[ubuntu-art] Theme Teams. Moving Forward. Making Stuff!

[Frank Schoep]

On Jan 3, 2008, at 9:42 AM, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
> To all the new people around here - please pay attention to Who, he
> has been around here for a good while and knows the drill. …

Absolutely – there are a few people on this list who've been around  
for quite some time. I think this list is very fortunate to still  
have experienced people like Who and Troy around, but it's also good  
to see a lot of new enthusiastic people sharing their vision.

> …
> We came close to the real deal once, was it Dapper?, where we got a
> few community themes, bundled, but not enabled, by default.

I think you are referring to Edgy, as the Theme Teams were introduced  
in that release. Eventually three themes ended up in universe, being  
Blubuntu (Who / PingunZ), Peace (Chuck Huber) and Tropic (Viper550).

While varying in quality and polish, the mere fact they were included  
was a sign that independent small community groups could work towards  
their own vision *and* meet the hard deadline constraints that were  
set for them.

> This happened solely because of two things:
>  * A few people stood up and took responsibility for creating themes

Indeed. There was a deadline for Theme Team applications a few weeks  
into the release cycle so that the theme leaders needed to be  
involved from the start up through a few weeks before release. For  
Edgy, four leaders stepped up with a serious proposal.

During the development period, we regularly discussed progress and  
problems and where possible I tried to help out either myself or by  
getting the right people in touch with each other.

>  * Daniel Holbach saved our asses with a lot of packaging work we
> really should have done our selves

Daniel has historically helped out with a lot of packaging work,  
indeed. For the Edgy Theme Teams, we made sure he only had one final  
version to package per theme with room before the deadline, so they  
wouldn't burden him much.

> I think it would be very valuable to have a "History Page" on the wiki
> outlining the success and Failures of the art team. That would
> probably help to make it clear how we are doomed to repeat history
> unless people step up an take responsibility.

While I can't say much about Feisty, Gutsy or Hardy-in-progress, I  
could tell you about Edgy. As far as I know, Edgy was the first (and  
last?) release to actively try and use community input as a viable  
source for distribution artwork.

Postmortem I did an interview with Linux.com on the Edgy cycle, and  
there's some half-decent comments from Slashdot, too:
http://www.linux.com/feature/58477
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/14/2241255  
('Stroep' [sic])

It seems that all the history we built on the Wiki has been shoveled  
elsewhere or been dumped in a landfill altogether, but if you can  
find it, you might be able to reconstruct a decent timeline along  
with the mailing list.

It was pretty high traffic during those days (July - October 2006)  
and the ML / Wiki combination seemed to work somewhat satisfactory.

All in all, Edgy was edgy to me – as you can read in the interview  
the idea was to try something new, community artwork by default, and  
since there were no trodden roads available I did my best to get and  
keep things rolling in an enjoyable fashion.

I think it worked out pretty well in terms of community involvement,  
enthusiasm, commitment, process structure and raw output. Slightly  
missing was the desired art *direction* but somehow I don't think  
that problem's been resolved ever since, no flame or offense intended.

If you'd ask me now, sure I'd do things different based on the Edgy  
experience and the knowledge I've accumulated since then, but I think  
the Edgy cycle already showed a lot of potential for the future  
although it never got tapped into afterwards.

Tell me if I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Frank