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.