Safe as Milk

GUADEC in hindsight

July 18, 2008 9:35 pm Dave Neary freesoftware, gnome, guadec, maemo

It’s been a hectic week, but I really wanted to write up some notes from this year’s GUADEC for posterity, and to share some of the great stuff that happened that people might not know about.

GNOME Mobile

After arriving late (very late) on Monday, I was up early to go & lead the GNOME Mobile BOF in the nice luxury bar on the top floor of the building.

The meeting location had been changed the day before, so we left people an extra half an hour to find the room. Unfortunately, we were a couple of days late to appear in the printed program once we’d decided when to hold the BOF, so some people who really wanted to be there found out afterwards.

The BOF went well – some really interesting discussions, and, I hope, some momentum to carry us through to a successful 2.24 GNOME Mobile release and a productive collaboration effort over the coming months.

We will be working on updating the website to list the active participants, collect and publish success stories from GNOME Mobile developers and users, and provide a more fruitful collaboration forum for participants.

Keynotes

I loved Leisa Reichelt and Matt Webb‘s keynotes. Since I was the one who invited them, I’m glad that they seemed well received by those who attended. Matt’s keynote suffered a little by being at 10am, but unfortunately he had to fly away early in the afternoon, being the FOO that he is. Interesting factoid: the book that Matt co-authored for O’Reilly, “Mind Hacks”, was not for sale at the ORA stand. I bet that we could have set up a signing session if she had some 😉

I also enjoyed Chris Blizzard’s keynote, and Alp Toker and Kristian Reitveld’s sessions were choc a bloc with interesting technical stuff.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see Federico’s talk as I was already at the airport, and thus I also missed the closing plenary, the foundation meeting, and (with great regret) the lightning talks.

Presentations

I did get to catch some great presentations though. Clutter Guts was great – really fascinating stuff, and as always, pippin gives a mean demo.

I caught Travis Reitter’s Soylent talk, and I think I missed most of the feature presentation & demos in the first 5 minutes… which was unfortunate. It seems to me like libsoylent is aiming to provide the type of API I was kind of expecting from Telepathy… I don’t know if that’s a pair representation.

I also caught Owen Taylor presenting Big Board and the GNOME Online Desktop – promising stuff, and it seems like it’s almost at that inflection point you get in a project where it goes from a small project to one that gets adapted everywhere. It seems to be, as I tweeted at the time, like Gimmie, brought through to completion.

I think the only other presentation (outside of keynotes) I caught was my own, which seemed fairly well received. I managed to give Chris 20 minutes break before his keyboard too, which was great.

GTK+ 3

I’m not going to take any part in the whole GTK+ 3 discussion, though, except to share my own experiences with third party developers. Having worked with a company that had a GTK+ 1.2 interface that we were supporting for years for a client because the client didn’t want to pay to have it ported to GTK+ 2.x, I see where Miguel is coming from. I also understand that it would be good to have some idea of the things people don’t like in the current platform before committing to an API freeze for at least 2 – 3 years again.

Perhaps that would be a good first step – going beyond the initial rant to say “OK, what features do people not like? What do we need to change/add to the current platform to address the needs application developers have?”.

Like I said, I’m going to mostly stay out of it, except to reiterate one point I made on the marketing list – I think it’s a bad idea to connect a change in major version number in GNOME to a change in the API of the platform. GNOME version numbers indicate compelling new features to users, API version numbers convey something about the API, which users (and, by extension, press) don’t care about. We need to concentrate on the user when talking about GNOME versions.

GUADEC selection

I was happy to sit in with the board on the discussion with KDE eV when the three bids for GUADEC/Akademy 2009 were considered. Based on what I’ve learned from being involved in GUADEC organisation every year since Kristiansand, I recommended that the final cost to attendees (with particular thought for companies sending many developers from the US) be the primary deciding factor, the organising committee and their community credentials second, with the location itself being third.

While I’m happy to see the Canaries chosen as the final choice, I don’t think that my suggestions were particularly given precedence in the decision making process. In any case, I hope I’ll be able to help make GUADEC 2009 a success.

Stormy

I know what she’s thinking – “I’ve had enough publicity at this stage, let’s get people talking about GNOME” – but I am really really pleased to see Stormy come on board as the new Executive Director. When I mentioned it to her back in April, I really didn’t think that she would be interested, but I saw from that first spark of interest that she has wanted to work with the GNOME project for a long time. The stars were aligned and it has come to pass.

I know, when we decided to hire for the role a couple of years back (yes, it’s been that long) Jeff had major concerns about the title – he wanted to set different expectations to those we had of Tim. I agree with that – and I think that the board have done a good job of setting those expectations with Stormy. She is our relationships person, and we direly needed one working full time.

Outside the conference

The FreeFA World Cup has its third running this year, with 3 teams battling it out in the Turkish sun (I’m still trying to work out if we were mad dogs or Englishmen) before battling with Turkish rush-hour traffic (for some reason, Istanbul rush hour seems to be around 8pm). Others have written about it already. In spite of the considerable handicap of wearing the most heat-absorbant t-shirts, the black team won through against the red & white teams, thanks to a rock solid defense. There’s no praise like self-praise they say.

SMASHED was again a great success – this is the third time I’ve brought a bottle to a conference, after buying a Glenrothes 10yo on my way to China for the Linux Foundation Developers Summit and bringing a bottle I’ve completely forgotten to Austin for the Collaboration Summit in April.

This time, I will definitely not forget – the Glengoyne 12yo cask strength I brought was a lovely bottle among other lovely bottles. We spread the whisky love around, I hope that all the whisk[e]y lovers on the boat got at least one wee dram. Karl & John Carr were feeling a little worse for wear at the end of the evening. I managed to be a little more reasonable than those two… but only slightly. And the nightcap of reki on the pillows put paid to any hope I had of making it into the conference the following morning.

I really enjoyed getting some quality time with Luis, jrb, Lefty, vuntz and Stormy, and the many discussions I had on the rooftop, in the hallways, and on the boat. The really best thing about GUADEC is the conversations happening all the time.