Month: July 2015

Call for GNOME.Asia Summit 2016 Host Proposals

The GNOME.Asia Committee is inviting interested parties to submit proposals for hosting GNOME.Asia Summit during the 2nd quarter of 2016.

GNOME.Asia Summit is the annual GNOME Conference in Asia. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, but also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss the present technology and future developments.

GNOME.Asia Summits have been held in Beijing, Ho-Chi-Minh City, Taipei, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Beijing, Depok respectively over the last eight years.

The Committees’s preference is to find a new location each year in order to spread GNOME throughout Asia and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and execution of the event.

You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our website: http://www.gnome.asia

Interested parties are hereby invited to submit a formal proposal to the GNOME Asia Committee.  The deadline for the proposals is September 11, 2015. Please email your proposal to gnome-asia-committee-list<at>gnome<dot> org. We might invite you to present your proposal in more details over our regular IRC meetings or send you additional questions and requests. Results will be announced by the first week of October 2015.

The conference will require availability of facilities for 3-5 days, including a weekend, during the 2nd quarter of 2016 (between March and June).  Key points which each proposals should consider and which will be taken into account when deciding among candidates, are:

    • Local community support for hosting the conference.
    • Venue details. Information about infrastructure and facilities to hold the conference should be provided.
    • Preliminary schedule with main program & different activities.
    • Information about how Internet connectivity will be managed.
    • Lodging choices ranging from affordable housing to nicer hotels, and information about distances between the venue and lodging options.
    • The availability of restaurants or the organization of catering on-site, cost of food/soft drinks/beer.
    • The availability and cost of travel from major Asian and European cities.
    • Local industries, universities and government support.

Please provide a reasonably detailed budget (sponsorships, expenses, etc).

  • Plans for local sponsorship’s

Please refer to the GNOME.Asia website. Please also check the GNOME.Asia Summit check list, howtos and the winning proposal for 2012 when putting together a proposal.

You are welcome to contact gnome-asia-committee-list AT gnome org if you have any questions.

Please help to spread the word and we are looking forward to hearing from you soon!
GNOME.Asia Committee

GUADEC 2015 Keynote Speakers Announced

Following the opening of registration, we’re glad to announce Pamela Chestek, Christian Hergert and Matthias Kirschner as keynote speakers for GUADEC 2015.

Pamela is the lawyer who worked with us during the trademark negotiations with Groupon. She is the principal of Chestek Legal in Raleigh, North Carolina, and counsels creative communities on open source, brand, marketing and copyright matters. At GUADEC, Pamela will share her thoughts on how the combined strength of the FOSS community made a difference in the Groupon case.

Christian has been involved in the Free Software community since the late 90s. He has worked on a wide range of desktop and server technologies for GNU/Linux,and is currently working on Builder, a new IDE created specifically with GNOME development in mind. In his talk, Christian will tell us more about Builder and his vision for development experience in the GNOME project.

Matthias is the Vice President of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). He started using GNU/Linux in 1999, when he realized that software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives. Matthias is strongly believes that technology has to empower society instead of restrict it, and will discuss the boundaries for how computers are programmed and socially function.

We’re truly honored to have a such a special cast of keynote speakers joining us in Sweden. If you haven’t yet, make sure to register to attend GUADEC 2015. We’re looking forward to see you!

Donations within the EU are now handled through the Wau Holland Foundation

The GNOME Foundation and the Wau Holland Foundation (Wau Holland Stiftung; WHS) have recently reached an agreement that will significantly improve the way donations to GNOME within the European Union (EU) are received and managed.

Prior to signing this agreement, the GNOME Foundation was able to receive donations through many payment methods (including wires, checks, and Paypal transfers or subscriptions), whether for one-time donations or recurrent (monthly) subscriptions as part of the Friends of GNOME program. However, donors needed to be residents of the United States for their contributions to be eligible for tax-deductibility, and wire transfers were prohibitively expensive from Europe.

The GNOME Foundation worked closely with the WHS to streamline the process for donations made within the European Union. Thanks to this agreement, Europeans donating to the GNOME Foundation through the WHS in support of GNOME will be eligible for tax receipts, allowing them to deduct donated amounts in their annual tax reports to the extent permissible by the law in their local jurisdiction.

The WHS has become a valuable ally to the GNOME Project, providing financial support, knowledge and infrastructure for strengthening GNOME’s ties with their European donors.

“Having an entity for collecting tax-deductible donations within the European Union is something the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors has been working on for a long time. I’m glad the current Board was able to sign the agreement that turned this dream into reality,” says Andrea Veri, Secretary of the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors.

The GNOME Foundation thanks the WHS for its continued support and help.

Useful links:

  • Ready to make a donation from within the EU? Look at the “Other ways to donate” page.
  • The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors values transparency, and thus made public the agreement between the GNOME Foundation and the WHS. Look here for a copy of the agreement.

West Coast Summit 2015 concludes

After three intensive days, West Coast Summit 2015 has concluded in San Francisco. The summit gathered core GNOME contributors and Endless employees, as well as elementary OS contributors.

Topics that were covered during the summit included:

  • Application sandboxing and xdg-app
  • Application development and Builder
  • GTK+ and multi-touch
  • App stores and AppStream
  • Mutter (Screen rotation)

Beside technical work the summit featured discussions about community and outreach.

We’d like to thank everyone who made West Coast Summit 2015 happen. Special thanks goes to Endless for providing the venue.

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.