Hi all,
I've been picking up a lot of indicators of stress in our project participants. Each seems to be a unique case, with a different cause, and so there can be no universal solution. But if you're feeling stressed it might help to take a look at a broader perspective, and see some of the great progress being made.
We just completed a very effective Hackfest. We burned through our list of discussion topics and unblocked progress on multiple fronts, and helped get each other on the same page on several topics. I think everyone came away energized, a bit overwhelmed, and enthusiastic to get moving on some big efforts. It was an intense week. I wish everyone could have come! We want to organize future hackfests to be more convenient for you, so everyone gets a chance to benefit from face-to-face time with each other.
The Inkscape 1.0 release is now visible on the horizon, which is very exciting and will be a massive achievement for our project. There is still planning to be done, and it'll be probably about a year before we reach it, but a lot of path clearing has been done the past couple weeks to ensure we can head there at full speed.
Print/color management, multi-page, GActions, and more are starting to get charted out; 1.0 is not going to be the end of the road, but rather the start on some major innovations for Inkscape. It is almost overwhelming to think of all the work needed, but know that while they'll be progressing in parallel, our focus right now is the 1.0 release. People have been very understanding that we have to pace ourselves and prioritize stability right now.
Several changes are afoot for our infrastructure - mailing lists, merchandise, forums, a website redesign, and bug tracking all have improvements under way. Quite a bit to do, but will strengthen both our user and contributor communities, and we have plenty of time to do them.
Another bit of very good news is that Inkscape is doing well monetarily. At the start of FY2017 we had $18,414; after one year this has grown to $45,732. This is thanks both to prolific individual donors and several very generous sponsoring companies -- people believe in us and what we're doing, and are providing us with financial resources to do even more. Looking at this past month's financial data, donations appear to have picked up even more, and we've several potential sponsors that will likely pitch in once they see some plans for specific features they're interested in. All of this funding gives Inkscape a lot of flexibility to do more to improve both the software and the community. And, to boot, efforts on new fundraising sources are in process, which could kick us off in a 'virtuous circle'.
At least some people are finding stress from the sheer amount of different things, and how quickly they're progressing. I sure feel it. I just want to say - pace yourself. Don't be afraid of letting others take over some of your tasks, and don't be shy about asking for load sharing if you feel overwhelmed. Please email me privately if you need help. I expect things will even out better in the next few months -- the release and the hackfest caused acceleration on a bunch of stuff, but the next few weeks should get quieter as people take time to digest.
In some cases, the stress has shown itself in various discussions. Please know we're taking these seriously and working behind the scenes to improve relationships. This community wrote a remarkably good Code of Conduct for itself, well worth reading (or re-reading):
https://inkscape.org/en/community/coc/
In the next week or so I'll post a plan for getting us to 1.0, with specific tasks that we'll need people to pitch in on. Meanwhile, take some time to get recentered and get the stresses eliminated. :-)
Hugs and cheers, Bryce