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.
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
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
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
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 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 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.
Welcome to the November 2020 Friends of GNOME Update
“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:
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.
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.
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.
There are two great conferences coming in November: the Linux App Summit on 12-14 and the GNOME Asia summit on 24-26!
Kristi Progri has been busy co-organizing it all.
The final Program of LAS with the schedule and speakers have been announced. You can find all the exciting talks given on the LAS schedule. Engagement also opened the call for BoF so people can hang out together and brainstorm on issues they face in the Linux App ecosystem.
The call for papers for GNOME Asia is now closed, but the registrations are open! It will take you only few minutes to reserve your seat in our biggest event in ASIA. The papers team committee is starting to review the papers.We will send out the emails to accepted speakers during the first mid of November.
Organizing conferences takes quite a bit of work, so Kristi has been working on a document as well to define the roles and responsibilities for events organization. The Events and Conferences team will meet again to keep improving the document, start putting together the GUADEC 2021 team and set up the agenda for the next meetings.
Social Media
Social media working groups have started. These will take place weekly every Wednesday at 17:00 UTC. We’ll use the hour each week to talk about news or items we can post on the GNOME social media channels. Everyone is welcome to join and it’s not necessary to stay for the whole hour.
People can also contribute to social media by submitting topics or requesting posts on our GitLab project.
Caroline Henriksen is in the process of writing guidelines for people who manage our social media accounts. These guidelines will cover how we as GNOME sound on each channel, best practices, and tips for creating consistent content. They will also help us onboard new social media contributors.
Claudio Wunder has been monitoring and moderating our Discourse instance and the GNOME subreddit. He has also tweaked the AutoModeration bot to fight abuse and help reporting bugs properly. The subreddit statistics are now public.
Thibault Martin has been monitoring GNOME Planet to find pieces our community wants to share with the outside world and made summaries for the general public to be published on GNOME’s Twitter and Mastodon accounts. He also has been monitoring the Twitter and Mastodon accounts to boost and like the contributors’ posts, and interact with the community.
Our community is currently in an uncomfortable situation regarding instant messaging. We have three platforms running: IRC, Matrix, and Rocket.chat. IRC and Matrix are bridged together, and Rocket.chat is isolated from the other two. This confusing situation makes onboarding of newcomers particularly difficult.
Our Rocket.chat instance was primarily opened for the GNOME Foundation and Foundation Staff. It has been mistakenly advertised as the official GNOME IM platform, which led some confusion. Claudio has been working with our system administrators and the Foundation to determine if access to that instance can be restricted to Foundation members and special guests. He’s working on an action plan to move this initiative forward.
Since many people from IRC complained about the bridge between IRC and Matrix, and the chat evaluation initiative was stalled, Thibault has been trying to gather feedback from IRC users to understand their main gripes. The people from Element, who hosts our Matrix instance and bridge, have been tweaking the bridge to make the experience less painful. Now the infamous URL-instead-of-message should be over!
He also has been in touch with the Mozilla community to get feedback regarding how they handle abuse and moderation on a federated platform in the open.
Finally, with the help of people from Element he has been assisting our system administrators in fixing an issue that prevented users from using gnome.org in Fractal to log on GNOME’s Matrix instance. Fractal users don’t need to remember the odd gnome.modular.im URL anymore!
It is to be noted that despite a very Matrix-rich month, the chat evaluation is still running and we still haven’t decided which will be our recommended platform.
Initiatives
Claudio has been gathering feedback on the Faces of GNOME project and scheduled a meeting to decide on its direction.
