Featuring the people side of GNOME
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are a few posts we particularly liked from Planet GNOME:
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.
Executive Director Neil McGovern spoke at Open Source Summit EU. In his keynote, titled “Patently Obvious – The Year the Lawyers Came to FOSS,” Neil spoke about our patent case with Rothschild Patent Imaging.
Neil was also interviewed in The Registrar. This wide-ranging article covers the patent case, technical development of GNOME, GNOME beyond a desktop environment, and even GNOME on a phone.
We’re working with our friends at KDE on the Linux Application Summit (LAS). This event takes place November 12 – 14. It will be online this year. The event will cover all things to do with apps in a Linux environment. Registration is open! LAS is also looking for volunteers, so if you’d like to get involved, please fill out this form.
Registration for GNOME.Asia is open! The GNOME.Asia Summit 2020 will be taking place online on November 24 – 26. While the conference is centered around the GNOME Project, there will be talks, workshops, and Birds of a Feather sessions for everyone interested in free and open source software. You can register online.
The GNOME Engagement Team, organized by Kristi Progri, launched two new projects: Engagement Team Reports and What’s Happening in GNOME.
“Engagement Team Reports” covers what the Engagement Team has been up to, which includes work from contributors, volunteers, and Foundation staff. “What’s Happening in GNOME” focuses on technical developments in the GNOME ecosystem.
If you don’t already, consider following the Engagement Blog to keep track of these updates.
If you’re now inspired to get involved with the Engagement Team, they maintain an active Discourse, and have monthly meetings.
GTK is an amazing, important, and exciting part of the GNOME ecosystem. It gets people excited in ways that few other parts of our technical development does. Emmanuele Bassi, the Foundation’s Core GTK Developer, has been working hard on getting the newest major release, GTK4, ready to go. We’re really excited about this at the Foundation and across the GNOME community.
Melissa Wu, the head organizer of the Community Engagement Challenge, and Caroline Henriksen have been working hard on keeping up momentum around the Challenge. Between organizing public conversations with the judges and keeping up with the Phase One winners, we have the Phase Two deadline coming up. If you’d like to keep up with the Challenge news, sign up for the mailing list.
Flatpak is one of our favorite ways to install apps on GNOME. The best way to get the apps you want is on Flathub. Bartłomiej Piotrowski and Jan Horbowicz have recently added new search implementation to flathub.org, which will yield better results in your searches.
LAS (mentioned above) is a great event if you want to learn more about what’s happening with Flatpak.
Thank you for being a Friend of GNOME! Caroline and I are working on some stuff for Friends of GNOME that I’m pretty excited about and can’t wait to share with you. In the meantime, we appreciate your continued support and all the ways you help GNOME.
We’re excited to announce that the Registrations for GNOME Asia Summit 2020 are open! You can now register online.
GNOME Asia Summit 2020 will take place online November 24 – 26.
Topics covered include the GNOME desktop and a range of other topics that are GNOME specific and general to the free software and tech communities. The summit brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a place for users, developers, leaders, governments and businesses to discuss present technology and future developments.
More information about the GNOME Asia 2020 Summit including is available on the official website. The GNOME Asia Summit will be three days of stand out keynotes, engaging and educational sessions, and skill building Birds of a Feather sessions and workshops, so register today.
We released GNOME 3.38 Orbis! The release, of course, includes an amazing release video we highly recommend checking out. Release notes are available online.
Several Foundation staff presented at GNOME Africa Onboard Virtual. Kristi Progri helped kick off the event with Foundation vice-president Regina Nkemchor Adejo. M de Blanc and Rosanna Yuen talked about the GNOME code of conduct. Melissa Wu reprised her session on What it’s Like to Be New to GNOME.
Rosanna will also be presenting at All Things Open. On October 20 at 3:30pm ET, you can catch “GNOME Foundation Then and Now — 20 years of bringing free software to the desktop.”
Exciting things are happening with the Community Education Challenge! While the phase one winners work on their projects, our fabulous judges have been hosting office hours to discuss the Challenge. To keep up with office hours and other Challenge news, sign up for the email list.
We’ve been working with the local team on GNOME.Asia. In addition to other developments, the Call for Proposals is open. You can submit to the CfP until 18 October 2020. GNOME.Asia 2020 will be taking place online.
We want to help you fund your GNOME projects! While the Foundation is not giving out grants, we are helping with grant applications for specific parts of the project. If you have any ideas, please add them to the wiki.
Each year the GNOME Foundation produces an annual report. This report covers Foundation and community activities over the past year. This year’s report is now underway.
As always, thank you for supporting GNOME, the Foundation, and the community!
We’re going to be doing some rebranding soon, including looking for a new name. Our goal is to cover news and activities from the GNOME Foundation, as well as linking out to interesting GNOME news. Feel free to contact us with any name ideas you may have!
We had an amazing GUADEC last month. We had talks, workshops, and Birds of a Feather sessions. Topics ranged from role of technology in education to team work best practices around building free software to GNOME specific technical discussions. The videos are now online.
GNOME is people and the community really came through at GUADEC, spending lots of social time together, taking advantage of the platform we used for GUADEC 2020.
We’re actively working on the Linux App Summit and GNOME.Asia. The [CFP for the Linux App Summit is currently open][5].
[5}: https://www.gnome.org/news/2020/08/linux-app-summit-2020-call-for-talks-now-open/
We installed instances of Big Blue Button (video chat software) and Indico (event software) for GUADEC. These have been made available for general use to GNOME Foundation members and for Foundation activities.
The Community Engagement Challenge is about coming up with new ways to get people involved in free software and GNOME. The Challenge is set up in phases – at the end of each phase winners are selected for the next stage and supplied with funding to work on their project. We recently announced phase one winners!
These twenty projects are all excellent and quite different from one another. Some are based in organizations, where others are being created fresh by one person. We look forward to seeing how they develop over phase two!
We’ve looking at trying something new! A number of projects within GNOME are stuck at a point where funding could make a big difference. We’re looking to identify those and the people working on them in order to help them take the next steps they need to take. If you know of such a project, please add it to the Fundable Projects page.
In general, we’re in the early stages of starting a Fundraising Working Group. If you’re interested in getting involved, we’d love to hear from you!
Thank you so much for supporting the GNOME Foundation! We appreciate everything you do for us!
GitLab Commit starts tomorrow, Wednesday August 26! In addition to a session about how some of us at GNOME use GitLab, we’ll be present at the exhibit hall at a virtual booth.
If you’d like to visit us during GitLab Commit, a number of staff and community volunteers will be present over the course of the day. You will find us on the following schedule. Times are in UTC. Other staff members or volunteers may also stop by to say hi.
August 26
13:00 – 16:00 – Neil McGovern and Molly de Blanc
16:00 – 18:00 – Neil and Oliver Propost
18:00 – 20:00 – Molly and Chinwe Zojie
20:00 – 22:00 – Caroline Henriksen and Ruth Ikegah
August 27
03:00 – 05:00 – Melissa Wu
06:00 – Sammy Fung
10:00 – 12:00 – Neil and Bartłomiej Piotrowski
12:00 – 13:00 – Neil and Oliver
13:00 – 14:00 – Neil and Ruth
Part of the magic of GUADEC is going out to amazing dinners with your new and old friends; exploring the beautiful parts of somewhere new; and maybe even staying up to watch the sun rise.
This year is a little bit different – but there are still lots of ways to get to know each other, try out new things, and hopefully have a little fun.
Wednesday (22 July) at 21:10 UTC you can join Melissa Wu for drinks. She’ll be teaching us some fun cocktail and mocktail recipes. Thank you Woodlyn Travel for making this happen! (See Notes below.)
Sriram Ramkrishna, every GNOMEie’s fun uncle, is also quite the cook. Join him Thursday (23 July) at 21:00 UTC to learn some of his kitchen secrets. I recommend getting the ingredients ahead of time so you can cook along and then we can all snack together. (See Notes below.)
You might know Sumana Harihareswara from her work with Python, GNOME, Zulip, Mailman, MediaWiki, or many other places in the free software world. She’s also hilarious. If you like to laugh, check out Sumana on Friday (24 July) at 21:00 UTC to hear Sumana’s stand-up comedy.
There might not be a Museum BoF this year, but Ayanna Dozier will be bringing the museum experience to us on Monday (27 July) at 21:00 UTC. Ayanna Dozier is a scholar, filmmaker, and performance artist, and the Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum and an Adjunct Professor at Fordham University. She’ll be introducing us to modern art (1930 – 1965) through key artists and important historical events.
Every night after the evening social events, you can attend or host a Social Hour. Social hours are a time to get together around any topic you’re interested in. These will include a Tea Party, GNOME Beers, and a GLBTQ+ social time. We especially encourage Social Hours based on non-English languages. If you want to host a social hour, please sign up for an account on and add it to the wiki.
Cocktail 1
Cocktail 2
Cocktail 3
Cocktail 4
Recipe 1
Recipe 2
Cranberry Pickle
There are so many exciting things happening at GUADEC this year, it would be impossible to highlight everything I’m looking forward to. What really excited me about the schedule this year is how diverse the topics are. I really do think this year’s GUADEC has something for everyone, from people just getting to know free and open source software (FOSS) to people who are hardcore GNOME contributors. Please note that all sessions will be captioned in English.
I positively adore my coworkers. I’ll spare you how great they are, and instead focus on some of the talks they’ll be giving.
GKT Core Developer Emmanuele Bassi will be giving two talks: Being a GNOME Maintainer: Best Practices and Known Traps and Archaeology of Accessibility. Being a GNOME Maintainer will discuss what it means to be a GNOME maintainer, and Archaeology of Accessibility will be a technical deep dive into the accessibility work Emmanuele and others have been doing around accessibility. (Note: “Accessibility” refers to the ability of technology to accommodate the needs of users who have disabilities, visual impairments, etc.)
Melissa Wu, who is organizing the Community Engagement Challenge, will give two sessions as well. In her first, Remember What It’s Like to Be New to GNOME, she’ll talk about her experience coming to the GNOME community only a few months ago, getting to know people, and making things happen.
Melissa will also join me for A Year of Strategic Initiatives at GNOME, during which we’ll talk about a range of things that have happened at GNOME over the past year (and some future plans), with a focus on organizational sustainability and the initiatives that make us excited to work here.
Executive Director Neil McGovern will lead the Annual General Meeting, to provide everyone with an overview of what we’ve been doing and what we will do, and answer your questions.
New to FOSS? New to GNOME? Not sure what I’m talking about? Check out these sessions!
In these talks you’ll learn about how to build better, stronger communities and be a better community member. A lot of this is applicable to your life outside of FOSS as well!
These talks cover ways to build software better. Some of them are focused on GNOME, but all of them will be applicable to whatever you’re working on.
Registration for GUADEC is free, but we encourage you to do so anyway. Knowing how many people are attending, and learning about who you are, helps us make GUADEC better every year. Register today!
With GUADEC two weeks away, this was the perfect time to talk to Program Manager and GUADEC organizer Kristi Progri. To see her amazing work live, register for GUADEC today!
Tell us a little bit more about yourself.
For people who have known me for a long time, I am Kiki. That’s my nickname, which comes from when I was playing basketball and I had four other team mates with the same name.
I was born and grew up in the country with the largest number of bunkers in the world, left over from the communist era. I finished my bachelor studies in International Affairs and Diplomacy and my Master’s Degree is in ‘Information Systems Security’
A few years ago I co-founded the Open Source Diversity initiative and for around five years I was the chairwoman of a local hackerspace in my hometown that promotes all Free & Open Source technologies and data. For many years I was part of the organizing team for many years of the biggest open source conference in Albania.
What is your role within the GNOME community?
I am the Program Coordinator in the GNOME Foundation where I help to organize various events, leading many initiatives within the community including the Engagement Team, and working closely with all the volunteers and contributors. I also coordinate internships and help with general Foundation activities.
Do you have any other affiliations you want to share?
Before joining GNOME, I was very active in Mozilla community. I have been part of the Tech Speakers program and a Mozilla Representative for more than seven years now. I have organized many events and workshops and also have participated as a speaker talking about Free Software communities at many events around the globe.
Why did you get involved in GNOME?
I was introduced to Free Software when I was in high school, my friend had a computer running Debian and he started explaining how it worked. This was the first time I heard about it and I immediately understood that I would never be part of these communities. It looked so complicated and not my cup of tea, but it looks like I was very wrong. Once I went for to a hackerspace meeting I completely changed my mind and from that moment the hackerspace become my second home.
Why are you still involved with GNOME?
Diversity, people, community, sorting out dramas in and outside community, are some very important keywords that drive me to love working in such environment. I am working full time, so GNOME gets a big part of my attention everyday, which I am happy to share.
What are you working on right now?
My working desk is full of post-it notes of to do tasks 😀
My main thing now is organizing GUADEC online edition, working as well Google Season of Docs, University Outreach Initiative, other activities and tasks part of the Engagement team, and many others things which I am sure I have missed.
What are you excited about right now – either in GNOME or free and open source software in general?
We are building a new GNOME Community in Africa and spreading our community more in Asia, I am so excited to know what the future will bring us and how big GNOME will get. I feel like we are gaining momentum and I see very motivated people coming and contributing.
What is a major challenge you see for the future of GNOME?
As in many Free Software communities we have a big challenge with how to get newcomers on board and to keep them motivated to continue contributing. We need to have a very good structured way within the community to guide people for the tasks we need contributors and show them the way. Another major challenge I see is how GNOME will adapt with the new changes that are occurring in the world due to Covid-19 in terms of events, conferences, and hackfest organization .
What do you think GNOME should focus on next?
Financial sustainability and keeping the shiny growth rate we have right now should be one of the most important focuses. As previously mentioned these are difficult times we are currently living in, in the making the world a bit unsafe and therefore this might mean that finding the resources and donors will be challenging.
What else should we have asked about that we didn’t? Please answer 🙂
Whats you favorite physical activity? Weightlifting
Answers edited for length.