clearlooks is a step in the right direction towards a set of default styles in Gnome that distros might actually want to ship (and humans use). Let's talk about the next steps. (not quite "usability", I know) --StevenGarrity

  • Unified Desktop Icon Theme - What is wrong with icons on the linux desktop. Proposal, demo. --JakubSteiner

  • Usability Testing Video Review. Since January 2005, I have run usability tests on hundreds of people in the civil service, education and biotech fields. I propose that we watch some of these videos in a dual context: first, with an eye toward what we can learn from these videos to improve GNOME, and second, with an eye toward looking ahead at future GNOME releases, and planning future usability tests. --AnnaDirks

  • Usability and the importance of good "use cases" early in the development process. My idea is to get some good examples on how this stuff is important, how to do this in real world development and well, generally, like Anna's proposal, trying to figure out how we can do more of this as a community. I'll try to update this thing here once I gather my thoughts a bit more. It'll be fun anyway :) --TuomasKuosmanen

release planning

  • Release Planning, ISV's & Interface Stability (BrianCameron): At this past GUADEC, Joe Kowalski and Ed Hunter discussed interface stability. Taking this a step further, a proposal discussing what is being done to improve interface stability in the GNOME Platform, and what more we can do.

marketing

Last year's topics included guerilla marketing, non-US marketing, and a SWOT analysis that never quite got off the ground.

This year's topics:

  • MaddogHall- Marketing - guerilla (and other simian) and otherwise on the 10th

  • 10x10 key messages, key goals

  • Building a great community website - We'll examine Open Source software (wikis, blogs, etc.) that can power a project website and discuss the type of content which can communicate clearly. --GarrettLeSage

event planning

We talked some about event planning last year; we could do something similar this year if people are interested.

Events/Summit/2005/TheSchedule (last edited 2013-11-25 17:37:57 by WilliamJonMcCann)