ArsTechnica reports that GNOME 3.0 has been officially announced at the GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC)
>> GNOME 3.0 officially announced... and explained
The path the GNOME community took to this proposal is somewhat complex. When the prospect of GNOME 3 was first discussed by developers in 2005, the concept took on a life of its own among the users who imagined that it would be an audacious reinvention of the desktop with completely new interaction paradigms and a new kind of user interface. This pie-in-the-sky vision was referred to as ToPaZ, word play on the phrase three-point-zero.
>> GNOME 3.0 officially announced... and explained