Archive for the ‘AGO’ Category

So this has been my major concern in the last few days.
One of AGOv3 objectives is to be an hight quality artwork repository for GNOME desktop. Thus, there is the need for moderation. Since AGO’s development community is short on staff we need to find a efficient way to have submissions checked out. On the other hand the community should also have the opportunity to say what they think should or shouldn’t be accepted.

In response to the problem I’ve already gather several ideas among the community and tried to compile what I think is a good solution to the problem.

• Every work should be submitted to an initial moderation process where it is voted by several moderators if it is accepted or not
• After being accepted, it will be made fully public. Users can now vote on it. This votes will decide if a work will stay in the system or not.
• In case of having a negative rating for a certain period of time it is removed from the public gallery and moved to the author’s draft folder.
• The most active artwork developers are perfect candidates to become moderators. That can be seen as a way to recognize and award their commitment to the community

You’ll find a complete description of the process in here.

However I’m not fully happy with this solution. So if you have any suggestion, please, do tell.

Well, in the past days I’ve been idling in #gnome-art @ irc.gnome.org. I haven’t had the opportunity to meet much of the community and I definitely should do that. They certainly have valuable ideias to the project.

Thomas(my mentor) and I have been slowly planning the database schema. Being this probably one of the most important steps in the whole process there’s no need to rush things up.
All ideas can be found in the gnome wiki where I’m updating previous ideas aswell as adding new ones.

But let’s explain some ideas, that’s why this page exists.

Authentication
Implement ACL to manage user permissions in the system functionalies seems to be a good option since it let’s easily change user rights whenever needed. Not that we need to be changing constantly but we are looking for a expandable system, so let’s not hardcode too much basic features. In later development this can help to speed up code writing.

XML+RPC
Ok. So one of the features I’d love to implement would be this one. This integrates art.gnome.org with 3rd party applications, which can be beneficial to everyone.
If you aren’t familiar with XML+RPC, it would allow us to launch an API so 3rd party applications could interact with AGO. A possible example is to download backgrounds, themes, icon sets directly to a GNOME Desktop using a small application based on AGO API.

That’s all for now.

If you have an idea you think can help the project or just want to comment about, please do. Every feedback is welcomed.

So it seems that my proposal got accepted in Google’s Summer of Code program. For those of you who don’t SOC: Google’s invites and fund students to work on an open source project while being mentored by the project Organization. During three months, over 900 students will be working in the projects they applied to.

My mentoring organization will be GNOME Foundation and my application was about developing art.gnome.org Version 3(AGO3).
So for the next three months I’ll be developing AGO3 and I’ll be using this page as a log to my experience with the SOC program.

So, about the project:
art.gnome.org is an artwork site for GNOME’s Community. Users can submit their artwork and share it.
This new version to be developed will give new life to the project, where users will have a major role in what content they want to see. Let’s say, a more web 2.0 view
Anyway, you can read everything about it in my SOC proposal