“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
