State of the Kitchen

Hear, hear!

Now the announcement has been such a big success, discussions are already on-going in the mailing-lists (again, you’re all amazing, guys!), we need now to set up strong bases for Mageia. We will come back to each of these points with more details but here is a overview.

Infrastructure & tools

Infrastructure setup is one of the most important things. It has started by using temporary resources to have main services online as soon as possible:

  • The Mageia blog went online yesterday (in English only for now, we’ll set other locales up very soon)
  • A temporary wiki has been opened to help everyone register in the various proposed teams; these teams will have dedicated mailing-lists for starters, will have to name one representative + one delegate, then they can start working on their various tasks (see below)
  • User Forums are also on the way – we will have an official English-speaking forum, together with links to local forums which are already active and ready to welcome users from different countries (Blogdrake, mandrivausers-de, MLO…). If you think a language is not supported by an existing local forum, please email us at mageia-contact AT gmail.com so that we can add for now a new instance on Mageia server(s). Special thanks to Paul Willard and Raphael Jadot who will lead this hard task 🙂
  • We have already many proposals for Mageia mirrors coming in
  • Discussions are on-going and we’re working on the build-system setup; that will be the first major technical milestone for all of us to start to cook the real meat.

Logo

We need a logo (and a great one!) and a global design for Mageia!

We’ve already drafted these logo guidelines (please review them carefully) and you will find all current proposals in this gallery. Feel free to upload new ones and/or comment on existing ones.

Organisation

We are still working on creating the association for Mageia. It will allow to have a board officially leading the project, to get some funding, to ask for various kinds of help and to be able to insure Mageia future.

Statutes are still being written (in French) and the founding board should be constituted soon (we hope it will be balanced and effective, although specifically dedicated to the founding task; renewal elections by third will start later on). This board will then lead the kitchen, coordinating with each team delegates to drive the various aspects of the distribution (design, development, testing, production, distribution, advocacy… etc) forward.

We still have open questions which we’d like feedback about before we reach a final decision. We will detail our understanding of the functions of the organisation in a following post and collect advices on specific points before we decide what to do.

Oh, by the way, you can now make donations using Paypal and/or bank transfer. Funding is critical so we can set up then above independent infrastructure and the various other needed pieces.

Finally we have already many contacts with other communities around Mandriva. Unity Linux is already having a very active part in the discussions. Others are welcome to join: just contact us on IRC, via the mailing-lists or by personal email.

Again, we’re so grateful for your support!

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Thank you!

We don’t know from where to begin this, so let’s just start it the most obvious way.

Guys, thank you.

Thank you so much for your enthusiasm, your calls for joining, for helping this project, for providing insights about hardware infrastructure, build system, community management, artwork, so many things!

It’s been different for each of us, but the idea of making something different has been brewing for months now. Things really came together a few days ago as discussions were becoming more concrete, and now here we are.

We knew that it was an important move; that we would probably miss a few steps and that we should proceed with care. Your reception of the news just exceeded our wildest dreams.

Seeing so many people from the cooker and user communities, as well as people who left in the previous years, converging all together is confirming our resolution that making the distribution fully community-based was, is, the right move.

It’s not about just a small group of people, it’s about what we all can do with a technology we design, build and use every day through an organisation that ensures collaboration, innovation, production and benefits to everyone.

Again, this won’t be easy, instant or straightforward. We’re laying down the first organisational steps so all of us can start working on this new project.

So, let’s start together!

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