Gallery Sprint in Mountain View

The majority of the Gallery team is at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA to assess Gallery as a whole and figure out what we should do next. No hard decisions have been made yet, and we'd love to hear any input you have on our development mailing list.

There are a lot of things we're taking into account including:

• The usability research that's been done for the past few months including the Season of Usability, some work from the University of Michigan including personas here and here, and some wireframes we've been working on.
• The web application research and prototyping the team has been doing for the past month or so. You can find all the code for this in svn here and the majority of discussion has been on the gallery-devel mailing list. Check the gallery-devel archives on nabble and look for threads about evaluating frameworks and "Gx".
• The experience we've all had delivering Gallery 2 over the last few years.

Why do all this now? Gallery 2.3 is out the door and the feedback has been pretty positive, but we would really love to fix a lot of things about Gallery. Its footprint should be smaller and the whole product should be a lot more lightweight, it should be easier to use and easier for anyone to quickly jump in and work on Gallery themes and modules, and it should be easier to integrate Gallery into other applications.

We got a lot done yesterday and so far today, and as we work on things until Friday evening, there are a few places you can look to see where things are:

• initial agenda
• some pictures - We'll have more albums in more places next week once everyone gets home!
• shared notes - If we decide to stick with this system, it'll move to a more permanent URL later

Once the week is over and things have had a few days to settle, we'll post the full report!