<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffcc" text="#000000"> Pascal, I'm surprised to hear that from you given that we spent several hours together at LCA in New Zealand, and discussed ways to get community contributions directly into Dapper. The goal is to get a few of the best community themes into Dapper, and have professional artists supplement that work where necessary. I see a partnership between community contributors and professional artists as one of the great things about Ubuntu - the community gets its best work showcased, and interested folks get to work with professionals where previously they may not have been able to. Now, as I understood it, Pascal was going to help organise the community side of things here, so that we could identify two or three crisp, clean community-contributed themes for inclusion in Dapper. Best I can tell, that hasn't happened yet, so Pascal please get onto that or ask someone else to take the reins. I suggest that you identify at most three candidates for inclusion, based on their quality and completeness, and focus the energy of the art team on those three to see if one or more can get up to snuff for Dapper. Getting a good theme together requires strong leadership - those of you who think you have what it takes, organise teams around your themes and polish them up. Make sure that there's a web site where we can review and assess the themes. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are of course equally important, so make sure we give equal time to the blue folks. We will only include themes that meet a very high standard of quality and completeness - it wouldn't be Ubuntu if it were half done. We have a UI sprint in London next week (all welcome) where we will be polishing more of the icons / desktop / theme bits. I expect Dapper to look pretty sharp by the end of that. I've subscribed to this list and I'll stay monitoring it for the next couple of week. If you want to live up to the standard of other Ubuntu teams you need: - Leadership. Identify someone who is dedicated (this stuff takes time) and work with Henrik to organise all the work that is to be done. As a team, you need to know how to take decisions and then move forward with those decisions. You won't all agree most of the time - so you need leadership to get everyone to go in a common direction rather than following their own artistic muses all the time. - Teamwork. If you want community-contributed themes to match up, then you can't divide yourselves a hundred different ways. Pick a few high quality starting points, and push hard on those to improve their completeness. Write up good style guides for the key themes you pick, so that new contributors can produce work that is consistent. It isn't so much of an accomplishment to do a single beautiful desktop image as it is to produce a complete set of icons, with GTK theme and desktop, splash screens etc. You will ONLY achieve this with teamwork. - Organisation. There is a lot to be done, and I can't find any obvious starting point that lists each of the areas that need work. Get that right, and you will find new people joining in as they can see what needs to be done. - Presentation. This is even more important in the art team than it is elsewhere. Your stuff needs to be shown off to best effect! Don't hide your light under a bushel, so to speak, make sure that your work gets visibility. Your leadership should arrange an Ubuntu Art website where the best themes get presented completely, so that people can immerse themselves in them. So guys, this is a challenge. Raise your game. Make clear, good suggestions for this new icon theme, and organise yourselves better to produce some community contributed themes that make it into Dapper itself. Mark </body> </html>