Hi,
How can Inkscape's assets be used to grow the Inkscape community?
The users community seems quite big already. Improving our documentation, adding new translations, and of course improving the application itself would certainly attract new users. The key point is that we need to convince users to become contributors if we want to attract new users. Funded contributions or targeted campaigns (not only developments, it could be anything else) seem to be good ideas.
Merchandising could also help in many ways: users would be please to have Inkscape branded objects, it would improve our communication, and increase our financial resources. The Inkscape logo is great and would fit nicely on T-shirts, mugs, badges, stickers, caps or anything else. And of course we could also use artwork donated by artists.
It seems we all agree we should make add-ons (extensions, filters, templates, symbols, palettes...) creation easier for users. Implementing a repository to host user made add-ons could be very useful in that regard, and would allow us to reduce the core extensions we ship with the application. Firefox and its extensions system is a good example of what we should target.
Are there specific projects that you think the board should pursue? How would you contribute to them?
I've had to opportunity to help students with Inkscape related projects some years ago (as a mentor). The result wasn't always good enough to be merged in Inkscape, but I feel it was a good experience for the students, the mentor, Inkscape and FOSS community in general. The board should help local mentors set up projects with students in their area (schools often need legal documents to accept such projects).
Booksprints (see http://www.booksprints.net/) is a very efficient method to create documentation with both users and developers. We could use it to rewrite our developers documentation or create new content on parts of Inkscape that is not well covered (filters...). We already have experienced contributors in our users community, and I'm sure they would be pleased to help us organize booksprints (a docfest could be held just before or after the next LGM in London?). Needless to say I'd be part of it, at least remotely.
We (Elisa and I) are currently trying to free the book we wrote in 2009 (updated in 2013) on Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/fr/apprendre/livres/). Discussions are in progress to dual-license it with a commercial and a CC license so that anyone could read, distribute and modify (or translate?) it freely. Along with funds raising, freeing documentation or artwork are great ways to give to the Inkscape community.
Regards, -- Nicolas