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

Welcome to 2021!

Since mid-November, we’ve been running a fundraiser that ends today, January 5. We’re thankful for everyone who donated to support our work.

Welcome to 2021! A new year feels like a time for new beginnings, even though the challenges from 2020 still hang over us. But in the midst of all this, we continue to build free software and a welcoming, supportive community. We do this because we know that even in a world with issues that are so immediately pressing, we must also ensure that the foundations of technology are things that empower people, that people can trust, and that we can continue to use for the hard, amazing, inspiring work still needed.

GNOME helps users. We believe strongly that in order to create good technology, it must be trustworthy. We do this through the creation of world class technology that meets the needs of users — GNOME works for everyday people. This also means that people know a technology is working in their best interests. With rigorous scientific methods and passionate end user advocacy, GNOME is designed for users, by users.

We dedicated 2020 to making sure that GNOME software works for everyone through a focus on accessibility. This work is certainly not finished, but we’re proud of how far we’ve come. With the newest release of GTK4, we’ve completely revamped our accessibility toolkit. The updated layout implementation creates new possibilities for designing interfaces for a variety of user needs and preferences. We know that GNOME must be usable by everyone, whether that is due to disability or simply geography. There are more than 140 translations of GNOME in progress, which includes the billions of people who do not speak English.

GNOME helps people making technology. GTK, a GNOME Foundation project, is a complete set of UI elements implemented to make all sorts of software usable. Since everything in GNOME is free software, not only is it available to people working on software, but the parts, the code, and the designs are available as well. Anyone can look at how any part of GNOME is constructed and reuse that work. We’re excited to hear more about the ways you use GNOME tools to build a better world.

GNOME helps its contributors. We cannot stress enough the impact GNOME has on the lives on the individual community members. With both mentorship and internship, GNOME helps people break into tech and move to the next stage of their careers. Whether it calls for skills that are technical, social, public speaking, project management, writing, or everything else that is required to make a project as large and complete as GNOME succeed. Working on GNOME builds confidence for contributors. People learn to trust their skills and intuitions. They learn that what they do is valuable to the world at large.

GNOME is not just an end, but a means to give people the tools, skills, and resources they need to accomplish what they need to create a brighter future. We except 2021 will be a challenging year, but one we have high hopes for. We’re going to continue to build amazing things thanks to the support of our donors, contributors, and supporters.

Engagement Team Report- November 2020

Conferences

LAS took place from 12-14 November,

The Linux App Summit (LAS) is designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience. It is a three days conference organized jointly by GNOME and KDE. We had 310 people who joined and participated in the event. This event had 38 speakers and we had 7 Bofs organized. During the event we had 2 social events, the first one was the Amalfi Coast tour and the second one was a pub quiz.

GNOME ASIA

It’s the biggest GNOME event organized in Asia. This year we had 23 talks and 20 speakers participating. It’s a three days event starting from 24th-26th of November. We are now processing the number of participants in the event. GNOME ASIA had 2 social events: one was the Guitar class and the other was the cooking class.

Social media team promoted the call for proposals, registration opening, schedule, and speakers on all channels. Illustration work was created by the GNOME Asia organizing team.

Annual report

People are finishing and polishing their articles for the annual report. We are still in the process of gathering, with the hope that we will have all materials by December.

Website updates

Claudio had been working with Gabriele on updating the Branding library. This is going to be used as a visual framework for all the websites of the GNOME Ecosystem.

Challenge and fundraising

We held a live event for the Community Engagement Challenge Phase Two winners announcement which we promoted over social and streamed live to Youtube: https://youtu.be/poTxMwKDq2g

We’ve promoted Molly’s fundraising efforts throughout all channels. She’s launched a new article every week which we share and developed additional social content around.

Community bonding

Engagement Priorities

This month Kristi and Thibault worked on a report for Engagement team priorities as well that has been published on Engagement’s wiki

Instant Messaging Moderation

Thibault has been working with the system administrators on IRC’s end and from the people of Element on Matrix’s end to set-up a moderation system that will support both worlds at once.

It appears that many issues are caused by Matrix rooms being in an outdated version. Those matrix rooms will be upgraded in January with the help of Element’s system administrators.

GTK4 Release Party

GTK4 is coming out and we’re going to party!

Join us on Friday December 18 at 18:00 (UTC) to celebrate the release of GTK4. There will be Q&A time with GTK developers, including Emmanuele Bassi and Matthias Clasen, and open social time. We’ll be hosting the event using the meet.gnome.org.

Read more details and RSVP at: https://events.gnome.org/event/59/

What’s Happened In GNOME: October and November 2020 Edition

Welcome to the October and November 2020 Edition of the update series where we detail what our developers have been working on recently. Each change listed here is what developers on the project have merged and want to show the world.

GNOME Web & WebKit

GNOME Web and WebKit have seen some exciting new changes in October. To start off, WebKitGTK now has gamepad support implemented by ChangSeok Oh. Thanks to their work, you will be able to use your favorite gamepads to play games in WebKitGTK-based browsers such as GNOME Web starting next March.

GNOME Web has also received a new icon designed by Tobias Bernard that better fits in with GNOME’s icon set.

New Epiphany Logo
New Epiphany Logo

Geary

Julian Sparber polished off the responsive work for Geary which has landed on mainline. This means Geary now fits better on smaller screens, and this can be tested in the nightlies.

Screenshot of Geary in 3-panel mode
Screenshot of Geary in 3-panel mode

GNOME Games

Adrien Plazas has added support for playing Dreamcast games to GNOME Games. It is powered by the Flycast Libretro core and it supports both the .gdi and .cdi formats.

Screenshot of Sonic Adventure running in Games
Screenshot of Sonic Adventure running in Games

You will be able to use it in the next stable version to be released in March 2021.

Fractal

Christopher Davis has been working on a slight styling overhaul to be more in line with newer Adwaita styling and recent app designs.

Screenshot of Fractal's main view, showing new rounded styling.
Screenshot of Fractal’s main view, showing new rounded styling.
Screenshot of Fractal's image viewer, with round buttons
Screenshot of Fractal’s image viewer, with round buttons

A large merge request from Alejandro Dominguez changed Fractal’s backend to use matrix-rust-sdk instead of a custom API module. Alejandro is also working to refactor how Fractal handles all the UI and interactions between the UI and the internal machinery. The main target is to make Fractal snappier, and more flexible for future development.

Librsvg

Librsvg is a vectorial (SVG) rendering library. Its test suite is now in Rust, and the CI has been intensively optimised: it used to take an hour and a half to build the library, and now only takes 13 minutes!

GTK4 and GTK3 and Rust

The GTK team has been working hard this month again. GTK4 now talks nicely with assistive technologies thanks to the new AT-SPI backend. The Emoji chooser and other emoji handling related improvements have been performed.

macOS can now run GTK4 applications, thanks to the new GDK backend. GTK4 changed the way UIs are drawn and the existing backend for GTK3 could not be reused.

Bilal Elmoussaoui and Sophie Herold have been working on fixing the null-ability annotations in GTK4 before the 4.0 release. Bilal has also put in a large amount of work for subclassing support, further filling out the types gtk-rs users can subclass. Christopher Davis also added initial support for composite templates to the gtk4-rs and gtk-rs bindings.

If you want to get started with the GTK4 bindings, check out the GitHub repository. There you can find examples and links to API documentation.

GNOME Circle

A new initiative for third party apps has launched, called GNOME Circle. This initiative supports apps and libraries that use the GNOME platform. Circle is meant to showcase all the amazing third-party apps and libraries within the GNOME ecosystem, and support the independent developers creating them.

GNOME Circle logo on green background
GNOME Circle graphic

Developers who are using the GNOME platform can apply to have their projects included in GNOME Circle. When their project is approved, they qualify for benefits including:

  • Promotion and advertising
  • Contributors qualify for GNOME Foundation membership
  • Optional inclusion in the Circle Gitlab group

To learn more and see the apps included, you can visit https://circle.gnome.org/.

Third-Party Applications

Starting this edition, we will be showcasing third-party applications, including those in GNOME Circle.

Introducing Health

Rasmus Thomsen created an application to follow your weight and steps count! It accepts
both manual input and synchronisation with Google Fit devices.

If you’re interested in contributing to the project or using it, visit the GitLab repository.

Introducing Souk

Souk is a flatpak-based app store, written with GTK4 and Rust. It’s written from the ground up to be an app store that works both on desktop and on mobile devices like the PinePhone, PineTab, and Librem 5.

If you’re interested in contributing to the project or using it, visit the GitLab repository.

Conclusion

We hope to that this was useful. If any of these projects seem useful to you or you would like to contribute, please don’t  hesitate to join us via IRC or Matrix or post on https://discourse.gnome.org. As usual donations would be appreciated as well to help support the development of GNOME.

Friends of GNOME Update – November 2020

Welcome to the November 2020 Friends of GNOME Update

A photo of a group of people in matching shirts, sitting on a table making spring rolls.
“GNOME Asia 2009 with FOSSASIA, Saigon Ho Chi Minh City” by FOSSASIA is licensed under CC BY 2.0

GNOME on the Road

The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference took place online this year and we were there. Executive Director Neil McGovern gave a presentation titled “Patently Obvious” about our legal case with a patent assertion entity and how the settlement impacts all of FOSS.

Strategic Initiatives Manager M. de Blanc gave a surprise talk that had nothing to do with GNOME, but discussed the Foundation nonetheless.

We also had talks at Linux Application Summit and GNOME.Asia, which you can read more about below.

We (co-) Hosted Great Events!

Linux App Summit (LAS) took place on November 12 – 14. Co-organized with KDE, LAS brought together attendees from over 80 countries. Videos are already online if you would like to catch up or share your favorite sessions with friends.

We had three GNOME Foundation staff speaking at LAS:

While writing this, GNOME.Asia Summit is taking place. Organizationally based in Malaysia, GNOME.Asia is happening until November 26. It features an amazing list of speakers, including talks from Bartłomiej and Melissa; GNOME Foundation Board Members Felipe Borges (giving two talks), Rob McQueen, and Federico Mena Quintero (also giving two talks; and GNOME Foundation members and friends.

Accessibility GTK (and GNOME)

Emmanuele, Core GTK Developer, has spent 2020 focusing on accessibility. He recently worked with Matthias Clasen on a blog post about some of that work.

When discussing computing, “accessibility” refers to the technologies that make things like software and web sites work for people with disabilities or who otherwise need accommodations. This includes a range of permanent and temporary conditions, e.g. blind users and people who have broken an arm and are computing one handed while it heals. Accessibility matters to us at GNOME because we believe everyone should trust and be empowered by their technology, regardless of ability.

Community Education Challenge Phase Two Winners

The Community Engagement Challenge Phase Two is wrapping up. Melissa Wu and Caroline Henriksen have been preparing for the announcement of the Phase Two winners. You can join us on December 2 at 18:00 UTC for a showcase of projects, highlighting how they’ve developed since July, and the grand announcement of who will be moving on to Phase Three.

Check Out A GNOME Working Group

We’ve started up regular social media working group hours that anyone can join. The goal of these meetings will be to discuss and plan out news and social topics for the following week, and if there is time, to work on drafting the content. You can drop in on one to check it out (or one of the other Working Group or Team meetings). Information is on events.gnome.org.

Building the Future of GNOME

We’re running a fundraiser to fund the Foundation’s activities in 2021. We appreciate how much you’ve already supported GNOME! We’re asking if you’d be willing to share our announcement of the fundraiser; one of the weekly updates we’ll be sharing on gnome.org, including this one on GTK4; or your GNOME Story on social media using #GNOMEStories.

Even if you don’t, we recommend checking out Director of Operations Rosanna Yuen’s GNOME Story.

From Planet GNOME

Here are a few posts we particularly liked from Planet GNOME:

Thank you!

Thank you for all the ways you support GNOME—the community, the Foundation, and the project. This has not been an easy year for many of us, and we appreciate that you have given your time and energy into making GNOME a place where people have found connection, fulfillment, and even joy.