[Election Question] Some questions.
Questions for the candidates:
The board's primary role has been to handle Inkscape's assets. How can Inkscape's assets be used to grow the Inkscape community?
Are there specific projects that you think the board should pursue? How would you contribute to them?
Tav
Thanks Tav,
The board's primary role has been to handle Inkscape's assets. How can Inkscape's assets be used to grow the Inkscape community?
Inkscape's most powerful asset is it's authority over it's brand. If a space where the community gathers is blessed as official and linked well like I stated in my previous question, then it has more power to improve Inkscape's whole community. A good candidate is the inkscape forum.
Are there specific projects that you think the board should pursue? How would you contribute to them?
A good example of what I mean would be Kickstarter or Patreon; Inkscape should involve itself more directly with creating and managing funding campaigns. These would both grow community and create a new kind of space where users can contribute (one not yet fully utilized). These kinds of spaces must be managed by the inkscape board more directly as only inkscape itself can lend the authenticity to users seeking to contribute in this way.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Hi Tav,
Good questions... responses herein:
== How can Inkscape's assets be used to grow the Inkscape community? == Inkscape has limited financial resources, but benefits from a sizeable and enthusiastic user base. I'd like to see that community grow and become a self-sustaining entity, where we break down the barriers between developers and users. To this end, I think we should encourage users to give something back to the project... bug triaging, translations, tutorials, extension development and so on. The Hackfest was a great opportunity to bring developers together, and we could strategically invest in supporting and promoting small user-forum events in major cities (in a similar way to the Wikipedia community events) to strengthen the user community. This should be roughly cost-neutral, with Inkscape funds providing advance funding for venue booking etc., which could be either partially or fully recovered through attendee contributions. Other possible options could be funding professional video production for user tutorials, artwork showcasing etc., which would encourage community growth, with funds potentially being recovered through user donations and video streaming revenue.
== Are there specific projects that you think the board should pursue? How would you contribute to them? == I agree with Martin about the potential of crowdfunded development. However, I have a slight concern that this could lead to a proliferation of new features without the necessary quality assurance and maintenance planning. I'd like to ensure that these less glamorous but important project contributions are also encouraged but I'm not convinced that a direct crowdfunding request for something like code documentation or security cleanup would be successful. As such, we also need to encourage contributions to general funds, which could then be used on such projects, if necessary. I liked the idea, raised at the Hackfest, of raising general funding through merchandise sales, video streaming, artwork sales and so on. I would be happy to contribute to the planning of this activity and decisions on any required start-up funding.
Best wishes,
Alex
On 20 August 2015 at 21:07, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
Thanks Tav,
The board's primary role has been to handle Inkscape's assets. How can Inkscape's assets be used to grow the Inkscape community?
Inkscape's most powerful asset is it's authority over it's brand. If a space where the community gathers is blessed as official and linked well like I stated in my previous question, then it has more power to improve Inkscape's whole community. A good candidate is the inkscape forum.
Are there specific projects that you think the board should pursue? How would you contribute to them?
A good example of what I mean would be Kickstarter or Patreon; Inkscape should involve itself more directly with creating and managing funding campaigns. These would both grow community and create a new kind of space where users can contribute (one not yet fully utilized). These kinds of spaces must be managed by the inkscape board more directly as only inkscape itself can lend the authenticity to users seeking to contribute in this way.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
2015-08-20 16:46 GMT+02:00 Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...8...>:
Questions for the candidates:
The board's primary role has been to handle Inkscape's assets. How can Inkscape's assets be used to grow the Inkscape community?
Our biggest assets are our brand, our existing community of users, and the adoption of SVG on the Web. Probably the most important and high profile case of such adoption is Wikimedia Commons.
To make users more involved with the project, I think the obvious thing to do is reducing the barrier to entry for contributing. There are many people in the community who don't know how to program, but are excellent artists. A moderated repository of creative resources (e.g. sets of symbols for the Symbol dialog, extensions, filter presets, alternative icons, and so on) accessible through our website would provide a simple entry point for new contributors. There should be a way to browse and install these resources directly from Inkscape. This is rather important - if we provide a way to conveniently share resources via our website, many people might decide that licensing their artwork under a permissive license is a reasonable price to pay to be able to use them on every machine. Moderators of this repository could be recruited from the community, so it would not require us to spread our somewhat limited developer manpower even thinner.
We could introduce 'installers' for creative resources and extensions. The current process of installing them is not very user friendly. It should not be more difficult than double-clicking on a package. Unfortunately, it would require someone to spend some development cycles on Windows and OSX to make sure that these installers work cross-platform.
From the development side of things, the best thing we can do for the
community is creating more extension points. The simple filter model we have for extensions is very useful, but at the same time rather limited. Some examples of new extension points would be:
* Complex filters with adjustable parameters. Right now one can create a filter and set some parameters, but adjusting them afterwards requires knowledge of the internals of the filter. * Templates, especially procedurally generated ones. We already have a 'new from template' dialog that supports those. * Live effects as extensions in a scripting language, such as Python. This would require cleaning up the live effect API and bringing the Python binding of 2Geom up to speed. * Scripts. This requires the most initial work, but the payoff is probably the biggest, and the feature is very useful even for people who won't contribute anything to Inkscape.
Another issue I mentioned on the hackfest is domain-specific drawing editors. I would classify this as a very long term goal. There is a lot of demand for a vector drawing program that can be extended to cover the needs of a specific community. For example, Inkscape could be extended into a chemical structures editor or an UML editor. This could be done either by better modularization, with those domain-specific editors being standalone applications that link to libinksomething.so, or by making Inkscape extensions sufficiently powerful to allow such things.
Are there specific projects that you think the board should pursue? How would you contribute to them?
I have some experience with organizing large events; In 2012 I managed a conference for chemical students with over 100 attendees. These skills could be helpful when organizing hackfests or similar community events.
I think the board could provide technical direction to Inkscape and relieve some of our accumulated technical debt by funding specific development tasks from general funds obtained from Patreon. AFAIU, Patreon allows people to make a small recurring donation to an organization or artist they like, but it's not tied to a specific project. Kickstarter-style, project-oriented crowdsourcing could work well for adding new exciting features, but we'll have to rely on something else for maintenance stuff. I'm fairly good at code analysis and design, and could handle the technical side of such an effort - define goals for those maintenance projects, and if time permits also implement some of them.
The long term funding goal should be to secure enough recurring contributions to hire one or more full time developers, or at least accumulate enough funds to hire a contractor for a longer period of time.
Regards, Krzysztof
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
participants (5)
-
Alex Valavanis -
Krzysztof Kosiński -
Martin Owens -
Nicolas Dufour -
Tavmjong Bah