GUADEC 2021 is less than a week away!Please make sure toregister online for the conference if you have not done so yet.
GUADEC is the GNOME community’s main conference. This year’s event takes place remotely between July 21st-25th and featurestalks from many community members and contributors covering a range of subjects.
GUADEC 2021 also features two fantastic keynote speakers.
The first, Shauna Gordon-McKeon, programmer and community organizer, will present on July 21 at 20:30 UTC. The second, Hong Phuc Dang, the founder of FOSSASIA, will present on July 22 at 15:00 UTC.
Don’t forget about the social events! Our GUADEC 2021 schedule is packed with post-conference social activities. You can find all the details online.
No GUADEC would be complete without a new t-shirt. The GUADEC 2021 event shirt is available for purchased on the GNOME Shop.
More information about GUADEC 2021 is available on the official event page.
Hope you enjoy it!
Particpants walking outside of the GUADEC 2018 venue
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.
“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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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:
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.
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 theGUADEC channel on Rocket.chat in the upcoming weeks to work on your CfP responses! Hope to see you there.
“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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
“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.
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.
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.
