It’s not yet accepted but it looks like Dirk-Jan proposed doing a little chat about Modest at Guadec this year.
I figured it’s going to be a tinymail related presentation and maybe, who knows, will others do talks and presentations on the subject in future too? Although I might improve the location by giving it an actual page like the demos page, you can already find my own slides there. I left out the FOSDEM ’06 one as that one was about software design with GObject, not about tinymail. The FOSDEM ’07 one was about tinymail, so it’s available.
Oh .. I might be interested to do some marketing around tinymail. Nothing big though. I’m not sure yet: once Modest and other E-mail clients start getting used, it might automatically sell? Maybe marketing is overkill? The project might not be mature enough? Perhaps it’s just a bad idea? Perhaps it’s a great idea? I also don’t think there are a lot competent marketing people who understand free software (except for two crazy Australians, though that’s not marketing but rather ‘strategic consultancy’, right?).
Boy, it should be clear by now that I truly lack experience in leading a project. The idea of “leading a project” also scares the hell out of me. Given that I’m actually quite incompetent at some important social skills. Well, Daniel Coleman writes in his books about emotional intelligence that being self aware helps a lot. So I’m not fully incompetent! :-). At least one contributor actually wrote on his blog that he’s happy. I’m proud of that achievement! I never thought I could do that through a project (you know, making people happy).
Now these Subversion guys tell us, project leaders, that we need to be careful of both poisonous people and even of not becoming poisonous ourselves. I mostly agree with the end of their presentation (not with everything): that you need to be very careful with quickly identifying people as poisonous.