A walk down memory lane … with GNOME and Stormy

I ran across the GNOME Advisory Board Minutes from June 2003, back when I was on the advisory board representing HP:

Stormy Peters did a presentation about her work on the Open Source
Program Office at HP, policy, review for releases, and the OSS portal.
The Foundation provides:
  - a bridge between community and the users
  - credibility
  - product management
  - communication, especially roadmap
which are the main values from a corporate perspective.
Stormy devoted a significant portion of her presentation to the role
of the advisory board. She says that the advisory board could contribute
more to the GNOME project and could be more helpful to the foundation.
She urged us to make better use of the advisory board, and of her
resources in particular.

Well, the GNOME Foundation is certainly making better use of my resources now! We could still do something about that roadmap though.

Advisory board members often ask for the GNOME roadmap. (Or the GTK+ roadmap or the you name it roadmap it.) They need it to make their plans. They need it to explain to their management and their peers what GNOME is up to. I think even if we didn't have concrete dates on the roadmap, we could still create one. The idea is to show where you're going, not necessarily all the fine detail of how you'll get there.

For example, recently someone contacted us for a list of GNOME goals for 2009. I was getting ready to jump in with some high level, vague answer when Vincent Untz jumped in with this great list of things that might happen in 2009. I went wow, where'd you get that from? To which he responded, in typical Vincent fashion, that it was only in the heads of crazy people who try to follow everything. (And I am very, very impressed with how much crazy people like Vincent follow, keep track of and know. 😉

But what if we created a GNOME technologies roadmap of all the crazy things that might happen in 2009-2010? Then we could color code it with likelihood of happening and update it a few times a year. We could also mark who was working on what, what areas needed help, …