June 2018 – GNOME Foundation

Call for Participation – Libre Application Summit hosted by GNOME – Sept 6 – 9th 2018

Call for Participation in the Libre Application Summit 2018
Presented by the GNOME Foundation

Denver, CO. The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the Call for Participation in the 2018 Libre Application Summit (LAS). The conference will be held from September 6th – 9th in Denver, Colorado, and brings together developers, entrepreneurs, and free and open source (FOSS) enthusiasts for discussion and debate around the future of the open source application ecosystem.

The conference will be held at the Parkside Mansion, situated immediately next to the Denver City Park, with direct access to downtown, public transport, restaurants, and nightlife. With the beautiful Colorado summer weather, there really is no better spot for our community to come together to chart the collective future of our projects.

Whether you represent a large or small project, the Libre Application Summit is the perfect opportunity to collaborate towards building a new and successful market for the proliferation of FOSS software. We need persons such as you to lend your voice and expertise, so if you would like to be considered for a presentation we are now accepting abstracts.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Universal App Packaging – I.e. Flatpak or Snap
Toolchains, Toolkits, and Resources for Developers
Application Design and UX
Legal/Licensing/Community Management/Open Source Education
State of the Application Ecosystem

Proposals by newcomers and experienced speakers alike are welcome. When submitting your proposal please keep in mind that talk slots are 45 minutes long. Please kindly keep your abstract to 500 words or less.

The call for presentations will have the following timeline:
July 25th: deadline for submitting your talk proposals through https://las.gnome.org
August 1st: all speakers will be notified if their talk has been accepted
September 6th-9th: core conference days in Denver, Colorado

The Papers Team is looking forward to your talk proposal. In case of questions regarding the call for talks, please contact the Papers Team at papers@las.gnome.org. For general questions regarding the conference, please consult the LAS GNOME website or contact the LAS GNOME organizing team.

If you would like to become a sponsor of LAS GNOME please contact sponsors@las.gnome.org

GNOME collaboration with Mozilla OSSN

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce a new collaboration with the Mozilla Open Source Student Network (OSSN) on a pilot program that aims to bridge the divide between university students and Open Source Software projects.

This program seeks to identify and correct what have historically been the major barriers to engagement within the university student population. With this collaboration, we are building new ways for students to discover where opportunities and needs exist in the Open Source Software community, and to ease their path towards code contribution.

“With this opportunity, we hope to link students with Open Source projects, where they can gain real-world experience, and contribute to software that is used by millions of people worldwide. I’m very excited to support this program, and look forward to welcoming new contributors to the world of Open Source software,” said Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

From June to October 2018, the GNOME Foundation, as well as other partnering projects and organizations, will be providing university students with the opportunity to work with our experienced mentors to contribute their work to a variety of GNOME projects. At the same time, students will be growing their skills in C, Python, and JavaScript, while learning effective and efficient programming and collaborative conventions.

Furthermore, throughout the program students will be helping us glean important insights from their experiences, which will be used to refine and improve the experience of new contributors. As Christos Bacharakis, Project Manager Open Source Student Network, Mozilla, says: “With OSSN Mozilla is building a network that makes it easy for students to learn about and contribute to Open Source but also for us to understand the needs, challenges and maybe reservations of this next generation of open innovators. With a broad set of diverse and inspiring projects for students to contribute to, the GNOME Foundation ideally complements our initiative and we’re thrilled about this new collaboration.”

If you are a student interested in contributing your time and code to Open Source Software, we cordially invite you to join us! No prior experience is needed, just bring your excitement and passion and we’ll do the rest. Please sign up here.

If you are interested in knowing more about the approaches we are taking for this pilot project, please visit this page.

Registration to GUADEC 2018 is now open

The GUADEC organizers are pleased to announce that the registration for GUADEC 2018 is now open.

GUADEC is the the largest annual gathering of GNOME developers and community members and will take place this year in Almería, Spain between July 6 – July 11. If you are planning to attend please register as soon as possible.

Parties with an interest in GNOME are strongly encouraged to attend. Travel and accommodation information is available on the GUADEC website.

We hope to see you in Spain!

Please follow GUADEC on Twitter for frequent updates about the conference.
A complete conference program is expected to be published soon.