We are proud to announce the release of GNOME 40. This release is the first to follow our new versioning scheme. It brings a new design for the Activities overview and improved support for input with Compose sequences and keyboard shortcuts, among many other things. Improvements to core GNOME applications include a redesigned Weather application, information popups in Maps, better tabs in Web, and many more.
More information about the changes in GNOME 40 can be found in the release notes:
GNOME 40 will be available shortly in many distributions. If you want to try it today, you can use the just-released Fedora 34 beta or the openSUSE nightly live images which both include GNOME 40.
We are also providing our own installer images for debugging and testing features. These images are meant for installation in a vm and require GNOME Boxes with UEFI support to boot:
If you are interested in building applications for GNOME 40, look for the GNOME 40 Flatpak SDK, which is available in the www.flathub.org repository.
This six-month effort wouldn’t have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world: developers, designers, documentation writers, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, students, system administrators, companies, artists, testers, and last, but not least, our users.
GNOME would not exist without all of you. Thank you to everyone!
Our next release, GNOME 41, is planned for October 2021, after our yearly GUADEC conference, which will be online again. Until then, enjoy GNOME 40.
The GNOME Project has a storied history dating back to the early days of Open Source. In that time frame, the project has grown substantially and with it our body of documentation in our wiki. Unfortunately, our documentation has not kept in sync with the reality of the state of the project.
Phase 1 requires that the candidate audit the entire wiki and work with community members to go through the content and remove content that is no longer applicable or plain wrong. There will be some that clearly need to be archived and some that need to be flagged to be updated. For those that need to be updated, the candidate will work with community members and their mentor to update the documentation to the current situation.
Phase 2 is more challenging. Taking the experience from the audit – modernize the current documentation structure. The candidate will work with their mentor to build a documentation tree that will make sense for the current direction of the GNOME Project. This could mean taking advantage of modern infrastructure like GitLab or looking at alternative documentation technologies that promote easy contributions with low overhead. The key goal is to be able to have an efficient documentation life cycle that will allow GNOME to maintain its documentation into the future.
How We Measure Success
A successful internship will require these tasks to be complete:
Remove all documentation that is determined to be expired
Flag all documentation that needs to be updated and gets updated
Build a proposal document that the GNOME project will evaluate and approve as the future direction of manageable documentation for the years ahead
[Bonus] We have picked an infrastructure technology and created actionable items that volunteers will be able to work on and complete
Recommended Skills
Must have: Basic knowledge of terms and their meanings in the general tech industry and computer languages. Had at least one or two technical documentation projects in the past.
Nice to have: Knowledge of open source, its development model, and some knowledge of the GNOME development model.
Volunteers
Sriram Ramkrishna will help with answer questions about the wiki, and make introductions to community members
Sriram Ramkrishna, Kristi Progri will review what will need to be removed/archive. and communicate to the community
Sriram Ramkrishna, Kristi Progri will review changes to areas that need to be updated
Sriram Ramkrishna will provide any assistance and/or executive decisions on content
The GNOME engagement team will review the proposal document on Gitlab for approval
The GNOME engagement team will provide feedback and guidance on the proposal document
Contact Us
Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to gsod-team@gnome.org. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio, résumé, or CV.
Budget
Budget Items
Amount
Total
Technical writer
9000
9000
Volunteer stipends (one Mentor)
500
500
Project t-shirts (10 t-shirts)
200
200
Total
9700
Downstream donation(10% of the amount)
970
970
Total Amount
10670
All amounts in USD*
About GNOME
GNOME is a worldwide community that creates a desktop environment, applications, and the underlying technology. GNOME has a long history of design-oriented development, and of working on all parts of the stack to create a good user experience. The GNOME documentation team has worked on both user and developer documentation for over two decades and was one of the pioneers in creating modular, topic-oriented help.
The GNOME community is loosely organized, with many teams working on different parts of the project. We strongly value all kinds of contributions, including design, documentation, translations, and outreach. GNOME is more than code.
GNOME has a long history of working with mentoring and outreach programs, including the GNOME Newcomers initiative, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy (which was incubated in GNOME as the Outreach Program for Women).
