Welcome Red Hat as a GUADEC Sponsor

Red Hat is a Gold Sponsor of GUADEC 2021! We’re pleased to welcome them back to GUADEC for another year. As a Gold Sponsor, they will be hosting office hours on Wednesday, July 21. This will provide an opportunity for attendees to talk directly with Red Hat, about a range of topics, including the many GNOME-related activities they have going on.

“As one of the many active contributors within the vibrant GNOME community, Red Hat is very pleased to also be among the sponsors of this year’s GUADAC event,” said a representative from Red Hat. “Community is about connections, and as we move into a world that is waking up from decreased social contact, those connections are more important than ever. GNOME remains an incredible part of the open source ecosystem, and the conversations made at GUADEC amongst users and contributors are a big reason why GNOME continues to be successful! We are thrilled to be a part of these conversations and look forward to participating in the GUADEC 2021 online event.”

Kristi Progri, lead organizer of GUADEC, says “On behalf of everyone at GUADEC organizing team, I would like to express our sincere gratitude for the generous sponsorship to GUADEC, We’re happy they’re joining us again at GUADEC to help build GNOME and show the community what they are working on.”

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT.

About GUADEC

GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters together for a week of talks and workshops. It takes place July 21 – 25 and will be online. This year’s keynote speakers are Hong Phuc Dang and Shauna Gordon-McKeon. Registration for GUADEC 2021 is open, please visit guadec.org to sign up.

About GNOME

GNOME is a free and open-source software environment project supported by a non-profit foundation. Together, the community of contributors and the Foundation create a computing platform and software ecosystem, composed entirely of free software, that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.

The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that believes in a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. We do this by building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem.

Friends of GNOME Update – May 2021

Welcome to the May 2021 Friends of GNOME Update

Cherry blossoms with a grey sky in the background
“Cherry Blossom” by shioshvili is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

LAS

The Linux App Summit took place May 13 – 15. Taking advantage of its virtual nature, the event had a long break in the middle of the proceedings in order to better accommodate attendees across time zones. Congratulations and thanks to the whole LAS team!

GUADEC

The call for GUADEC birds of a feather sessions, lightning talks, and workshops is now open. These will take place July 23 – 24, after the talks.

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions are up to two hours. These provide a time for people with shared interests to get together to talk about them. These can be working sessions and/or discussion sessions.

Lightning talks are ten minute talks. If you’re an inexperienced speaker or nervous on a stage, lightning talks are a great opportunity to try out speaking in a more relaxed setting. If you have an idea you want to try out, a narrower topic to explore, or you want to start a conversation, consider giving a lightning talk!

A workshop is a hands on session where people will be learning and working together.

You can submit an idea today!

Community Engagement Challenge Feedback

Did you follow, participate in, or otherwise engage with the CEC? Please give your feedback and fill out this survey!

Seeking University Outreach Ambassadors

The University Outreach program serves two purposes: helping universities adopt GNOME technologies and helping students get involved with GNOME. The GNOME Africa community is currently recruiting for university outreach across Africa. Fill out this form to learn more!

Interns!

We can never adequately express how excited we are about GNOME interns. This year we have two Outreachy interns and 12 Google Summer of Code interns.

Our Outreachy interns are Veena Nagar and Madds H. GSoC interns include Abanoub Ghadban, Maximiliano Sandoval, Manuel Genovés, Kai A. Hiller, Nishal Kulkarni, Alejandro Domínguez, Nishit Patel, zbrown, Ivan Molodetskikh, visvesh subramanian, Arijit Kundu, and Dhanuka Warusadura.

GNOME Gifts

We’ve had a few changes at the GNOME Shop, including a new water bottle.

Misc Updates We Like

Thank you!

Thank you for your support! Whether you’re a Friend of GNOME, contributor, users, or casually interested in our work, we appreciate your time and interest in building a great GNOME community!

Friends of GNOME Update – April 2021

Welcome to the April 2021 Friends of GNOME Update

GNOME 40

At the end of March we released GNOME 40! Some highlights include:

  • new touchpad gestures
  • core apps
  • better wifi settings

You can try it out on GNOME OS Nightly, Fedora, and openSUSE. Check it out online or watch the release video!

GNOME On the Road

We might not be on the road, but Director of Operations Rosanna Yuen recently curated imakefoss. As part of this, she gave her perspective on things like her FOSS origin story and newcomers to the FOSS community. Check it out!

Events with GNOME and Friends

Linux App Summit is coming up. Join us and KDE from May 13 – 15 to learn and grow the Linux app ecosystem. Keynote speakers include GNOME Foundation member and former executive director Karen Sandler and Kathy Giori, who has built her own Linux powered private smart home. The schedule is online and registration is open.

We’ve opened registration for GUADEC 2021. This year’s conference will take place online, using our BigBlueButton installation. You can read the schedule and then register online to attend! Highlights from the schedule include 24 sessions on all sorts of topics, the GNOME Foundation annual members meeting, and keynotes by Hong Phuc Dang and Shauna Gordon-McKeon.

Challenge Winners Announced!

After a number of exciting months, the Community Engagement Challenge wrapped up on April 7 with a showcase of projects and the announcement of the Challenge winner. Congratulations to our winner Big Open Source Sibling and the runner up Open UK Kids Course and Digital Camp.

Part of running the Challenge was building the infrastructure for it, which we now have set up and is ready to go. If you have ideas for future Challenges that match up well with the mission and work of GNOME, please email us!

GNOME.org updates

We recently updated the GNOME web site with a new WordPress instance! Previously, we used a combination of WordPress pages and static pages, but the new site is all on WordPress. The project was started by Britt Yazel, and happened with the help of Evan Welsh and Claudio Wunder.

Summer Internships

This summer we are participating in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Mentors have been working with potential interns on their applications and first contributions to GNOME. Accepted interns will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

Technical Updates

Emmanuele Bassi, Core GTK Developer, works on a tool called gi-docgen, which generates API references from introspection data. He’s made some updates and documented them. Additionally, there have been a lot of updates to the GTK documentation.

Emmanuele is also working on fixing issues in the GTK4 accessibility infrastructure. He is replacing the shared accessibility bus with a peer-to-peer connection between GTK4 applications and assistive technologies.

Thank you!

Thank you for your support! Whether you’re a Friend of GNOME, contributor, users, or casually interested in our work, we appreciate your time and interest in building a great GNOME community!

GUADEC 2021 Keynotes and Updates

GUADEC is taking place this July!

A GNOME banner hung on a tower, with several people behind it.
“GUADEC 2010” by Francisco Rojas is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The GNOME Foundation is excited to announce that GUADEC 2021 will take place July 21 -25. This year’s conference will be held online and last five days. The first two days of the conference, July 21 – 22, will be dedicated to presentations. The 23 – 24 will be Birds of a Feather sessions and workshops, and the last day will be for social activities.

Call for Papers 

The GUADEC 2021 theme is “Future-Proofing FOSS”. GNOME is always anticipating the future and looking to innovate and build better for whatever the future may hold, whether it’s with events, technologies, or ways to empower users and integrate free and open source software into our lives. We are interested in proposals that align with this theme as well as ones relating to free and open source software, technology, and community building. In the past, we’ve had talks on:

  • Application development
  • Privacy and security
  • Community and team building
  • Design of user and developer experience
  • Use of GNOME technologies outside the desktop
  • Newcomers initiatives
  • Project planning and governance

Proposals are due March 22, so submit one today!

Keynote Speakers

A photo of a person with long hair and a pink shirt.
Photo courtesy of Mario Behling. License: CC BY

Our amazing keynote speakers for this year are Hong Phuc Dang and Shauna Gordon-McKeon. 

Hong Phuc Dang chairs the annual FOSSASIA Summit and organizes Open Tech Summits in countries from Vietnam, India, China, and Sri Lanka, to Germany. She is the board member of the Open Source Business Alliance Europe and also serves as Vice President of the Open Source Initiative.

 

A person with long hair and a purple/blue shirt.
Photo courtesy of Shauna Gordon-McKeon. License: CC-BY-SA

Shauna Gordon-McKeon is a writer, programmer and community organizer who focuses on the intersection of technology and governance. She co-organizes the Washington DC chapter of the Tech Workers Coalition. She serves on the board of Tech Inquiry and is an advisor to Metagov.

Office Hours for GUADEC Call for Proposals

A person in a black, pink, and white flannel behind a speaker podium with a sign that says "GUADEC."
“Guadec Dia 3” by Ana _Rey is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

What: GUADEC CfP Office Hours

When: March 11 (14:00 UTC) and March 18 (23:00 UTC)

Where: GUADEC channel on Rocket.chat

The GUADEC 2021 Call for Proposals is open! We’ve scheduled CfP office hours for Thursday March 11 (14:00 UTC) and Thursday March 18 (23:00 UTC).

If you’re interested in presenting at GUADEC and want to talk with organizers and experienced speakers about your ideas, have someone look over your session proposal, or just want to ask some questions about speaking at a conference, come by Office Hours to discuss all of these and more!

Join us in the GUADEC channel on Rocket.chat in the upcoming weeks to work on your CfP responses! Hope to see you there.

Friends of GNOME Update – February 2021

Welcome to the February Friends of GNOME Update!

A photo of snow and ice crystals clinging to plants
“Snow!” by neil-5110 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

GNOME on the Road

Typically FOSDEM is a big deal for the GNOME Foundation. We have a booth, we give talks, we run hackfests, there is GNOME Beers, and we have lots and lots of meetings. This year FOSDEM was a little different.

While we didn’t give any talks or run a hackfest, we had a virtual stand. For us, the highlight of this was having scheduled hours in the chat, during which we talked with participants about different GNOME-related topics. It was great to meet people, and it’s always fun to talk about GNOME.

Our GNOME Beers event was also a lot of fun. Around 40 people joined Neil McGovern for a tour of three different Belgian beers. We learned more about beer than many of us expected to.

In March, Neil will be speaking at LibrePlanet 2021, the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference. LibrePlanet 2021 takes place online March 20-21.

Events Hosted By GNOME

We have four upcoming events we’d like to share with you.

GNOME Latino Event

With a goal to have a one day event to celebrate GNOME in Latin America, we’re supporting a GNOME event that will take place entirely in Spanish and Portuguese. This will take place on March 27th, and an event on events.gnome.org will be added soon.

Community Education Challenge Phase Three Winner Showcase

On April 7 at 17:00 UTC, the Community Education Challenge phase three winners will be showing off the work they’ve done on their projects — and you can join us. These projects have been working for months to build programs and tools to help people get involved in building FOSS and with the GNOME community. You can learn more about them online.

Linux App Summit

We co-organize the Linux App Summit with KDE. This year’s conference is taking place online, May 13 – 15. LAS is about building and sustaining a Linux application ecosystem. We believe that having many excellent apps is important to promote FOSS adoption, including GNOME.

The call for papers is open, so consider submitting a talk today! We’re looking for sessions on everything related to apps, including legal and licensing and community growth and care, in addition to more technical topics.

GUADEC

We have also announced GUADEC 2021! GUADEC will take place July 21 – 25, also online. GUADEC is the GNOME conference, covering everything GNOME and many general FOSS topics in talks, birds of a feather sessions, and workshops.

The call for abstracts it open. We’re looking for talks related to FOSS in general as well as GNOME specifically. Past talks I’ve personally enjoyed have been on growing the tech community in Kenya; the environmental impact of tech and what we can do about it; better communication with open, remote collaborative communities; how to have great meetings; and many GNOME specific topics.

While a formal announcement will be coming soon, we’re pretty excited about the GUADEC keynotes, Hong Phuc Dang and Shauna Gordon-McKeon.

Technical Developments

Since GTK 4.0 released, we’ve put out several bug fixes. We’ve been working with the community on GTK 4.2, which should be ready in time for the GNOME 40 release. We’re also working on revamping the documentation, including using a new tool to generate references from the introspection data also consumed by the various language bindings.

GNOME has been doing a lot of work on GNOME Shell for GNOME 40. This includes numerous UX updates. You can read about them on the GNOME Shell & Mutter blog. Topics include multi-monitor development, the user resting and research that went into the design changes, and general status updates.

Outreachy

We’re always excited for Outreachy, and this round is no different! We are currently looking mentors (signup by March 5). You can submit an idea online.

Outreachy provides paid internships in FOSS (and in this case in GNOME) for people who face systemic bias that historically has made it difficult for them to participate in FOSS and/or the technology industry.

We are planning on participating in Google Summer of Code, and will share more details as they arise. You can check out project ideas on GitLab.

Chat Evaluation

GNOME uses a number of different communication tools: IRC, Matrix, Rocketchat, and Telegram. Kristi Progri is in the process of leading a chat evaluation. This is to determine which communication channels people are using, and how and why they are using those channels. Preliminary research has been completed, and we’ll be working on to surveying the community in March.

Thank you!

We try to highlight the most exciting things we’re working on in this Update, but we do a lot more, including infrastructure support, community work, and things like taxes. Your generosity helps us make sure we can get everything done. Thank you.

Hang out with GNOME at FOSDEM 2021

We’re going to FOSDEM!

FOSDEM is online this year and we’re going to be there with a stand, volunteers, and GNOMEies of all varieties.

A photo of post-it notes below a sign reading "GNOME Love"
“Fosdem 2009” by faerie_eriu is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Stands at FOSDEM will be web pages, including a Matrix chat. Come visit us at the GNOME Stand!

You can join us in the Matrix chat to talk with contributors, staff, board members, and executive director Neil McGovern. Our full schedule is below. Times are displayed in the local time zone for Brussels which is Central European Time (CET) (UTC+1).

Saturday, February 6th

  • 10:00-11:00 – Meet Executive Director Neil McGovern
  • 11:00-12:00 – General Chat Time
  • 12:00-13:00 – General Chat Time
  • 13:00-14:00 – GTK
  • 14:00-15:00 – General Chat Time
  • 15:00-16:00 – Newcomers
  • 16:00-17:00 – Meet the Foundation Staff
  • 17:00-18:00 – GNOME Events (GNOME.Asia, GUADEC, LAS)

Sunday, February 7th

  • 10:00-11:00 – GNOME Circle
  • 11:00-12:00 – General Chat Time
  • 12:00-13:00 – General Chat Time
  • 13:00-14:00 – GTK
  • 14:00-15:00 – Internships with GNOME
  • 15:00-16:00 – Meet the Foundation Board of Directors
  • 16:00-17:00 – Meet the Engagement Team
  • 17:00-18:00 – Panels with Community Engagement Challenge Participants

Saturday, after the booth is closed, we’ll be doing GNOME Beers. Read about it and how to register.

GNOME Beers – FOSDEM 2021

FOSDEM may be online this year, but that isn’t stopping us from hosting GNOME Beers. Join us Saturday February 6 at 18:00 UTC on our Big Blue Button server for a beer. The event will be under the GNOME Code of Conduct and last until approximately 20:00 UTC.

An old drawing of a room full of people with discussion bubbles and the text FOSDEM.
“The first FOSDEM Legal Issues DevRoom” by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

We’re mixing things up a bit this year. Instead of our usual gathering, Executive Director and beer aficionado Neil McGovern, who has 1,107 beers tasted on Untappd, has picked three Belgium beers that are hopefully easy to find in your neighborhood. We’ll be drinking them together while he teaches us a bit about them and a bit about beer.

Please RSVP on events.gnome.org. We look forward to seeing you there!

The Beers

  • Westmalle Trappist Dubbel – 7% ABV
  • Duvel Belgian Strong Blond – 8.5% ABV
  • Leffe Blonde / Blond – 6.6% ABV

Friends of GNOME Update – January 2021

Welcome to the January 2021 Friends of GNOME Update

We made it to 2021! Go team!

The northern lights, a green slash across the sky above deep snow and trees.
“Northern Lights” by timo_w2s is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

GNOME on the Road

  • We’ll be at FOSDEM 2021! We will have a stand you can visit, which will include a Matrix chat. We’ll be scheduling themed discussion hours, which will be finalized and posted soon. We’re still looking for people to volunteer, so if you want to come and share your love of GNOME, please sign up today! You don’t have to be an expert in GNOME to volunteer at our virtual stand and it’s a great way to start learning more or get more involved.
  • We will also be hosting a GNOME Beers event on the Saturday evening of FOSDEM (February 6) in the evening, Central European Standard Time. We’ll share more details on the Engagement Blog and on social media. This event will be emceed by Neil McGovern, who will lead participants on a beer tasting journey.

GTK 4 Release

The GTK team released GKT 4.0! We are thrilled to see ten years of work culminate in such a great way. Many people were involved in the creation of GTK4, and you can read all about them on the GTK blog.

Getting Involved With GNOME in Paraguay

In December we worked with the Universidad Catolica in Paraguay to host a GNOME event. This event featured four sessions to help people get started in contributing to GNOME and finding a place in the GNOME community. This was a project of the University Outreach Initiative. If you’re interested in seeing an event at your university or participating in one, please contact the University Outreach Initiative.

We Finished Our Fundraiser

Thank you to everyone who helped get the word out on our Fall Fundraiser, which ran from November 2020 until January 2021. Over the course of the fundraiser we raised over $7,000 (USD), which is more than twice as much as we raised last year. We’ll be having a wrap up meeting on February 4 at 17:00 UTC. You can register to attend if you’re interested in learning more about how the fundraiser went, what we learned, and what we’ll be doing moving forward.

Community Engagement Challenge

Phase Three of the Community Engagement Challenge is underway and our five teams are hard at work preparing their final presentations. Learn more about the BOSS, Leapcode, First Contributions, OpenUK Kids’s Courses and Associated Digital Camps, and Brooding Participation through Scaffolded Sustained FOSS Engagement projects at https://www.gnome.org/challenge/winners/ or follow @gnome for their social media takeovers! Join us on April 7, 2021 for our Winner’s Showcase. For more information about the Showcase, please visit: https://events.gnome.org/event/75/

Thank you!

Thank you for everything you do for GNOME. If you’re not already a Friend of GNOME, please consider becoming one today.

Engagement team needs your help!

Over the last few months, the Engagement Team has done some restructuring and we wanted to share our updates with you!
As a reminder, the Engagement Team facilitates communication between users, contributors, partners, and anyone else who might be interested in the GNOME project. This includes working on projects like GNOME’s social media and news channels, as well as conference and event organization. During our restructuring, we coordinated our priorities for 2021-2022, which you can read more about here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Engagement/General/-/wikis/home. From there we identified five main areas within the Engagement Team and have assigned each a lead coordinator. Going forward these subgroups will have regular working group meetings that are open to everyone.
We implemented this new initiative for many reasons, the main being to provide more transparency on our projects, and to make it easier for more contributors from all over our community to join Engagement Team projects. We hope that having clear priorities and project leads with regular working group meetings will be more accessible to new contributors and help them easily find a project they’re interested in.
These are our five new subgroups:
  • Social Media: responsible for maintaining all GNOME social channels
  • Fundraising: works on grant applications and Foundation fundraising efforts
  • Events and Conferences: plans and coordinates GNOME events, including GUADEC
  • Onboarding: building a manageable and scalable onboarding system
  • Graphic Design: supports all Foundation and Engagement projects with graphic design work
If you would like to join us or if you are interested to know more of what we do please do not hesitate to contact us at: kprogri@gnome.org or reply to our discourse thread: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/engagement-team-working-groups/4379