GNOMG

Conferences conferences conferences

I’ve been really behind on blogging but with good excuse! I’ve been running from one conference to another, talking about GNOME and free software and having as many meetings as I can to forward our causes. It’s been really intense – I’ve basically given six talks in six days.

First up was South by Southwest (and the most out of date report). As I mentioned here before, I was especially excited for this one in part because I was looking forward to the technically savvy crowd that may not be as familiar with free and open source software and also because my session was featured on the sxsw blog. This was a new experiment for the GNOME Foundation, and we were figuring things out. Happily Sri came to help and we were able to team up. We mostly hit the streets talking to people, which is surprisingly effective at sxsw since so many of the attendees are people we’d want to partner with in some way. We made some great contacts and have already been following up.

My talk was pretty well received, and there were a couple of articles that came out of it too. One here and one in Le Monde”, for example. I was interviewed a few other times too, especially after the session with Snowden remotely dialing in. I was encouraged to hear him talk about how important UI is to free software which also gave me a good opportunity to talk about GNOME. I also got a few good leads on fundraising and partnership for Outreach Program for Women.

Next year I’d love for us to partner with other free and open source software orgs and sponsors and have a Free and Open Pavilion in the expo floor. I think sxsw is an excellent audience for us to try to reach, if we can figure out a way for our presence to have the maximum impact.

More recently, in the last week I was at the FSF’s LibrePlanet and the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit. Both are great conferences. I always love LibrePlanet as it’s one of the few conferences that is entirely ideologically motivated, and I find it really restorative on a personal level. I had the honor of keynoting the conference again, entitled “We can’t all be cyborg lawyers: How messaging may be our most important obstacle,” where I talked about my experienced advocating for software freedom, marketing exercises done by GNOME and the FSF and how we can approach this going forward. I also led a session with Marina on diversity, and one with Deb on messaging.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about LibrePlanet was that the GNOME Foundation won the Free Software Award for the Outreach Program for Women:

Marina and I right after Richard Stallman presented us with our award!

You can read the whole press release on the FSF’s site.

I also taught a course on legal ethics on the day after the conference, which also happily earned me some continuing legal education credits to boot. Later in the afternoon Marina and I got coffee with a few other advisors of the Ada Initiative which was really fun.

I then flew to California for the Collab Summit, where I spoke on the Outreach Program and then again on issues about representation in Free Software. I’ll try to make an independent blog about some of my thoughts soon. This conference, while being almost opposite to LibrePlanet, was also really productive, and I was able to have a lot of great meetings. Now I’m off to finally have a bit of a weekend, there’s more news coming soon so stay tuned.

Getting ready for SXSW!

I’m excited to leave for Austin in the morning. I have a few goals for the trip:

• Give my talk about medical devices and free software. If you’re coming to sxsw, please come to my session, which is on 5pm on Friday! And if you’re not, tell other people about it. I was so happy that the conference featured my session and ran a little interview with me.
• Get some new people thinking about ethical technology and free software. Sri and I are organizing a GNOME and free software meet up on Saturday, more details to come!
• Spread the word about the Outreach Program for Women. The application period has begun so it’s the perfect time.

Got any other suggestions for things I shouldn’t miss? Please say hi if you’re at the conference. And thanks to everyone who voted for my session!

Support MediaGoblin!

The Goblin Force strikes again!

MediaGoblin launched their fundraising campaign yesterday with the FSF. Check out their fantastic video (it’s definitely worth watching and was obviously the product of quite a bit of work) and donate generously.

One of the awesomest things about free software fundraising campaigns is that we all want each other to succeed, even when we are in competition. One of the best examples of this is the launching of the Pitivi and MediaGoblin campaigns. Instead of getting frustrated and bitter at finding out they were launching around the same time, they teamed up to adjust their timing so as not to hit on the same day. Even though this meant that MediaGoblin delayed by a few days more than they had meant to. And the Pitivi fundraising page even links to the MediaGoblin campaign.

Love is all around.

I just made my donation to MediaGoblin and can’t wait to see them make their goal!

Support Pitivi!

Exciting news! GNOME is hosting a fundraising campaign for Pitivi. Their fundraising page launched today. I love their announcement:

Free and Open Source video editing is something that can help make the world a better place, as it gives people all around the world one more tool to express themselves creatively, fight oppression, create happiness and spread love.

I’m pleased that GNOME is able to serve Pitivi as a fiscal sponsor on this, and I have to give Mathieu, Thibault and Jeff a lot of credit as they’ve already done so much work to set it up.

So go check out their video (made with Pitivi, naturally) and donate now! I just made my donation…

P.S. keep your eye on these guys, and special thanks to them for partnering up on timing!

A happy end of year to all

As another year comes to a close, I’m happy to reflect on some of last years highlights (and in no particular order)!

• We met our goal on our privacy campaign (we’re now evaluating the best ways to use the money – let us know if you have any ideas).
• Work was done by Igalia with the money from the accessibility campaign to improve document accessibility in GNOME.
• We were present at many conferences around the world, and I had the honor of keynoting at LibrePlanet, GNOME.Asia, FSCONS, and Minga por la innovación tecnológica in Ecuador and speaking at a few others. Many of us were also featured in interviews and articles.
• GUADEC was a success in Brno, and even Lionel Dricot admitted that “rumors of the death of GUADEC were greatly exaggerated”. The talks are still available to watch with the files available too
• Thanks largely to Marina Taylor’s efforts, we had multiple GNOME newcomer tutorial sessions and one that I was able to attend at the GNU 30th
• GNOME 3.10 was released with many improvements, and noticed for its polish and speed, among other good things. Allan Day’s post about the release is a good summary.
• The marketing team had its first dedicated hackfest in years, and emerged the engagement team, with a more refined view of what makes GNOME special as a community and a project
• Two new members joined GNOME’s advisory board – the Linux Foundation and Private Internet Access
• Some prominent new projectsand companies are choosing the GNOME desktop and GNOME technologies.
• GNOME seems to be improving in adoption generally, especially in more ideologically driven communities. I was pleasantly surprised at a number of conferences when I asked how many people were using GNOME 3 and a majority raised their hands. I loved sitting in the back of other people’s talks and seeing so many GNOME screens in front of me. In Ecuador I was excited to hear about a new GNOME-based distro in the works as well as government deployments underway in Latin America.
• Andrea Veri has been working hard to make sure that GNOME has made real progress on the sysadmin front (if you’re not subscribed to infrastructure-announce, you can see an example of the kinds of things he’s been up to on his blog.
• We ran the Outreach Program for Women, which this year involved more organizations and participants than ever before.
• We organized many hackfests and meetings, including the first FreeDesktop Summit.

There’s a lot more I could write about, but these things really stand out to me. So many thanks go to the GNOME community. Here’s a holiday card that our president Andreas Nilsson made:

Please don’t forget to donate to your favorite charities as the year ends! This is my usual donation roundup, and this year is no exception:

• the GNOME Foundation, of course!
• the Free Software Foundation
• the Software Freedom Conservancy
• the Ada Intiative
• the Software Freedom Law Center

My new year’s resolution is to get the oggcast I do with Bradley Kuhn, Free as in Freedom, back on track. What’s yours?

Gone Fishing!

Well, not really. But I’m on vacation this week. I’ll be checking email and taking care of a few things that I didn’t get to finish, but I won’t generally be available. Have a great week!

FSCONS

I had a fantastic time this past weekend at FSCONS, which is a conference dedicated to free society in Sweden. It was really energizing to be around so many freedom-focused people, and it’s a part of the world where I haven’t spent much time (I’d never been to Sweden before, but I confess I did spend too many weeks reviewing documents in Stavanger, Norway when I was a law firm lawyer).

Below you can see a picture of my keynote, as taken by Albin Olsson, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (incidentally, it also appears that Albin updated my picture and added a swedish translation on Wikipedia!)

My talk was entitled “Proactivism” and it explored how important it is for everyone in our community to be focused on being an activist for ethical technology and to proactively evaluate ways that we can improve. As examples, I talked about GNOME’s accessibility campaign, our privacy campaign and OPW, focusing on OPW to spread the word. I hope that I have another opportunity to give this talk in the future with other examples. I asked the audience to confess, and I would say about 80% of them had used Skype in the last two months. At another conference this may not have surprised me as much, but the vast majority also raised their hands that they were GNOME 3 users. It was great to talk to so many people who were really happy with it!

I enjoyed the other talks I went to too, and learned quite a bit. Of course, a major highlight of the conference for me was hanging out with the local GNOMEees:

And I loved checking out Gothenburg. I was very impressed by how many local free software and free culture people live there. I know the local GNOME team is working hard on putting together a GUADEC 2015 bid (we extended the deadline as apparently two years is way too long in advance to be able to properly plan a conference) and I wish them luck!

Great Summit in Montreal

I got home a day and a half ago and am packing up to go to San Francisco for the Mentor Summit, but email from James with his excellent write-up of the event reminded me that I too needed to report back.

James covers the bases so I won’t give that overview again but one of my favorite things from the weekend was that a whole group of students drove up from Western New England University. They’ve decided to work on Mousetrap (an assistive application that uses facial recognition to move the cursor without having to use a mouse) for their senior project. I kicked things off with an overview of free software for them (and discussed just what you need to know about licensing to get started) and Colin and Ryan helped them out with jhbuild. Colin, Ryan and Joanie hung out with them all weekend and I think they made great progress. It was also fun to have them at all of the social events.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank Ryan and Tristan for organizing the events, plus CRIM for hosting us, Savoire Faire Linux for helping us to organize and for hosting the cocktail party on Saturday, Red Hat for sponsoring the pool party on Sunday and Canonical for providing snacks and coffee during the days. The famous Montreal bagels in particular were a huge hit:

I was glad to see such a diversity of companies represented at the Summit, and nonprofit orgs too – I had great conversations with Yorba and Debian people. The Summit is pretty amazing in that it’s a small event so it’s intimate and it’s easy to talk to everyone and the people who come are focused and awesome and a good amount of stuff gets done at a high level. The event was so productive and fun that there was some talk of adding a west coast summit, and that sounds pretty great to me.

You can also check out Mike’s and Matthias’ write-ups too.

GNOME at GNU 30th

So I am at the Boston Montreal Summit, but I realized that I never published my post about the GNU 30th so I thought I’d get this up now and then write about what’s going on here this long weekend!

The GNU 30th was really fun. There was a great turnout and the GNOME room was petty full the entire time. Marina and Owen ran a Newcomers’ Tutorial and other GNOMEees were around to hack on stuff. We took a break for lunch with OPW interns and mentors. It was amazing to look down the long table and to realize how many non-GNOME people were there – a testament to the success of the program with other projects too. The GNU MediaGoblin folks were in full force, and I got an awesome 3D printed “Goblin Force” badge, which I now have with me in Montreal!

One of my favorite moments was a conversation I overheard just after the Newcomers’ Tutorial.

Richard Stallman asked a gentleman named Matt what he was involved in with free software. After initially describing himself as a fan, he corrected himself and said, “I’m no longer just an admirer, thanks to Marina!” He went on to explain how he went through the GNOME Newcomer’s tutorial and was now able to contribute for the first time to free software. I was also very pleased to give stickers to some students from George Mason University who wanted to run their own Newcomers Tutorial with the local user group.

On Saturday night we had a GNOME dinner at an Indian Restaurant to celebrate the GNU 30th and also the 3.10 release. Thanks to Joe for remembering to send me this picture of some of us outside afterwards:

Book your hotel for Montreal

We’ve gone ahead and gotten a block of rooms at the Hotel Le Cantlie Suites subject to availability. The rate is $135.00 per room per night for single or double occupancy. You can either call the hotel directly at +1.514.842.2000 and mention “GNOME” or reserve online.

All the information on the summit that you need is on the wiki. If you’re planning to come and haven’t already, let us know. Hope to see you there!