Mark Doffman
Mark has been consistently working on transforming AT-SPI (the GNOME Accessibility and UI automation technology) into a D-Bus based cross-desktop project. From nothing a year ago, working with Mike Gorse from Novell, he s now got something that more or less works and it’s getting a lot of focus and testing as we plan for GNOME 3.0. I’m looking forward to a brave new future for cross toolkit accessibility on the Linux desktop.

John Carr
John came to us from working on Conduit, and he s continued on his dream of making all the devices and web services of the world talk seamlessly to each other. John’s been in charge of pushing the Wizbit project along and now the core of this is pretty stable, he is going to be turning his eye to working on using Wizbit for synchronisation.

Jürg Billeter
A stunning hacker who needs no introduction! Jürg’s been continuing to hack on Vala and it s getting more and more mature each week. His main work, however has been on the stunning tracker-vstore, a branch of tracker that brings full RDF capabilities, which Philip van Hoof has been blogging about. I’ll be writing a biggish blog post on this soon and what RDF could really mean for the desktop experience.

Karl Lattimer
Karl came to us from working on UI at Nokia. At Codethink he’s continued to focus on graphics technology and user experience, bringing his keen eye to Wizbit, amongst other things. One of the most impressive things I’ve seen for a while was Karl s kinetic scrolling widget for the Wizbit timeline view. I m hoping we can turn this into something more general in the future.

Ryan Lortie
Another hacker who needs no introduction, Ryan’s our low-level infrastructure guy. He s been working on GNIO, a library to do network operations using GIO stream abstractions and continuing to hack on DConf, which is gradually coming together. He s also been helping Jürg out with Vala.

Mukund Sivaraman
I knew Muks from his GIMP work, and his work on Herb is really impressive. Muks is mostly working on top secret stuff that we can t talk about, unfortunately!

Peter Charlton
Our documentation guy. This guy knows how to write and knows how to take something vague and unintelligable and turn it into crystal clarity. Invaluable!

Of course, through all this I’ve been here, dancing about architecture and generally doing the best I can to hold the whole shebang together. I’ve been mostly working on some top secret stuff which hopefully will be getting opened up soon. I’ll dance about that then.

Update
Looks like my blog got hacked and this post was replaced by spam. Wordpress now upgraded and I’ve recreated this post, updating some of the links.

The main architectural aims will be to cut drastically the amount of of IPC used and generally be lighter than AT-SPI is at the moment. We’ll be working to support both ATK and QAccessible. I’ve applied for a project on freedesktop.org to house this, so when those are up and running that’ll be the main place for discussion. In the meantime, feel free to ask questions on the accessibility-atspi mailing list at the linux foundation or for IRC, #a11y on GIMPNet.

Update:
I should also note we will also have a very strong focus on supporting automated testing tools, so anyone out there working in that area is more then welcome to join in and tell us what needs fixing with AT-SPI.