Friends of GNOME Update – October 2020

Welcome to the October 2020 Friends of GNOME Update!

A crescent of the Earth from space
“Earth” by Kevin M. Gill is licensed under CC BY 2.0

GNOME on the Road

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.

GNOME Around the World

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.

Engagement Team: Engage!

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.

GTK4

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.

CEC: Community Education Challenge

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.

Flathub Search Updates

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!

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.

GNOME Asia 2020 Registrations Are Open

We’re excited to announce that the Registrations for GNOME Asia Summit 2020 are open! You can now register online.

A drawn image of a person at a computer, sporting the GNOME logo, in gront of a window and a plant. Text reads: AGNOME.Asia Summit 2020

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.

A QU code for GNOME.Asia and two sponsor logos for openSUSE and GitLab

Engagement Team Report-September 2020

Engagement Team has been busy this September. We’re working on several things we would like to share with you.

We have regular meetings to discuss our strategy and goals, under the impulsion of our Program Director Kristi Progri. We recently decided to set-up three working groups to structure our activities: a Social Media group, an Onboarding group, and a Fundraising group. As always, we will be happy to welcome you if you want to join us in any of those activities.

This month also had an important milestone: the release video project for GNOME 3.38 Orbis was completed! This project was led by Caroline with input and feedback from Foundation Staff, Engagement Team members, and other GNOME contributors. The video was created for us by Freehive. From this iteration we learnt how to smoothen the process for next releases with closer collaboration with the Release Team and the production of Release Notes.

The Fundraising Working Group has kicked off organizing the Fall Fundraiser. Our goal is to get 50 new Friends of GNOME this Fall. Initiatives like the Fall Fundraiser help provide the Foundation with the resources it needs to grow GNOME, through supporting events, infrastructure, internships, partnerships, and software development. If you’re interested in getting involved, email mdeblanc@gnome.org.

Claudio Wunder is taking over the GNOME.org website update started by Britt Yazel and Evan Welsh. The update focuses on upgrades to the backend of the site and minor changes for visual consistency, but will also include migrating the Foundation content to a separate page. While no visual impact should be expected for this first milestone, it will ease our systems administrators’ work.

Claudio also is following-up on Clarissa Borges’ internship. That internship was about the creation of a CSS library to have a common UI on all of GNOME’s websites. That library will then be used for a second milestone in the GNOME.org website update, this time for visual improvements.

Sri Ramkrishna had been working on two exciting initiatives. Scalable Onboarding and Scalable Mentors are meant to attract more contributors to stay in the long run and turn them into mentors for a solid community.

Thibault Martin has been following our GSoC interns and their reports to help spread the knowledge about their great work on our social media, with the help of Caroline. Closer collaboration with Felipe Borges for next iterations of the GSoC and Outreachy should be expected so we can follow our interns earlier in their process and integration with the community.

What’s Happened In GNOME: September Edition

Welcome to the start of a monthly series where we detail what our developers have been working on this past month. Each change listed here is what developers on the project have merged and want to show the world. September month was low volume due to the feature and UI freezes before release 3.38, but it still gives a small look into how much work is done each month.

Getting Ready For GTK4

With GTK4 approaching soon, the GTK team has been working on polishing the experience and tying up loose ends. The demo application has added new demos, showing off new features like layout managers and transformations.

GtkSourceView, an extension of GtkTextView, has been ported to GTK4. This port brings changes to how rendering is done, improves performance, adds new snippet and completeion engines, and more.

Now is a good time to start using GTK4 for new apps, and to start ports of existing apps. Read more about the team’s work on their blog post for release 3.99.1.

Epiphany

Our web browser, Epiphany (AKA GNOME Web), has seen multiple improvements during the 3.38 development cycle. The biggest feature this release is making Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) enabled by default.

Screenshot of Epiphany preferences window showing ITP toggle
Screenshot of Epiphany preferences window showing ITP toggle

ITP applies a set of innovative restrictions to all webcontent, and a stricter set of restrictions is applied by detecting sites that can track you across the web. In addition, Epiphany can now optionally block websites from using localStorage and IndexedDB, preventing them from storing arbitrary data in your browser.

Epiphany now supports user scripts, blocks videos with sound from auto-playing by default, and allows you to mute individual tabs. Various dialogs have been refactored, and the preferences dialog has an all new look via libhandy‘s HdyPreferencesWindow.

There are many more features and improvements this release. You can read more about it on Michael Catanzaro’s blog post.

Librsvg

Librsvg has a new contributor, John Ledbetter, who has been working to bring features from the SVG2 specification. These features include:

  • Blend modes
  • Paint order
  • Filter chains

If you are interested in helping with librsvg, the project is looking for interns to participate in the next round of Outreachy. The deadline for initial contributions and project applications is October 31, 2020 at 16:00 UTC.

Adaptive Apps

As devices like the PinePhone and Librem 5 bring convergent Linux phones closer to reality, developers have been working to make more applications usable on both desktop and phone environments.

Over the past few months, GNOME Weather has received a major redesign. This month, changes landed to ensure that redesign worked on mobile screens. The full redesign is not yet complete, but when it is users of GNOME apps on phones will have a fully-fledged Weather app.

Disks has also been changed to use HdyLeaflet, allowing the window to fold at small screensizes for use on phone. This will bring phone users a fully graphical interface to manage SD cards and internal storage.

Screenshot of Disks and Weather in mobile mode
Screenshot of Disks and Weather in mobile mode

Games

GNOME Games has a few headlining features for the 3.38 release. Games now integrates Nintendo 64 emulation so you can play more of your favorite classic games.

Picture of Games running Ocarina Of Time
Picture of Games running Ocarina Of Time

The Games app now loads faster, and has a search provider so you can instantly find and launch games from within GNOME Shell’s search interface. Nintendo DS support has received improvements, with a screen gap being implemented for clearer viewing.

More of the work done this release can be seen in Alexander Mikhaylenko’s blog post.

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 our Discourse forum. As usual, donations would be appreciated as well to help support the development of GNOME.

Friends of GNOME Update September 2020

Welcome to the September 2020 edition of Friends of GNOME Update!

A red maple leaf on a tree stump
“fall leaf” by JustyCinMD is licensed under CC BY 2.0

GNOME 3.38 Orbis is out!

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.

GNOME on the Road

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.”

Community Education Challenge

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.

GNOME.Asia

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.

Grants Strategy

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.

Annual Report

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.

Thank you!

As always, thank you for supporting GNOME, the Foundation, and the community!

Friends of GNOME Update August 2020

Welcome to the August 2020 Friends of GNOME Newsletter!

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!

A beach, with blue water, brown sand, and a yellow beach umbrella.
“Llegó el verano – Summer is here” by GViciano is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

GNOME on the Road

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/

New Infrastructure for GNOME

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.

Community Engagement Challenge Winners Announced

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!

GNOME is Looking For Fundable Projects

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!

Thank you so much for supporting the GNOME Foundation! We appreciate everything you do for us!

Say Hi at GitLab Commit

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

Social Events at GUADEC 2020

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.

Four smiling people at a restaurant
Photo courtesy of Sriram Ramkrishna. Licensed CC-BY-SA

Social Events

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.

Social Hours

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.

Notes

Ingredients for Drinks

Cocktail 1

  • Beer (ideally Mexican beer)
  • Tomato Juice
  • Lime Juice
  • Optional: Worcestershire Sauce, Hot Sauce, Tajin Seasoning, Lime wedge
    Non alcoholic version – all of the above minus the beer!

Cocktail 2

  • Tequila
  • Grapefruit Juice
  • Lime Juice
  • Agave Nectar, Simple Syrup, or Honey
  • Salt
  • Ice

Cocktail 3

  • Whiskey
  • Lemon or limes
  • Honey, Simple Syrup, or Maple Syrup
  • Ginger beer or soda water
  • Mint or Basil
  • Optional: Berries for flavor
  • Ice

Cocktail 4

  • Vodka
  • Coconut Water
  • Pineapple Juice
  • Fresh Lime Juice
  • Agave Nectar, Simple Syrup, or Honey
  • Club Soda
  • Ice

Ingredients for Cooking

Recipe 1

  • 1 cup mayonnaise (vegan works too)
  • 1 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded
  • 14 oz can artichoke hearts (in brine, not oil), drained and finely chopped

Recipe 2

  • 2 slices of bread
  • Various veggies – mushrooms, carrots, onions, beets, cabbage, green or red peppers – thinly sliced
  • 1-2 TB Mayonnaise (vegan works too)
  • 1-2 TB Cranberry pickle (recipe included)
  • 1 slice of cheese (muenster, cheddar, etc)
  • 1 TB of butter

Cranberry Pickle

  • 2 TB Oil
  • 3 tsp mustard seeds
  • 1 tsp fenugreek seeds
  • 1 cup cranberries
  • 1/2 tsp salt (to taste)
  • 1/4 tsp turmeric
  • 1/4 tsp asofetida
  • 1 tsp kashmiri chilli powder
  • 1/4 tsp sugar (optional)

(Some) Highlights from GUADEC

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.

A woman stands behind a desk, looking up at slides. She has a microphone in her hand and is giving a presentation.
“Guadec 2013: Interns lightning talks” by Ana _Rey is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Staff Sessions

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.

Welcome to FOSS, Welcome to GNOME

New to FOSS? New to GNOME? Not sure what I’m talking about? Check out these sessions!

Building Better Community

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!

Building Better Software

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.

Join us!

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!

Meet the GNOMEies: Kristi Progri

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!

A photo of Kristi Progri. She is wearing a red shirt and fabulous bright red lipstick.
Photo courtesy of Kristi Progri. Licensed CC-BY-NC-ND-SA.

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.