March 2023 - Inkscape Vectors

Inkscape 1.3 About Screen Contributor Voting until April 9
by Maren Hachmann 05 Apr '23

05 Apr '23

Hi Inkscape Contributors! It's that time of the year again :) We invite you to cast your vote on the 5 awesome About Screen Contest submissions that were favorited by 242 voting Community members. For this year's About Screen Contest, we have had 55 submissions from the Community, 49 of which met the requirements (licensing, branding etc.). These are the 5 items they liked the most: * "A long journey“ by Chris Hildenbrand * "Contest“ by Djelita Abderrahmane * "Creative Growth“ by Chris Hildenbrand * "Isometric Madness“ by Denis Kuznetsky * "Portal“ by Milad Moosavi (in alphabetical order) In this two-step selection process, it is now up to us, the Inkscape Contributors, to select the About Screen that we want for Inkscape 1.3. It's going to be a difficult choice, as they are all so cool :D Step 1: ======= Make sure that you are an Inkscape Member (see previous message or link below), and if you're not one yet, apply for membership and ask 3 of your team mates or other contributors whom you have worked with to confirm your membership. More info: https://inkscape.org/*membership/blog/inkscape-signs-new-fsa-sfc/ Step 2: ======= Visit https://inkscape.org/gallery/=artwork/inkscape-13-about-screen-contributor-… and rank the 5 images by clicking on the little circle right below them in order of preference (most liked first). The voting period starts NOW, and ends on April 9, 23:59 UTC. Voting is on the website only. The announcement of the winning entry is planned for April 11. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this year's About Screen Contest! Maren

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Become an Inkscape Project Member!
by Maren Hachmann 28 Mar '23

28 Mar '23

Dear Inkscape Contributors, it's time to make your Inkscape Membership official! With that come voting rights for all kinds of regular contributors - like translators, social media managers, forum moderators, documentation writers, testers, bug managers, ... - (not only developers anymore!). The first occasion we will be using that for is the Contributor Vote for the ongoing About Screen Contest (contributor voting starts tomorrow, and will end on April 9, 23:59 UTC, there will be a separate email for that!), which is also going to be a bit of a test of the membership system for the upcoming Inkscape PLC election. Read all about it here: https://inkscape.org/*membership/blog/inkscape-signs-new-fsa-sfc/ If you have any questions or are looking for people to confirm your membership request, please ask away in the #general rocket.chat channel. In some cases, it will be helpful to state the nature of your contributions to the project, or to approach those directly who know about your contributions. Please approve membership requests of those whom you know to be a contributor by first hand experience, and do not approve other membership requests, as in the worst case, when the person is not a contributor, that can get your own membership revoked. Thank you to the PLC and the SFC for getting that set up for us, to the website team for providing infrastructure for it, and to the Vectors team for writing about it! Maren

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Developer Meeting Notes, March 26th 2023
by doctormo＠gmail.com 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

Hi Everyone, This is our first online meeting since the hackfest. Last week's meeting was canceled, so don't worry, you haven't missed any previous notes. Event: https://inkscape.org/cals/event/1/ Present this week: Lazur, Martin, Jonathan, Tav, Thomas, Jabier, NPJ, Marc, Mikekov, Rafael Next Meeting: Monday, April 3rd # Release Plans The alpha release has been uncertain because of reports of deadly crashes on undo. The reports have been a little anecdotal though. The general consesnsus at the meeting is that we should release the alpha right away and then re-release a new alpha if this issue can be confirmed in the latest versions after several fixes. Users can be asked to be brave so long as they understand the risks. Martin created the 1.3 and 1.3-alpha0 release objects on the website and Marc is planning on pushing the alpha out in the next two days. The mushroom about screen was used as the graphic for the alpha. We have a few outstanding merge requests which we can merge immediately. The developer team spent some time looking at these merge requests for our activity at the end of the meeting to clear the backlog for the release. # Jabier Wants to merge some branches, some are minor fixes but need to have better and more descriptions to help reviewers understand what they do, we managed to merge two and attach reviewers to three others. Martin wanted to make sure the corners LPE upgrade is scheduled for after 1.3 since it's quite large. # Jonathan Some reverse engineering of the AI format and helping Nicco putting together the ai importer. Progress is going well, text is likely to be supportable. Asked tav about the mesh gradient and having a number of nodes on the edges of the patches. Gtk4 proposal is ready and waiting to be sent to the PLC. An email got lost and has been resent to Marc and Tav was asked to push the PLC election, nominating the proctor Pono to run the election. # Marc Has been busy and sick, with appologies. # Martin Recovering from travel. Made a video for the hackfest which has been well recieved. Bug accellerator program fixes are submitted and merge request management and pushing for the alpha release. Some website fixes for the about screen contest voting. # MikeKov Looking at a bug #4186 with the new preserve path functionality and trying to work around a fitting alogorythem. We could detect when it's not going to work well and then try a different method, or try to remove the constraints but with bad output. Bug has been assigned and tagged for 1.3. #NPJ Experimenting with Apple archetecture. #Rafael Worked on bugs as part of the accelerator program. Fixed four issues this week, one fix actually fixed two issues. Currently looking into a regression in patterns, where you can't see a marker using a pattern as a context-fill. Pair up with Martin to look into the problem. #Tav Spent a little time in the last week playing with Gtk4, try out the new Gtk List View, it wasn't performing quite as expected. It only generates widgets for things which are on the screen, but this makes the scrolling weird. Made a lsit of 10,000 items, it would scroll for a little bit but then it would jump around. # Thomas Doing some experiments for how to fix menus in macOS, contuing the work from the hackfest to see if there's an upstream patch that can be created. # Team Activity We looked at five merge requests with the Approve Please tag, and merged two, and assigned the rest to reviewers for further testing. Thanks to everyone for coming to the meeting, see you all next week!

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Hackfest notes from Pono
by Daniel Pono Takamori 19 Mar '23

19 Mar '23

Hey everyone, Here are some notes I took after collecting some questions from people at the Hackfest. I'll dump them here and here's a link to the markdown file on Nextcloud: https://office.inkscape.org/nextcloud/index.php/s/62TS2K4obzat4Rd At the end of the week I asked the people here what they liked about the project, what could be improved, how was the Hackfest and what can SFC and I do to better support the project. After I presented these comments and some of my own thoughts about them, we opened the conversation up to discussion and the bits at the bottom are the resulting conversations. Thanks again for having me, and I'm looking forward to building out the in-person events so everyone can come or participate to the best of their abilities. -Pono ## Things to celebrate about Inkscape and it's community There's a good spirit of volunteering and people taking on tasks that are interesting to them. This goes both ways though and sometimes means there are tasks that get left behind for no one to pick up. Liberal code contribution culture which has enabled lots of innovation and creativity. Receptive to new ideas. People are empowered to express themselves, regardless of their position in the world. People focused project, doesn't require lots of technical expertise and has a low bar to picking up. Mature project with lots of good momentum. People love Inkscape! ## Improvements to be made to Inkscape and it's community Diversity of participants was something that came up a lot. Working to have better outreach to make sure all groups and teams are represented. How can we get younger users and contributors? Make it easier for people to contribute non-code (I'm not sure what the processes around documentation, how-tos, etc work). We need better onboarding docs so we don't have to explain "basics" over and over again. "Inkscape on Twitch" - related to other outreach efforts Spending money... we need to come up with a more formal budget to support all teams and I (pono) think that a budget will make it easier to get money to flow since when things are within an accepted budget, it's easier to get things moving. Listening and communicating with users - surveys, forums, Rocketchat, etc. We need more dialogue with users (technical and non). How are artists, scientists and makers using Inkscape? Formalizing subgroups - with fear of over administering, how do we codify the teams so that they can operate autonomously but be included in all decision making processes? **pono idea - seats for each subteam on the PLC and more communication between groups** How do we get Inkscape in schools? This is something SFC has been thinking about in general ## Hackfest ### Things that went well Relationship building is unmatched in person. This was a great opportunity to meet and chat and the travel being handled if needed, was great. Length was good, maybe a long weekend could get more people. In person communication makes it much easier to clear up miscommunications and intentions. The venue was great and everything was made easy to focus on work and relationships. ### Things to be improved Calling it a 'Hackfest' might've discouraged teams from participating and we *need* all teams to participate. 15-25 people would be a better group. More diversity among participants, *pono let's get some scholarships for new and minority contributors* Open space and loud conversations made it hard to focus, providing quiet spaces would help. More thought into how to include remote participants. Have one with users? Does it have to be this event? More regular cadence makes it easier to get people here. ## SFC - how can we do better and what have we done well being clear about our limits SFC is not just an anonymous thing to help with managing things, we need to establish a more close relationship rewarding volunteers financial help was great and improved attendance Pono/SFC is very helpful for networking between FOSS projects, like introducing the right people and thus increasing the chances of successful collaborations Be a sparring partner for discussing policy & fundamental issues, "outside" person that can help when an outsider is need. E.g. CoC issues within the PLC, election proctor Also to escalate things within SFC if progress is slow. SFC should monitor foundations for grant opportunities & forward them to potentially relevant member projects making sure contracts and money flow smoothly SFC done a good job with mediation and spending money ## Notes during discussion hackfest rebuilds energy 5-10 is good for hacking OutreachFest colocating an event? FOSDEM! https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/ conference in Northeast? develop PenPot relationship Jabier and Adam Belis what we need from Inkscape to use PenPot for UI Scribus? Blender? subteams marin - didn't like term leader, have an organizer, contact, representative can switch off! describe as not one person, but a team collectively divvies up responsibilities if you want to be a formal group, you need to meet a set of criteria jonathan and ted thinking about it community building things graphics for teams, hat or graphics mousepads :P vectors, developers, documentaion, testing, translation, UX https://inkscape.org/user/teams/ recognized groups have duties benefits: PLC can delegate technical decisions to dev team, outreach to vectors, etc formalize duties and expectations keep outside FSA probably partners program GNOME has a Sponsors section allows relationship management *ChromeOS* ?? maybe we can talk with Google? how to package for those chromebooks schools helps schools administer the program krita and blender are on steam maybe need someone android? google funding for gtk backend? putting out more video for exposure - Chris attractive to sponsors build up vectors to make more content budget for video how does krita do it? need to try more things what do people like from Inkscape? we don't really know Youtube channel? surveys! demographics working with TuxDigital presskit press list for SFC Plausible website is contributor friendly not marketing slick friendly branding is not a singular thing it's there to tell your story "the only vector software that is a community project" more concious of public image

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