Tag: fog update

Friends of GNOME Update – May 2021

Welcome to the May 2021 Friends of GNOME Update

Cherry blossoms with a grey sky in the background
“Cherry Blossom” by shioshvili is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

LAS

The Linux App Summit took place May 13 – 15. Taking advantage of its virtual nature, the event had a long break in the middle of the proceedings in order to better accommodate attendees across time zones. Congratulations and thanks to the whole LAS team!

GUADEC

The call for GUADEC birds of a feather sessions, lightning talks, and workshops is now open. These will take place July 23 – 24, after the talks.

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions are up to two hours. These provide a time for people with shared interests to get together to talk about them. These can be working sessions and/or discussion sessions.

Lightning talks are ten minute talks. If you’re an inexperienced speaker or nervous on a stage, lightning talks are a great opportunity to try out speaking in a more relaxed setting. If you have an idea you want to try out, a narrower topic to explore, or you want to start a conversation, consider giving a lightning talk!

A workshop is a hands on session where people will be learning and working together.

You can submit an idea today!

Community Engagement Challenge Feedback

Did you follow, participate in, or otherwise engage with the CEC? Please give your feedback and fill out this survey!

Seeking University Outreach Ambassadors

The University Outreach program serves two purposes: helping universities adopt GNOME technologies and helping students get involved with GNOME. The GNOME Africa community is currently recruiting for university outreach across Africa. Fill out this form to learn more!

Interns!

We can never adequately express how excited we are about GNOME interns. This year we have two Outreachy interns and 12 Google Summer of Code interns.

Our Outreachy interns are Veena Nagar and Madds H. GSoC interns include Abanoub Ghadban, Maximiliano Sandoval, Manuel Genovés, Kai A. Hiller, Nishal Kulkarni, Alejandro Domínguez, Nishit Patel, zbrown, Ivan Molodetskikh, visvesh subramanian, Arijit Kundu, and Dhanuka Warusadura.

GNOME Gifts

We’ve had a few changes at the GNOME Shop, including a new water bottle.

Misc Updates We Like

Thank you!

Thank you for your support! Whether you’re a Friend of GNOME, contributor, users, or casually interested in our work, we appreciate your time and interest in building a great GNOME community!

Friends of GNOME Update – April 2021

Welcome to the April 2021 Friends of GNOME Update

GNOME 40

At the end of March we released GNOME 40! Some highlights include:

  • new touchpad gestures
  • core apps
  • better wifi settings

You can try it out on GNOME OS Nightly, Fedora, and openSUSE. Check it out online or watch the release video!

GNOME On the Road

We might not be on the road, but Director of Operations Rosanna Yuen recently curated imakefoss. As part of this, she gave her perspective on things like her FOSS origin story and newcomers to the FOSS community. Check it out!

Events with GNOME and Friends

Linux App Summit is coming up. Join us and KDE from May 13 – 15 to learn and grow the Linux app ecosystem. Keynote speakers include GNOME Foundation member and former executive director Karen Sandler and Kathy Giori, who has built her own Linux powered private smart home. The schedule is online and registration is open.

We’ve opened registration for GUADEC 2021. This year’s conference will take place online, using our BigBlueButton installation. You can read the schedule and then register online to attend! Highlights from the schedule include 24 sessions on all sorts of topics, the GNOME Foundation annual members meeting, and keynotes by Hong Phuc Dang and Shauna Gordon-McKeon.

Challenge Winners Announced!

After a number of exciting months, the Community Engagement Challenge wrapped up on April 7 with a showcase of projects and the announcement of the Challenge winner. Congratulations to our winner Big Open Source Sibling and the runner up Open UK Kids Course and Digital Camp.

Part of running the Challenge was building the infrastructure for it, which we now have set up and is ready to go. If you have ideas for future Challenges that match up well with the mission and work of GNOME, please email us!

GNOME.org updates

We recently updated the GNOME web site with a new WordPress instance! Previously, we used a combination of WordPress pages and static pages, but the new site is all on WordPress. The project was started by Britt Yazel, and happened with the help of Evan Welsh and Claudio Wunder.

Summer Internships

This summer we are participating in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Mentors have been working with potential interns on their applications and first contributions to GNOME. Accepted interns will be announced in the upcoming weeks.

Technical Updates

Emmanuele Bassi, Core GTK Developer, works on a tool called gi-docgen, which generates API references from introspection data. He’s made some updates and documented them. Additionally, there have been a lot of updates to the GTK documentation.

Emmanuele is also working on fixing issues in the GTK4 accessibility infrastructure. He is replacing the shared accessibility bus with a peer-to-peer connection between GTK4 applications and assistive technologies.

Thank you!

Thank you for your support! Whether you’re a Friend of GNOME, contributor, users, or casually interested in our work, we appreciate your time and interest in building a great GNOME community!

Friends of GNOME Update – January 2021

Welcome to the January 2021 Friends of GNOME Update

We made it to 2021! Go team!

The northern lights, a green slash across the sky above deep snow and trees.
“Northern Lights” by timo_w2s is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

GNOME on the Road

  • 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.

GTK 4 Release

The GTK team released GKT 4.0! We are thrilled to see ten years of work culminate in such a great way. Many people were involved in the creation of GTK4, and you can read all about them on the GTK blog.

Getting Involved With GNOME in Paraguay

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.

Friends of GNOME Update – November 2020

Welcome to the November 2020 Friends of GNOME Update

A photo of a group of people in matching shirts, sitting on a table making spring rolls.
“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:

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.

Accessibility GTK (and GNOME)

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.

Community Education Challenge Phase Two Winners

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.

Check Out A GNOME Working Group

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.

Building the Future of GNOME

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.

From Planet GNOME

Here are a few posts we particularly liked from Planet GNOME:

Thank you!

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.

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.

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!