Tag: fog

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.

Step up and become a Friend of GNOME

The GNOME project is built by a vibrant community and supported by the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity registered in California (USA). The GNOME community has spent more than 20 years creating a desktop environment designed for the user. We‘re asking you to step up for GNOME and become Friend of GNOME. We’re working to have 100 new Friends of GNOME join by January 6, 2020.

A photo of a group of GNOME contributors at GUADEC, standing behind a large beach blanket full of colorful GNOME logos.

The GNOME Foundation was founded in 2000, to support the activities of the GNOME project and our goal of building a desktop environments that respects the freedom of every user, developer, and contributor. We continue to make great strides towards this.

2019 has been an exciting year for us with the expansion of the Foundation‘s staff and efforts:

This year has not been without challenges. Most notably, October brought with it allegations of patent infringement from Rothschild Imaging, Ltd. Rather than settling or backing down, we are taking this fight as far as we have to in order to say that patent trolls have no place in free software. This effort is something we’ll be carrying forward into the coming year.

Looking ahead to 2020, we already have a lot going on in addition to our patent case. There’s kicking off the GNOME Coding Education Challenge in order to expand the tools we have available to learn and teach. We will be seriously expanding our accessibility efforts, and are currently planning an accessibility audit and making plans for updates to the Orca screen reader. We’ve already started planning GUADEC 2020, which will bring us to our first North American GUADEC in Zacatecas, Mexico. We have a GNOME.Asia in the works. There will be more hackfests and newcomer events, intern and mentorship opportunities, and constant efforts to work on, for, and with the community. We’ll do all of this while upholding the standards of technical excellence you have come to expect from the GNOME project, building software for people of every country with every level of ability.

The GNOME Foundation supports the work of the GNOME community, and we need your help to keep going. We’re working on the future, not just of how you interact with your computer, but the future of free software and we want you to join us. Step up for GNOME! You can become a Friend of GNOME, to support us on either an annual or monthly basis. We ask for a minimum donation of $10/month, and recommend $25 a month ($5 for students). Every donation comes with a Thank You postcard from a GNOME hacker and a discount on GNOME swag when you find our booth at a conference. For $30 a month, you can get a subscription to LWN. If you donate $500 or more on an annual basis, you’ll get a wonderful Thank You note especially from executive director Neil McGovern.

We’re bringing software freedom to the desktop. We‘re developing a safe, secure, accessible desktop environment for everyone; building a global community of contributors; and fostering the next generation of free and open source software contributors. By becoming a Friend of GNOME you are becoming a part of that.

Cheers,

Andrea, Bart, Emmanuele, Kristi, Molly, Neil, and Rosanna

Photo courtesy of Ana Rey. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.