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<title>freedesktop.org: A Working Proposal</title>
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<h2 align=center>freedesktop.org: A Working Proposal</h2>
<h3>Why freedesktop.org and The Status Quo</h3>
<p>freedesktop.org was created by our community for our community: the open source desktop. We enjoyed a rapid succession of early successes and have had a continued stream of commonly useful specifications and technologies emerge from it. Most importantly, freedesktop.org was erected to reflect not external needs and requirements but our own processes.</p>
<p>We do recognize that the current organization, as such currently may or may not exist, is sub-optimal. However we also maintain that the concept of a shared technology incubator is in itself valid. Therefore we make the following proposal to steer freedesktop.org towards being a more practical and productive place for the creation and improvement of shared technologies. This will in turn result in the happy by-product of providing a more coherent set of products for our users, industry and 3rd party developers.</p>
<h3>The Proposal, Part 1: Stakeholders First</h3>
<p>Web based collaboration software will be provided at freedesktop.org wherein individual participants from projects engaged in open source desktop development may create identities. These identities will then be used to mark the interest and implementation level of the respective projects in the specifications and software available on freedesktop.org. This will raise the visibility of participation (or lack thereof) in specific approaches and allow reporting and change notification to be automated.</p>
<p>Combined with responsible introductions of new specifications and technologies, as a community we will be able to measure the status and health of any given technology when it comes to shared support. This in turn exposes consensus or lack thereof. Once a given specification has reached a critical level of support, currently generally defined as having the support of both of the primary desktop projects (KDE and GNOME) as well as any primary stakeholder projects (e.g. X.org for X related technologies), then these technologies will be handed off to a standards body for formalization and announcement. We propose the FSG and OSDL respectively for these formalization activities.</p>
<p>The goal is to add as little overhead as possible to the processes while allowing us to easily monitor collaboration and measure when a given technology has matured to the point that it can and should be codified.</p>
<h3>The Proposal, Part 2: An Advisory Committee</h3>
<p>A committee made up of members from the leading desktop projects will be formed to aid in communication and, when necessary, conflict resolution that may arise around freedesktop.org activities.</p>
<p>We recognize that the majority of open source desktop developers are generally supportive of but lacking in time and motivation to keep up with every development at freedesktop.org. Therefore the committee will provide community triage to ensure that the proper people from the relevant communities and spheres of influence are involved. This will ensure that the proper people are involved allowing the stakeholder-driven process to work.</p>
<p>As an institution, the committee will not itself make technology decisions nor steer the specification processes, though individuals on the committee may be personally involved in various freedesktop.org efforts.</p>
<h3>Measurements of Success</h3>
<p>Near term success will be measured in the level of support for freedesktop.org within the open source community and the rate and quality of specifications that emerge. Mid-term, the level of satisfaction of open source desktop users and ISVs will be an important metric.</p>
<p>But the ultimate measure of success will be found in the enjoyment and energy levels of those participating in freedesktop.org as it is from that wellspring that the momentum we are all looking for will emerge.</p>
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