My points of focus and an announcement on a new project

[Pasi Lallinaho]

=== My points of focus as the Xubuntu Marketing Lead ===

As of today, 29th October 2009, the "Karmic Koala" release date, my
focus as the Xubuntu Marketing Lead will change. During the Karmic
development cycle anything related to packaging, specific file names or
configurations have been a burden for me, which I don't want to carry.
In the future, I want to interact with people more and hassle with the
technical side less.

For the Lucid cycle, I plan to follow the specification to grow the
Xubuntu community bigger and stronger
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Roadmap/Specifications/Jaunty/GrowXubuntuCommunity),
as it has become more clear than ever that I will not stay in the
project forever. I also try to polish the Artwork Guidelines and get
them in a shape they can be used for the basis for Xubuntu Artwork in
the future.

My other points of focus will be helping the cooperative Xubuntu/Xfce
documentation team with the documentation artwork and refreshing the
Xubuntu website theme once more while migrating to Wordpress, which I
think is a huge improvement for the website.

=== Announcement: The Shimmer Project ===

Also as of today, I'm glad to announce the official birth of the Shimmer
Project. The team I'll start leading consists of me, Steve Dodier
(SiDi), James Schriver (dashua) and Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi).

The reasoning behind setting up a separate group rose from my and Steves
disappointment in the somewhat cold and dismissing acts of the DX
(Desktop Experience) team, which lead us to do more and more work to fix
things that we hadn't broken. We feel really bad that Canonical is
making design decisions with only GNOME in scope and don't want to
handle with fixing (in our opinion) their design flaws. Yet another
thing that clearly became a burden too big is the Canonical half-yearly
release schedule. With our new project we will be free of any other than
our own schedules.

Our first project and main focus during the next months is to create a
solid theme for Xfce with beautiful artwork, a bugfree GTK+ theme and
all the other bits you need to have an astonishing Xfce desktop
experience. This basically replaces the stuff I cut down in Xubuntu but
without having to worry too much about fixing stuff all the time. That
being said, we are happy if the Xubuntu developer community decides to
use our theme (again), but we are most probably going to leave most of
the integration stuff to some other guys.

Our IRC channel is #shimmer on freenode. All of you are welcome to join
us. We will release the website address and more details later, once we
get all the stuff in order.


Yours truly,

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho
Xubuntu Marketing Lead
Web-designer, graphic artist
IRC: knome @ freenode