[Clipart] Update + Prepping Milestone 9 + Happy Holidays

[Jon Phillips]

Hello Everyone,

Almost all of our services are fully functional thanks to Bryce and 
fd.o's Daniel Stone and cworth helping fix up our services. We still 
have several components that need to be looked at, but our wiki is back 
online, our site is up on the newly renovated fd.o servers, cvs works, 
and so does ssh access.

With the holidays and end of the year coming up, now seems like a good 
time to assess the project and chart our course into the new year.

Yes, the server problems we experienced put the project on hold for 
about 3 and a half weeks, but let us use this as a reason to refocus the 
project and refine our vision to" create an archive of clip art that can 
be used for free for any use."

I have looked at the roadmap 
(http://openclipart.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Roadmap) and moved some items 
around. I think for the rest of this month we should try and collect 
clip art related to xmas and then just do a maintenance release. Do you 
all think this is possible? This way we will not really focus on major 
architectural changes, but primarily on getting our systems running 
smoothly once more. The first thing we need is the upload script to 
work. The browse script works and people can download the packages once 
again. Please check the roadmap and edit it in accordance with what you 
see all fit as well.

Jonadab, could you please look at the scripts you created and make sure 
that they are working. Right now there are some glitches with SVG upload 
and the screenshot upload tool. Also, others, please comb the site and 
see what works and what doesn't. Freedesktop.org now uses bugzilla, so 
it is worth the time to setup an account and file bugs. So far there has 
been about a one-day turnaround on bugs I posted for fd.o sitewranglers. 
(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/)

So, hopefully everyone is having a great holidays around the world. I'm 
looking forward to our next release(s). Please comment on this email. I 
would be great to hear from everyone and stir up support from new people 
as well. I'm personally looking forward to getting DMS up and running.

In other news, I have just moved to the bay area and had a meeting with 
Creative Commons assistant director, Neeru Paharia, last Thursday. She 
is super-excited about our project and they are open to collaborating 
with us in the future. Also, I'm writing up a list of ways to 
cross-promote both projects for her. This was a *great* meeting. I spoke 
on a panel with her at the sfmoma about a month ago and we have become 
friends since.

Two projects of theirs really are related to our work. One is this site, 
ccmixter.org, where people can remix music and re-upload their tracks. 
User's may see the genesis of a track and where samples come from. To do 
this project, some developers created a similar technology to DMS. I 
think it sounds like it is really woven too heavily into MP3, so I 
suggested that we talk with their tech people and try to collaborate on 
it and possibly adapt their system with our DMS to trim down workload.

Another project of theirs that interests me is a publishing software for 
Mac OS X that embeds metadata (CC XMP) into mp3 files. I know we haven't 
developed this yet, but this is another place that DMS and our tools 
could really help them. My main point though is that we need to work 
with them on cross-promotion and on cutting down workload, as many of 
our goals overlap.

Sooo, I didn't intend for this email to be so long, but I'm hoping that 
everyone can sense some energy in the project and help smooth out our 
transfer to the new fd.o servers and we can get a our next release out 
by the end of DEC.

Happy Holiday!
Jon