Hi,

Some thoughts on near-term goals and steps to get things rolling (for those who want to play):

- to immediately have a "GNOME server" I am thinking we could take http://mugshot.org/account and create a version with a different theme and stick it at http://something.gnome.org/account (same for a few of the related pages, like the login screen). For the theme I was thinking a clean black-and-white thing similar to my GUADEC slides - for the domain name, no good ideas yet.

For now we could just point DNS to the same server hosting mugshot, which isn't too much work, and DNS can always be pointed elsewhere later if we move the hosting.

The current mugshot.org hosting ia only a few servers but should be fine for development purposes.

- Jeff said he would set up online.gnome.org with mediawiki and we'll move online-desktop.org there. (maybe online.gnome.org should be the end user server for creating accounts and stuff, and we should put this on online-wiki.gnome.org or something?)

- Bryan Clark suggested we should start to dogfood nuking our homedir every week - so that would prioritize "do something about ssh keys and .emacs" - if we keep this simple and avoid syncing anything big to the server, I think we can get it done pretty quickly.

- Owen suggested that we set an explicit policy of "no API/ABI stability for online desktop stuff" until we get things much more mature - i.e. put the new APIs here in a "pre-GNOME-1.0" state. Release team and others may need to advise us on how to make this clear.

- we are thinking of just using desktop-devel-list for discussion, since this is really about "the desktop" proper, vs. a google group or another gnome.org mailing list

- another interesting short-term goal would be to get existing apps that do networking stuff to use the info from the GNOME server. So e.g. have AbiWord collab work with your name/avatar/etc. from the server, and have F-Spot automatically know your Flickr account if you've put it in already.

- should sort out how to start making "releases" of the online mode of the desktop - I mean, say we want to have "GNOME Online Desktop 0.1" release - how would we go about that?

- BigBoard is completely dogfood-capable already (and easy to hack on, since it's Python) - one goal would be to just keep improving it. For example, right now there's no way to move the "stocks" (the different widgets) around or configure which ones you have. That's the tip of the iceberg on what needs doing.

- the application-install stuff at http://mugshot.org/applications needs a bit of work to support non-Fedora distributions; it's written to allow that, but we really need volunteers to add Ubuntu etc. These pages should be re-skinned and re-domained to be at online.gnome.org/applications or whatever instead of mugshot.org, but that should be orthogonal to adding multi-distribution support. It's primarily a CSS task to re-skin them.

- one wild idea - say we use a very clean, mostly black-and-white theme for online.gnome.org (I'm thinking along the lines of my guadec slides) - we could also do a similar crisp line-art looking theme for GTK perhaps? visually distinguishing the online mode by default might be sweet, and the more line-art less gray-3D-beveled look would be easier to match to CSS. just an idea. (I'm guessing this "what color to paint it?" question could generate more traffic than most of the substantive issues ;-)

- we have some people diving into the "open service definition"/"free terms of use" question - Luis Villa and James Vasile for example - so that is moving forward

- we would like to see the server side support OpenID. As a consumer, it could allow you to create an account with an OpenID rather than the current email or AIM account. Or as provider, be able to use your online.gnome.org home page as OpenID provider. There are Java libraries available that do all the hard bits.

Havoc