I wouldn't even take an ipod.. things can get nicked so often when your on a 'round-the-world' trip, especially on public transport. I met an embedded developer on a recent van trip to tunisia, he brought bagloads of gadgets (gps, walkometer, pda), but it was all very old and cheap wares, and the power consumption is minimal with old gear (which is another reason not to take too much).
Before I go on this rant, there was a lot of talk on the mailing lists and the forums about what went wrong. This is just my subjective voice.
I've been following the mailing list since May, and saw as things started falling apart by mid-August. IMO there were many great contributions: niklas weidal did some absolutely gobstopping images. Who did some excellent GDM proposals, and many others contributed with original ideas later in August. However, the process was stifled somewhat to a rigid plan set out at the Paris Conference, and many contributors got very little further than submitting their first few efforts, before being rejected by "The Powers that Be".
There was a Proposal stage, with some great ideas thrown in (a summary of those ideas is in the link above). At the end of the Proposal stage Mark dropped into the mailing list to point at one picture as a basis for all of edgy artwork (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/EdgyProp osals/Summary_18JULY2006?action=AttachFile&do=get& target=lsplash.png). All further proposals were rejected by this point due to the Paris Plan, and the Council spent a great deal of time pondering on what to accept, and finally around mid-August decided to scrap all artwork unrelated to this image. Above all, it fell down to 3 member's contributions, which had encapsulated the "gloss" aspect that everyone was raving on about, but no one could figure out. Unfortunately, many users didn't like the selected outcome, as cogently put by one user on the mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/2006- September/003107.html (BTW this is not my opinion -- I thought the image question was very appetizing)
Not surprisingly, the existing contributors stopped helping out, presumably thinking their work was unappreciated rather than fixing the selected images, and when the final Polish stage arrived at the end of August, all the work was lumped onto 3 people. Around the same time there were a great deal of new contributors, yet they were all snubbed because they were not working on the existing artwork. Mark decided to revert to Dapper and try and brainstorm something with the 3 long-standing contributors. Whether that turned out well, I don't know, as I've long since stopped using Ubuntu as my distro de jour.
So, in the end the whole process became massively inflexible due to a one cycle pre-engineered artwork submission process, and a lack of direction from Mark when it mattered, because although plenty of people wanted to contribute, they couldn't. Yes, the story is much longer: there weren't the appropriate tools / the Wiki was a mess, but when I look at the Fedora Artwork process, they thrive on exactly the same toolset, so I don't think that can be used as an argument.
I've embedded the email in a flash link -- not 100% accessible, but you can display an alternative image/form if the browser has flash turned off. In general, I don't find micromanaged forms very future-proof, as can be seen by the number of blogs/wikis that have form spam.
Slashdot Mirror
there's a demo that is OS agnostic (java applet) on the washington Phototourism page.
I wouldn't even take an ipod.. things can get nicked so often when your on a 'round-the-world' trip, especially on public transport. I met an embedded developer on a recent van trip to tunisia, he brought bagloads of gadgets (gps, walkometer, pda), but it was all very old and cheap wares, and the power consumption is minimal with old gear (which is another reason not to take too much).
just my 2 cents from doing these trips often.
Here is some more links:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/EdgyPropo sals/Summary_18JULY2006
o sals/WallpaperProposal
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/EdgyProp
plus everything under https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/EdgyPropo sals/
Before I go on this rant, there was a lot of talk on the mailing lists and the forums about what went wrong. This is just my subjective voice.
I've been following the mailing list since May, and saw as things started falling apart by mid-August. IMO there were many great contributions: niklas weidal did some absolutely gobstopping images. Who did some excellent GDM proposals, and many others contributed with original ideas later in August. However, the process was stifled somewhat to a rigid plan set out at the Paris Conference, and many contributors got very little further than submitting their first few efforts, before being rejected by "The Powers that Be".
There was a Proposal stage, with some great ideas thrown in (a summary of those ideas is in the link above). At the end of the Proposal stage Mark dropped into the mailing list to point at one picture as a basis for all of edgy artwork (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/EdgyProp osals/Summary_18JULY2006?action=AttachFile&do=get& target=lsplash.png). All further proposals were rejected by this point due to the Paris Plan, and the Council spent a great deal of time pondering on what to accept, and finally around mid-August decided to scrap all artwork unrelated to this image. Above all, it fell down to 3 member's contributions, which had encapsulated the "gloss" aspect that everyone was raving on about, but no one could figure out. Unfortunately, many users didn't like the selected outcome, as cogently put by one user on the mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/2006- September/003107.html (BTW this is not my opinion -- I thought the image question was very appetizing)
Not surprisingly, the existing contributors stopped helping out, presumably thinking their work was unappreciated rather than fixing the selected images, and when the final Polish stage arrived at the end of August, all the work was lumped onto 3 people. Around the same time there were a great deal of new contributors, yet they were all snubbed because they were not working on the existing artwork. Mark decided to revert to Dapper and try and brainstorm something with the 3 long-standing contributors. Whether that turned out well, I don't know, as I've long since stopped using Ubuntu as my distro de jour.
So, in the end the whole process became massively inflexible due to a one cycle pre-engineered artwork submission process, and a lack of direction from Mark when it mattered, because although plenty of people wanted to contribute, they couldn't. Yes, the story is much longer: there weren't the appropriate tools / the Wiki was a mess, but when I look at the Fedora Artwork process, they thrive on exactly the same toolset, so I don't think that can be used as an argument.
[/rant]I've embedded the email in a flash link -- not 100% accessible, but you can display an alternative image/form if the browser has flash turned off. In general, I don't find micromanaged forms very future-proof, as can be seen by the number of blogs/wikis that have form spam.