I could possibly see it coming. Sitting on a draft mail to the list for Advocacy, chit-chat and event planning in India I managed to misplace it completely. So what’s in this post is a faint recollection of what I had drafted along with hopefully additional ideas.

The list has been existing for a while now (from 2003 December onwards) but there’s not much that’s been done through the list. This is to be construed as a “Call to Arms” for pushing GNOME visibly across India. The mission of the GNOME Marketing Team can be taken to be a jump-off point. The idea that was around when the list was proposed was:

+ Enabling companies/developers doing work with GNOME in India to connect to others through the list
+ Coordinating and planning “show-n-tell” sessions at various places
+ Track GNOME desktop deployments across the country
+ Figure out what can be done in education with regards to GNOME

With the foss.in Project Days around the corner (where I think Shreyas and Sayamindu are cooking up something – folks can you do that on the above list please ?) this seems like a nice time to discuss what can be done. Additionally, this can perhaps be extrapolated to what are the easy to do “show-n-tell” for various tech-fests and other meets which are coming up.

There’s a substantially more number of developers/companies working with and on GNOME so it seems to be a nicer idea to spread the reason to be talking more about it. The obvious question that I get asked is “why should I be on this list since I am already filing bugs/posting to other GNOME lists/insert-your-favorite-task”. It is a fair question. As on date the list does not offer anything that would make it sticky for companies or developers. But given that it is right now relatively low traffic, it might not be a bad idea to start being on the list (and the channel #gnome-india ?) while spreading the message across. There’s another planned blog on “why you should be here” but that’s for another day.

Tracking GNOME desktop deployments would assume increasing importance if coupled with tracking the usage of localisation. I never tire of repeating that it is time enough that folks started to really “use” localisation on the UI and the localisation framework (input-rendering-printing) so as to enable all the existing rough edges to be polished.

The education bit would perhaps be best explained by Sayamindu, the short bit is coming up with a list of technical stuff (I prefer to call them developer fundamentals) which would allow students to begin contributing to GNOME. If he does not blog, more on that later.