Create mechanisms that allow inter-project collaboration.
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

Motivation

It's always great when sibling open source projects foster common activties for shared goals. GNOME and KDE have a long history in cooperating in the Open Source scenario and I personally think that it'd be great if we could have more communiction and shared activties.

Plan

Foster a timeline of activties that both communities can co-organise together and a set of goals for improving the outreach and awareness of both communities.

Community

This task doesn't involve any immediate tasks, but more, a communication plan with the KDE e.V. Community/Engagement Team to share ideas and help each project mutually to improve their outreach. From sharing experiences, ideas, sharing publications (social medias), share feedbacks from userbases and share conversations regarding feature requests and things that would make sense for both projects to foster. Not to mention the opportunities of shared attendance for events and organisation of community activties that benefit both projects.

Risks and needs

As any inter-project long-term plan, it requires both communities to respect and help each other and requires a long-term commitment. It is true that KDE and GNOME have different visions for their respective DE's but they share one FOSS philosophy. There's always the risk of this idea not working out.

Champion

I'm Claudio, I contribute to the Engagement Team of the GNOME project. I mostly manage social medias and do some website development and mentoring for the project. I also maintain some Foundation-led initiatives and contribute to Engagement Team's Core mission and activities.

For me this idea would be an incredible benefit for both communities and also reduce the feel that both projects are competing each-other and empower both communities to work as united. There's no KDE vs GNOME or whose DE is better, just two different DE's with different philosophies and envisions for their design and operability, tightened and connected by one big goal, further reach out the FOSS statement and make people love Linux and demonstrate the power of Open Source. (Okay this sentence is quite dramatic, but it works).

Interest

  • No people yet :3
cwunder created this task.Jun 30 2022, 12:03 PM

As much as I agree with this goal, please use the goal template to expand on the goal description!

ognarb added a subscriber: ognarb.

How about convergence with Gnome? Provide the tooling to make apps that can feel at home in both Gnome and KDE. QT apps can fit in with both Mac and Windows, so why not the two main linux desktops? Now that would be something.

As much as I agree with this goal, please use the goal template to expand on the goal description!

Oh, @niccolove, I apologise! (Also, for the delay) I was on vacation! Let me update the description :)

BTW, where can I find the template?

The first step can be fixing https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/issues/255

@fusionfuture I don't think this is the appropriate place to report a GNOME issue.

cwunder updated the task description. (Show Details)Jul 17 2022, 12:22 AM

@adam just updated it! Thank you for your patience and for sharing the guidelines. I apologise for unresponsiveness again and for taking all this time.

I just submitted a merge request to at-spi2-core to improve accessibility and I find that the accessibility goal can also achieve this goal partially.

Something like restore Desktop Summit https://desktopsummit.org/

duffus added a subscriber: duffus.Aug 17 2022, 4:46 PM

Something like restore Desktop Summit https://desktopsummit.org/

GNOME don't seem to be interested in another Desktop Summit. They turned down our previous offers to do another one

There is however the joint Linux App Summit

Something like restore Desktop Summit https://desktopsummit.org/

This is before my era at GNOME. I can check with the rest of the Engagement Team what are the thoughts on Desktop Summit.

Something like restore Desktop Summit https://desktopsummit.org/

This is before my era at GNOME. I can check with the rest of the Engagement Team what are the thoughts on Desktop Summit.

see my comment above

see my comment above

I saw of course. Doesn't change the fact that I'm not sure who you refer to "GNOME". I have no idea who you talked with. Hence. why I prefer checking with the Team what was the decision-making process behind this :)

See also: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/evolving-a-strategy-for-2022-and-beyond/9759

Initiative 2: Diverse and sustainable Linux app ecosystem. I spoke at the Linux App Summit about the work that GNOME and Endless has been supporting in Flathub, but this is an example of something which has a great overlap between commercial, technical and mission-based advantages. The key goal here is to improve the financial sustainability of participating in our community, which in turn has an impact on the diversity of who we can expect to afford to enter and remain in our community. We believe the existence of this is critically important for individual developers and contributors to unlock earning potential from our ecosystem, through donations or app sales. In turn, a healthy app ecosystem also improves the usefulness of the Linux desktop as a whole for potential users. We believe that we can build a case for commercial vendors in the space to join an advisory board alongside with GNOME, KDE, etc to input into the governance and contribute to the costs of growing Flathub.

This proposal is very focussed on non-technical aspects of collabortation

From a technical PoV there is quite some potential for work towards better compatibility between KDE and Gnome, e.g. around running KDE apps in a Gnome environment. Perhaps that should be included in this goal

adam added a comment.Aug 21 2022, 5:19 PM

Notes from the refinement session:

  • It's not clear what we want to achieve with this, perhaps there is a larger goal that these activities would be a step towards?
  • Following that, the name of the Goal isn't very exciting right now, perhaps it could be changed to reflect the larger idea that this proposal could evolve into. This matters because a selected Goal will be with us for quite a bit, we'll use it in communication, promo stuff etc.
  • The plan lacks some detail on what technical collaboration would make sense.
  • Otherwise, people feel it's a good idea, bur maybe not big enough for a Goal that will be in the focus for the community for ~2 years.

From a technical PoV there is quite some potential for work towards better compatibility between KDE and Gnome, e.g. around running KDE apps in a Gnome environment. Perhaps that should be included in this goal

Those kinds of decisions are outside of my power. And would require more factual discussions within GNOME's Discourse or Matrix.

cwunder renamed this task from More activities with GNOME to Create mechanisms that allows inter-project collaboration..Aug 21 2022, 6:02 PM

@adam to be honest, my intentions here were mostly to just say "Hey, would love if we could have more activities that span across both our organisations", from social or engagement activities to actual meetups and stuff. It is true that I have no concrete plan, and I mostly originally created this issue as a fluff, just for showing appreciation that both projects can achieve nice community things together.

Having that said, I realise that what I originally meant with this issue was that there could be platforms and mechanisms that both projects could interact more with each other. I'm kinda tired of the infamous KDE vs GNOME paradigm, and people often compare what's better when IMHO reality should be that both projects work towards similar goals but ultimately have different embodiments of how these same things are designed and executed.

I believe this goal could be closed, as I mentioned before, there's no factual action to be done, and possibly what I truly want is to be able to communicate with the Engagement folks over KDE and maybe discuss some potential cool ideas of things that we could do together.

Regarding the technical side of things, I'm more than happy to chat over Matrix, but I would not be the right person for that, as I'm more an Engagement-person on the project.

Thanks!

I just submitted a merge request to at-spi2-core to improve accessibility and I find that the accessibility goal can also achieve this goal partially.

Only saw this now. Thank you for the contribution :)

adam added a comment.Aug 27 2022, 12:15 PM

Thanks @cwunder, based on your response, I will not move the Goal proposal to the voting stage, but you're very welcome to talk to our Promo team to discuss the overall ideas of visible collaboration between the two projects.

wrobelda renamed this task from Create mechanisms that allows inter-project collaboration. to Create mechanisms that allow inter-project collaboration..Aug 30 2022, 3:10 PM