Lucas: improving our relationship with potential new contributors is indeed most important. I buy your analysis on the barriers. Let me comment on the various barriers:

• psychological (self-esteem? unclear initial steps? project is too big?): from what I have seen (on mailing lists, but also at some events), a lot of people just think GNOME is too big for them. And most of the time, they don't know how to start. GNOME Love is a good way to destroy this myth. But to make this effort even more effective, I think we need to spread the word. This is where local groups are important: there are a lot of events where GNOME is represented and if at all those events, local groups can talk about the GNOME Love and show a concrete example on how to contribute, then this is a big win.
• social (community is not receptive? contributions not being considered?): we have a first problem here, since it's hard for a maintainer to find time to contribute and to review contributions (be it code or ideas). It just takes too much time... I'm interested in a magical recipe to help with this.
• technical (bad platform docs? gobject is too complicated? don't know C programming?): it seems the most difficult part is to get a first build of GNOME. jhbuild is great, but I'm sure a lot of people would love to download a simple script that would do all the jhbuild configuration for them. Might be a nice python project :-) The waited-by-everyone library.gnome.org will also help here, I believe. I don't know what's its status, though.
• cultural (don't speak english? doesn't have local group to share knowledge/information?): local groups are really important since they can spread the word. We should definitely help them as much as possible so they don't have to do a lot of work to start. Go, GNOME-BR, go! :-)

Quim: don't you have a global vision of the GNOME websites and the online channels we are using? When I read this, I think you have the vision :-) You can be the one. I agree that it's kind of difficult to find the right place to discuss this since there are a lot of people involved, but I would think gnome-web-list is the right place. Just announce it everywhere, like on the Planet. Try this:

Are you interested in the GNOME websites? If so, subscribe to gnome-web-list!

:-)

GNOME will have a devroom at the next FOSDEM. You can learn all the details about devrooms, but what you need to know is that it will be a place where a lot of GNOME people will be and it will rock!

GNOME-FR people are organizing the devroom (you can even see our page for that, but it's in French :-)). To make our devroom rock even harder, we want cool talks about GNOMEy things. Christophe sent a call for talks a few days ago two weeks ago (I'm late ;-)). There are already some interesting talks:

• gtkmm and glom, by Murray
• GnomeMeeting, by Damien
• the GNOME community, by Dodji and Laurent
• Developing GNOME apps in ruby, by Laurent (not the same Laurent)
• Gscore, one of the first application making heavy use of cairo, by Sébastien
• Kicking arse with GNOME advocacy, by Jeff

We also had some nice ideas of talks, waiting for talkers:

• Developing with pygtk
• a GNOME love talk
• why will GNOME 2.14 be our best release?
• ...

If you want to do a talk, then you win! I don't know what you win, but to know it, send a mail to Christophe and Laurent with your talk idea.

I know you all want to come to the GNOME devroom. So, everyone, please open your calendar and mark February 25 and 26th as two days where you'll be in Brussels.

Note for french-speaking readers: a probably more complete version of this post is available in french.

The Journées du Libre de Montpellier were organized at the end of last week. This is the first time I went there and I must admit I think I'll go there next year ;-) It was well-organized, with really nice and helpful organizers and interesting speakers.

Fabrice and I held a booth about GNOME and Ubuntu:

I also made small demonstration sessions about GNOME and Ubuntu. As the demonstration for GNOME was aimed at companies and most people already knew GNOME, I showed Sabayon and some accessibility features. It went mostly okay, but I had some difficulties due to my computer running dapper...

In the second session, aimed at home users, I wanted to demo that all the usual things you do on a computer (surf on the web, read mails, listen to music, etc.) was easy to do with a distribution like Ubuntu, and this wasn't to hard to demp ;-). I also tried to explain the ideas that are behind Ubuntu and to show that, with the launchpad integration, Ubuntu tries to involve users in the development in some new way. People were interested in this last item: enabling users to be easily active in the development is a really strong point, and I believe this will be even more important in the future.

As you can see on the photo above, we had some GNOME & Ubuntu promotion materials. Thanks to Canonical for sending all the Ubuntu material (CDs, but also leaflets, stickers and t-shirts): this is most useful in such events. I only regret that the leaflets were in English ;-)

Je suis revenu samedi soir d'une petite promenade à Montpellier. Plus qu'une promenade, en réalité, puisqu'il s'agissait des Journées du Libre de Montpellier. J'avoue y être allé avec une toute petite motivation, car la semaine avait déjà été longue, très longue. Mais la motivation a vite atteint son plus haut niveau.

Il faut dire qu'il y a de bons arguments qui vous poussent à aimer cet évènement : les organisateurs sont fantastiques (vraiment accueillants), la ville est très jolie, il y a des intervenants de qualité (ah, j'ai fait baissé la moyenne, je vous le garantis), la nourriture est excellente (que je regrette de n'avoir pas choisi le moelleux au chocolat !), les organisateurs sont fantastiques, etc. Je sais, je me répète sur les organisateurs, mais c'est tout simplement parce qu'ils ont réalisé un travail fantastique, à prendre comme modèle.

Il faut dire que l'accueil fut chaleureux : à mon arrivée, et après que j'ai donné mon nom, on me reconnait comme l'homme au chapeau bleu. Tout de suite, je me suis senti bien, un peu comme à la maison. J'ai pu prendre le temps de discuter avec de nombreuses personnes (organisateurs et non-organisateurs), et il y avait ce petit côté familial qui est fort agréable. Cela donne envie de revoir tout le monde aux Solutions Linux.

Mais je ne suis pas allé là-bas seulement en touriste, puisque j'y suis allé représenter GNOME/GNOME-FR et Ubuntu/Ubuntu-fr. J'ai fait une démonstration de GNOME, et plus particulièrement de Sabayon et de l'accessibilité de GNOME, ainsi qu'une démonstration d'Ubuntu pour montrer à quel point Ubuntu est utilisable par tout le monde. Les démonstrations se sont plutôt bien passées, mais c'est plus aux gens qui y ont assisté d'en juger. Il y avait aussi un stand commun GNOME/Ubuntu qui a rencontré un certain succès, puisqu'il y avait presque toujours du monde devant le stand.

La première conclusion de tout cela est qu'il ne faut vraiment pas faire des démonstrations avec un système de développement (Dapper m'a joué quelques mauvais tours, pas très graves). La seconde conclusion est vivement l'an prochain ;-)

Un grand merci à Fabrice pour m'avoir guidé dans cette magnifique ville et pour son aide, et aussi un grand merci à Canonical pour avoir envoyé des CD Ubuntu et du matériel de promotion (dont de magnifiques autocollants) !