[ubuntu-art] bringing good things to life

Matthew Nuzum newz at bearfruit.org
Thu Jan 4 03:32:37 GMT 2007


OK, I've been a part of the art-team since the very beginning. We started
out by being a bunch of people who liked art and wanted to help the Ubuntu
community in some way... some by contributing web graphics (powered by
ubuntu, etc), some by creating wall papers, others by creating themes, and
yet others by simply giving feedback and encouragement.

Then, we had a drive to make the art-team productive... instead of just
being a community of artists and enthusiasts we became driven to produce
something. Make specs, complete specs, etc. That's not bad, but its starting
to feel like the team is burned out and it appears that activity has
plummeted.

While we struggle to regain our identity and get back on track to produce
something, lets distract ourselves a bit and return to our roots. Let's just
do art for fun again for a while.

Here's my suggestion. But first, some people know that I have a
canonical.com email address... I am not using that address because I am
speaking as a fellow art-team member. This is just my own personal
hair-brained idea, not that of my employer.

Many people participate and contribute to the Ubuntu community by creating
packages that get into Universe. Now, while it's really exciting to have
packages in main, it's still cool to be in Universe and a lot of people use
it.

My suggestion is that we create a package called art-team-edgy (or
art-team-feisty) and elect an "artist in chief" (aic) for a release. The
team, lead by the aic, will choose a palette and a few guidelines and then
engage the community to create a desktop artwork package that meets the
guidelines. To complement the package we would also have
art-team-edgy-calendar (or whatever) that would have a new background
monthly until the next release and then continuing on as long as that
release's aic gets contributions.

I'm not suggesting a coup, I'm just suggesting something to make
contributing art fun. Maybe our process will get good enough so that one day
we could get art-team-* into main, but again, by not making that the
immediate goal it gives us a lot of freedom. It also gives a lot of artists
the opportunity to contribute, since new backgrounds will be out monthly.

The aic would be elected by the team and would be the person to make the
final decision for art during that release. The team would vote and cast
opinions, but it would be the tabdfr (team appointed benevolent dictator for
release) who gets to take the votes into consideration and make the final
call - note that this is different than a democracy, the only democratic
part is who the aic is. This is just a suggestion, I'll leave it to the team
to decide how the role should work if we decide to do this, but my $0.02
worth is that without a leader to make a final, potentially difficult
decision, some important decisions will get lost in the committees.

So, Feisty releases in a few months. We know practically nothing about what
to expect for that release, but that's OK. We know it will use gnome
2.18and soon we'll know if it will have a compositing window manager.
If we're
not aiming for main, we can do whatever we want... polka dots, stripes,
flames, kittens, whatever. We can choose our palette, our icon theme
(although it makes sense to go with the flow of course), everything!

OK, I've been thinking about this for a while, and I even mentioned the
calendar idea a couple months ago... I saw the recent bug report (#77289)
and this forum thread recently
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=326420 and decided to get my it in
gear and actually do something (send this e-mail).

How about some people +1 this if they like the idea, ensuring to note if
they feel competent enough to contribute a monthly background. We'd also
need a person willing to be the scape goat and be the first aic...
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org
newz2000 on freenode
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