Stuff about Steph

So I just finished my first day at GUADEC, so far so good! People are really nice, it's really cool to see "famous" hackers around, and sitting in the middle of people running only Linux (even greater, running only GNOME!).

As the main conferences don't start till the 28th, today and tomorrow are used for BoF sessions and workshops, so I attended this morning a very instructive workshop lead by the nice team of inventedhere.de, who introduced us to "Open Design Thinking", which, from what I've understood, is a set of practices and methods to design solutions to concrete user problems (I just won a Worst Meaningful Sentence Award).

In practice, we tried to solve the file management problem. Splitted up in four teams, we followed that process :

• Listening to real users interview about how they manage their files ;

• Throwing posts-it all over the whiteboard to identify what problems they encounter at doing it ;

• Creating a fictive character to "work for" ; as an example, my team came up with Anna, a 25 y-o medical student who just can't sort her documents (photos and audio are OK thanks to tags) ;

• Brainstorming a bunch of ideas about how to solve/enhance the situation, another good occasion to have fun with posts-it ;

• Voting the best idea in that pool and iterate over and over it ;

• Presenting some kind of prototype/mockup to the rest of the room.

And we did a great job! Each team got really cool ideas, combining meta-data, face recgonition, audio annotation, handwriting, chronology, file context, and a bunch of useful things. Too bad we didn't saved any prototype on paper or something, hopefully the mighty Tracker coupled with Zeitgest might achieve that in a not-so-far future. Personal conclusion of the workshop : if you use the good design process, you can come up with very creative (and effective) solutions in no time (was only 3 hours long).

Great thanks to the inventedhere.de crew! (picture)

I'm going to be faster for the end of the day, that's already a long post, I went to the HIG 3.0 BoF, where Calum Benson told us about the pattern we should follow on the GNOME wiki to describe new widgets : tags / status / description / when to use / current usage / user guide / specification / terminology and some other fields I don't remember. No new widgets for now, but now we know how to report them.

Finally, tonight was the Summer of Code students dinner, was really nice to hang out with them, dinner was good, mentors are fun, so yeah, I'm having a great time. See you tomorrow for another GUADEC report!