gnome-asia – Form and Function

GNOME.Asia 2014

I just got back from a great trip to Beijing, for GNOME.Asia 2014. This was my fourth GNOME.Asia, and I’ve been to every event since 2011 in Bangalore, where I participated in the GNOME 3.0 hackfest. It was great to meet up with the GNOME.Asia crew once again. They’re a fantastic bunch, and it’s always a pleasure to meet friends from Asia. Photos from the event can be found on Flickr.

This year’s GNOME.Asia was co-hosted with FUDCon APAC. Combining the conference with another event worked really well, in my opinion, and helped to boost participation and share the organisation workload. This could be an effective formula for future events.

On the Saturday I gave a talk about sandboxed applications for GNOME. This is something I’ve been working on recently (I’ll blog about it soon, I hope), and I think it’s an important topic, so it was good to get the word out. In general, I thought that the talk went pretty well, and it was a good opportunity to present our plans to Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers.

Highlights from the conference included Lennart’s keynote on systemd and David King’s talk on GNOME 3 application development. We ended the conference with a really nice discussion about the GNOME Foundation. It was great to see so much interest in how GNOME operates.

Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me to attend this event. I’d also really like to thank the conference sponsors.

GNOME.Asia 2013

I just got back from a great trip to Seoul for this year’s GNOME.Asia conference. This was the third GNOME.Asia that I’ve attended, having been to Hong Kong last year and Bangalore before that.

The conference was a two day event held at the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA). There was a nice range of talks, covering general topics as well as various GNOME technologies like Rygel and GStreamer. There were also quite a few talks about input methods, along with a training session on translating GNOME. I gave two talks, one on contributing to GNOME and the other on the history and future of GNOME 3.

max

As is always the case, the best thing about the conference was the opportunity to meet face to face with people from the GNOME community. It was great to see some familiar faces from previous GNOME.Asia conferences, as well as GNOME contributors from Asia who I have not previously encountered.

GNOME.Asia 2012

This year’s GNOME.Asia conference wrapped up a couple of days ago, and it was a pleasure to participate for in the event for the second year running. The conference was been a fantastic opportunity to meet GNOME enthusiasts as well as see some existing contributors face-to-face for the first time.

It was a busy conference for me, as I was involved in three separate sessions. The first was a design workshop that me, Jon and Jimmac ran prior to the conference. This was a well attended event that ran for a whole afternoon. We began with a discussion of design process, and gave an overview the various stages we go through as a part of design initiatives in GNOME. After that, we demonstrated some of the tools that we use in GNOME design, with Jimmac showing off some Inkscape tips and tricks.

Myself, Jon and Jimmac gave the keynote on the Saturday morning. Titled ‘Beyond Dead Reckoning’, the presentation talked about the history behind GNOME 3, as well as discussing where GNOME is today and where it is going. In the final part of the talk, we presented our recent design work and our efforts to define a new pattern language for GNOME application design. We’ll be giving a talk on the same theme at GUADEC next month.

I also gave the keynote on the Sunday morning. This was an updated version of the presentation I gave in FOSDEM earlier in the year, which centred on the Every Detail Matters initiative. I think that effort contains some important lessons for how we organise our development efforts in GNOME, as well as how we can improve other outreach initiatives.

As ever, the highlight of the conference was the people. It’s always fantastic to meet enthusiasts and contributors, as well as to speak to people who might want to participate in GNOME in the future. GNOME.Asia does a fantastic job of bringing new people into the community, and deserves all our support for that reason alone.

Big thanks to the GNOME.Asia organisers – Max, Haggen and Sammy especially – as well as the volunteers who helped out on the day. They worked extremely hard to make the conference run smoothly, and did a great job taking care of those of us who flew in to give talks.

I’d also like to thank the GNOME Foundation for assisting with the organisation of the conference, as well as enabling me to attend.