I am sure we will manage to get past $5,000, but I wonder if we will do it today? To help us put on this great conference, and help get some passionate and deserving free software hackers together, you still have time to give to the campaign.

Thanks very much to the great Free Art and Free Culture community out there for your support!

Update: Less than 2 hours after posting, Mark Wielaard pushed us over the edge with a donation bringing us to exactly $5000. Thanks Mark! Next stop: $6000.

We also concurrently opened the call for participation. Since we’re already a little late organising content this year, we’re going to have a pretty short call – please send abstracts for GNOME-related and cross-desktop content to guadec-papers at gnome.org before April 10th (midnight on the date line, I guess).

The procedure is going to be a little unusual this year because of the co-hosting of GUADEC with Akademy – a GNOME papers committee headed up by Behdad will be choosing GNOME-specific content, and a KDE equivalent will be choosing Akademy content, and we are co-ordinating on the invitation of keynote speakers and choice of cross-desktop content.

The thing that got me excited about this conference last yearn and the reason I was so enthusiastic about combining the conferences, is that cross-desktop content. The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has the potential to be the meeting place for free software desktop application developers and platform developers, as well as embedded and mobile Linux application developers. We will have the people behind the two most popular free software development platforms coming together.

The conference is an opportunity to plan the future together for developers working on the kernel, X.org, alternative desktop environments like XFCE, application platforms like XUL, Eclipse’s SWT, desktop application developers and desktop-oriented distributions. I’m looking forward to seeing proposals for presentations from all over the mobile and desktop Linux (and Solaris) map.

So to your plumes! We’re not expecting abstracts to be works of art, but we are looking for thought to be given to your target audience and what you want them to get from your presentation. Compelling, entertaining and thought-provoking content will be preferred over “state of…” presentations, or other types of presentation better suited to blog posts. Knock yourselves out!

In the three weeks since the announcement of the launch of the campaign, we have raised almost $3,000 in community donation – mostly smaller than $50 – from 71 individual donors. Much of the credit for the campaign this year has to go to Jon Phillips of Creative Commons, Inkscape and OpenClipart fame.

The campaign has started earlier this year than last year, when we were really caught unawares by our difficulties in getting sponsors, and has lacked some of the frenzy of the last campaign, but Jon has been doing stellar work keeping the fire burning, and ensuring a regular stream of donations from supporters of projects related to Libre graphics.

It is hard to overstate the importance this conference has to the communities working on projects like Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus, among others, and to overstate the progress we have made because of these conferences in the past few years in the realm of graphics applications on Linux.

It’s useful to point out that in the Linux Foundation desktop linux surveys, the most popular applications which companies and individuals want for Linux are graphics applications – Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Autodesk AutoCAD, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visio are the top 6 applications which people are missing on Linux. This conference is all about encouraging the development of applications destined to fulfil those needs. Also worth noting, when asked whether they wanted the applications above ported to Linux, or they wanted to use equivalent Linux applications where possible, a large majority want to use native equivalents, rather than ported commercial applications.

For any of you looking for a good cause which will go directly to supporting high quality applications that you use, I’d encourage you to contribute to the Libre Graphics Meeting. The conference is only as worthwhile as the people attending it, let’s ensure that we get a critical mass once again and provide energy and momentum to all of the participating projects for the coming year.

I am honoured to have become the latest GNOME personality to catch the eye of Sam Varghese.

Sam feels I was unfair in my characterisation of him as a “shock jock”. He may be right… he says himself that the definition of a shock jock is “a slang term used to describe a type of radio broadcaster (sometimes a disc jockey) who attracts attention using humor (sic) that a significant portion of the listening audience may find offensive.” Clearly, since Sam’s not funny, I was unfair. Sorry Sam.

I take issue with Sam’s massive leap (which reminds me of when my maths professors used to say “obviously it follows…” at the end of complicated theorems) when he says that I “have to fight the perception that any of [our] major sponsors is making nice noises to the other camp”.

First, as I have told Sam on numerous occasions when he contacts us for answers to leading questions, we do not think of KDE as “the other camp”. Second, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t exactly avoid a perception that he’s a fan of KDE. Later in the same article, he says that he thinks that KDE have got a nice rate of development going, and are driving innovation better than GNOME. He’s the first top-paying member of KDE eV, which is roughly the same amount of money annually as Canonical gives to GNOME.

And Mark’s not alone. Nokia are sponsors of both Akademy and GUADEC, as well as investing heavily in both GNOME (through Maemo) and QT (and paying the wages of some KDE developers).

What Sam has trouble understanding is that I have an issue with sloppy journalism. I like the KDE developers, we get on well, and I’ve done a lot of work bridging gaps between projects – whether it be through the organisation of Libre Graphics Meeting or FOSTEL, or my participation in the FLOSS Foundations group, or the numerous conversations I have with KDE board members about any number of subjects (including Akademy & GUADEC colocating).

So when Sam sets me up as a shill, or as someone who has a problem with KDE (or considers them competitors) he’s ignoring a body of evidence that suggests otherwise. But then, with Sam, that’s par for the course.

We’ve been watching your fund raising campaign, and last we checked you were still somewhere around $600 short of your goal.

The Fedora Project would like to fill in that gap for you, with a donation of $700 for the Libre Graphics Meeting support.

Wow!

In addition, we got a €20 donation from someone who came on IRC yesterday quite distressed that they’d missed the end of the campaign. (If anyone else is in this situation, please drop me a line – don’t worry, we can still use your money!)

What this means is that the campaign has now officially passed our revised goal of $12,000 – $11,368 of this is listed on the Pledgie page, and add $730 from late donations, we have collected $12,098 (before charges & fees).

Thank you everyone! And especially Max and Paul from Fedora!

Now that the campaign has ended, it’s still possible to donate to support the conference, and another sponsor would do us no harm at all – just drop me a line to find out how. But with the show of support over the past two weeks from 275 donors, the health of the conference for this year at least is guaranteed.

The site is still showing a campaign final total of $10980, but being special, I know that there are 5 outstanding donations totalling $388 which will arrive in our count over the coming week, giving the campaign a grand total of $11,368. We still need to see how much of that will go in bank fees and paypal charges, but we’ll have close to $11,000 left which will be dedicated completely to bringing people to the conference, in addition to the sponsorship we received from Google, Intel and the Free Software Foundation.

Incidentally, one of the things I’m most proud of in the campaign is that our user community will be contributing more direct funding to the conference than our two corporate sponsors, Intel and Google, combined!

Thank you all!

As I noted earlier, Vincent Untz pushed us over the magical bar of $10,000, and since then there has been a steady flow of donations. In addition to the $10,510 currently on the site, there is another $418 in uncleared checks that will appear early next week in all likelihood – we are only $1072 from reaching that $12,000 target now (reduced from $20,000 yesterday) with a little less than 24 hours left in the campaign.

So rejoice! For after this evening, you will not be seeing any more begging letter/progress report blogs from me. It’s taken a lot of time over these past two weeks, but I must admit I’m delighted with the result. And if anyone wants me to shut up early, one $1100 donation should do it

…well, for some definition of famous (and certainly mine).

Without wanting to play favourites (I love all our donors) here are some names that stood out when I was reading through the donors list earlier: Michael Tiemann of OSI and Red Hat, Bdale Garbee, everyone’s favourite gentle giant from SPI and HP, Garrett Lesage and Andreas Nilssen from the Tango project and more, Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk, Ilan Rabinovitch, chief bottle-washer of SCALE, Nicolas Spalinger of the Open Font Project, Chris Messina, the man behind the original incarnation of SpreadFirefox, John Bintz, who gave a great presentation last year on using the GIMP and Inkscape for comic drawing, Andy Fitzsimon, Aussie artist & Inkscaper extraordinaire, Louis Desjardins, last year’s organiser, Eric Sink, future GUADEC keynoter and co-founder of AbiSource, Adam Sweet from the LUGRadio crowd (where are the rest of ye, lads?), Steven Garrity of SilverOrange, best known for his work on GNOME and Firefox, Mark Wielaard of Classpath, and the rocking Jon Phillips of Creative Commons and Inkscape.

Modestly forbids me from mentioning myself (damn!).

If you’ve been holding out until the last minute, notice is served – we are now closing in fast on $10,000 raised, and the campaign ends tomorrow at midnight, PST. I am hoping that we will reach $12,000, which would be a great achievement, even if it does fall short of the original $20,000 goal. To that end, I’ve just changed the campaign goal to be more realistic – let’s see if we can get $2,000 more in the remaining 36 hours.

Update: Jealous of all the attention other famous people were getting, the very famous Vincent Untz jumped in and pushed us over the magical $10,000 level last night. That was quickly followed by donations from the famous Behdad Esfahbod and the famous Paul Cooper. And I don’t know how I failed to mention a friend from ILUG, Padraig Brady, also famous in his own right. Thanks guys! Keep ‘em coming!

Any Inkscape people out there able to set me right?

One interesting drag & drop thing I love showing to people is dragging a chart created in Gnumeric into Inkscape – the drop is a proper SVG, and you can ungroup & manipulate individual elements from the chart in your favourite vector graphics application. Which is nice.

The donations have really picked up again after the weekend, and with another $350 in uncleared e-Checks last night, we now have over $9000 collected (with $650 not yet up on the site). I wonder if we can get over $10,000 today…