[ubuntu-art] What are we doing?

Vishnoo vish at ubuntu.com
Sun Sep 19 11:01:51 BST 2010


Hi,

This mail was sitting in my drafts for a couple of weeks, since the
people i mentioned this about kept saying it is not worth the effort!
But Saleel's mail [1] gives me hope! :)
Initial draft of this mail would have probably ended-up being a tl;dr ! 
So I'll try to keep it short. 

Recently, this mailing list has had almost no useful activity.
And we dint even realize it was UIF to get community themes updated. 
To me, these are signs of this artwork list dying and our lack of
organization!

From:
<http://www.ubuntu.com/community> Contribute > Artwork :
"Put your creativity to work by improving the look and feel of Ubuntu.
Help design themes, graphics or backgrounds for the next release."

What has this team achieved among those goals for Maverick?
What are we doing?
If it weren't for the half yearly calls for countdown banners, this list
could even be considered dead!

- Members often announced and we'd welcome them and they disappeared!
Since they do not know what they can do. 

- The list was once active when Breathe icon set was developed and when
Cory got busy with life , that died too. 

- The last piece of activity from the Canonical design team[apart from
banners] was about the boot-splash for Ubuntu 9.10!! 

- Mark announces UbuntuMovies on ayatana mailing list and not here!

- Design blog announces new theme changes and feedback is requested in
the comments and not here.
When asked why announcements about the new theme and discussions are not
done here , the polite reply was "discussions there are of low quality".
Yes , i would consider this a very polite response!
When a member announces a video for the 10sec boot, we had responses
about our boot taking longer than 10secs! Is that response even related
to this list? When the "participation" is only of such caliber , people
tend to drift elsewhere!

- Gnome-themes-ubuntu [dust,dust sand, new wave] were last updated only
for Lucid
- Community-themes package seems to have only one lone ranger! ;)

- thorwil has unsubscribed from the wiki pages too , and i can only
assume the wiki is now in disarray.

          
******  Now, how do we move forward?  ******
          
Do we need this team or mailing list? Does Ubuntu need a community
artwork team?

Can we get more organized? Can this team have a purpose?

Is there a considerable number of members interested in doing
artwork?[note: no one is dutybound to do artwork , but atleast is anyone
willing to work on artwork at some point?]

I'v been talking to a few people around and I'v setup an etherpad with
what we can do[ and try to do], where we can help and what we need to
organize:
<http://openetherpad.org/UbuntuArtwork> 
Do add your ideas too!

Can we brainstorm and move forward?

Or if there is no purpose to this mailing list or team, should we
dissolve this team/list?

I send this mail now, since i fear everyone is loosing interest in this
team/list! 

Speak up now! Or even I'll give up..! ;-)

-- 
Cheers,
Vish

[1] <https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana/msg03715.html>




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