In reply to "Fedora + Creative Arts"

Jon talk about encouraging "creative" people to use Fedora and his ideas about achieving this.

Well, the answer is really simple: creative people are just normal people, they work in the same way as the other and the others, the main motivation is to see their work (on which may have wasted several hours) get used by people.

Look at desktop wallpapers as a perfect example: every graphics guy love to create wallpapers and to share them, a lot of people get into graphics by creating wallpapers. At the same time, of course we can have only one default wallpaper in a certain Fedora release, so the motivational factor for creating wallpapers is low.

The answer here is to provide a place where people can submit their unofficial wallpapers and have them exposed to a large number of users and at the same time a place where users can get a lot of wallpapers (in various styles, colors, formats) and find something fitting their own taste.

This can work either as a gallery hosted by the Fedora Project or as an aggregation of resources posted elsewhere by various authors. Either way, the graphics have to be discoverable and easily searchable.

Here is a cherry we could add on top, to increase even more the motivation from contributors: have as part of Fedora Weekly News a "wallpaper of the week" category.

Note: we have content hosted elsewhere and tagged, some examples: Flickr, deviantART, Fedora Forum, but they are not known enough, not easily discoverable and not tied to a central point, from where the users can learn about them (and all use proprietary services/hosting).

And I have not finished yet, there is another answer: the tools, which are not available or just not emphasised enough.

Here is one example about the tools: Inkscape is currently the star of FOSS graphic applications (and definitely the tools we use and love the most at the Art Team). However, the application is not included by default in any Fedora spin (not in Core, not in Desktop).

The answer I get when I ask about promoting the application to a spin? Usually none. Sometime I may get "create your own Art spin". Which, IMO, is just not good enough. It does not work for promotion, it does not work for attracting new people, it does not work as a selling point for us, it differentiate us from other distros in a negative way.