GNOME Foundation

Author: GNOME Foundation

  • Help GNOME to collect information on keyboard layouts

    GNOME needs your help to make its software available to all! GNOME is used on computers all over the world, in countries that use different languages and sometimes even alphabets. We offer everyone the opportunity to have a localized version of GNOME 3, and to use the appropriated keyboard layouts for their country and language. This is made possible by a database which is used to identify which layouts will be interesting to users depending on their country and language. Unfortunately, this database has a lot of gaps.

    That’s where you come in. By supplying the information we need, you can help us to predict which keyboard layouts are relevant to a user.

    Helping with this task is easy: check out the wiki page and find any keyboard layouts that you use. Then fill in the code for your country and language. If you are new to wikis, we have instructions that will help you get started.

    Helping us collect this information is a really quick and easy way to participate in GNOME and to improve the GNOME 3 user experience.

  • 25 Women in 10 Free Software Organizations for GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women

    25 women have been accepted to participate in the GNOME-led Outreach Program for Women for January 2 to April 2 remote internships with Deltacloud, Fedora, GNOME, JBoss, Mozilla, Open Technology Institute, OpenITP, OpenStack, Subversion, and Wikimedia. The internships are generously sponsored by the participating organizations, as well as Red Hat, Google, Rackspace, and Elego.

    GNOME, which until the Summer of 2012 ran the program without other organizations, is benefiting from the program in measurable ways. 17% of GUADEC 2012 attendees were women (41 woman), compared to only 4% (6 women) among attendees affiliated with GNOME three years earlier at the Desktop Summit 2009. In a recent survey of Free Software newcomers to 12 organizations, 50% of GNOME respondents were women whereas only 6% of the respondents from other organizations were women (with 15% being the next highest concentration). Moreover, GNOME had 22 female respondents, which was a greater number than the 20 female respondents from all of the other organizations combined.

    Interns from the most recent completed round of the Outreach Program for Women added to the long list of accomplishments of the 47 women who took part in the program since December 2010.

    The dramatic increase in participation of women in GNOME and our experience with the Outreach Program for Women show that there are many women interested in contributing to Free Software and that reaching out to them with targeted opportunities is an effective way to help them get involved. We anticipate the expansion of the program will create a big shift in the demographic of Free Software contributors.

    The collaborative application process, during which the applicants are asked to work on a small contribution to the project they are applying to work on with the help from the mentors, has been a cornerstone of the program since its first round. All accepted participants successfully completed the required contribution and showed that they have both passion and skills to work on their chosen projects. Coordinators and mentors from all participating organizations have done a tremendous job in helping scale the program and welcoming all applicants into their communities.

    Red Hat is sponsoring seven internships – three for Fedora and one each for Deltacloud, GNOME, JBoss, and OpenStack. “GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women has already been effective at increasing participation of women in Free Software, and it’s exciting to see it expand to more communities that Red Hat contributes to,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President of Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Red Hat is proud to provide sponsorship, coordination and engineering mentors for this transformative effort.”

    The Wikimedia Foundation was a popular organization this round. For its applicants, it defined an open and participatory application process, in which applicants added their information to a common wiki page and members of the community provided endorsements and feedback on the wiki pages for individual applicants. “We’re delighted to participate in GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The whole point of Wikipedia is that everyone can contribute, and for it to reach its full potential requires participation from everybody, including women. The GNOME outreach program has proven to be a practical solution for engaging women — one that really works.”

    Google continues to be a dedicated sponsor of the program, providing general funds for internships beyond the ones individual organizations were able to sponsor. “It is incredibly exciting to watch GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women expand so quickly and so well,” said Cat Allman, Program Manager at the Open Source Programs Office at Google. “This new involvement by other projects and organizations is a tribute to the skill and dedication of the GNOME team that created the program, particularly Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Karen Sandler, who organize it.”

    The participants are asked to blog about their work at least once every two weeks during the internships. Their blogs are linked to on the program page and are aggregated on the Women in Free Software planet, in addition to being aggregated on the planets of their respective organizations.

    The GNOME Foundation invites Free Software organizations and companies that support Free Software to join the next round which will take place from June to August, and have an application deadline in April. Please let Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Karen Sandler know if your organization is interested or if you have any questions by the end of February.

    About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

    The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. In the 15 years since then, the project has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, GNOME is a popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized by a large number of popular mobile device manufacturers.

    The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. It is comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies. The Foundation is a member directed 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project. The GNOME Foundation supports the pursuit of software freedom through the innovative, accessible and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. Find out more about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation through their websites: www.gnome.org / foundation.gnome.org
    Become a Friend of GNOME today! Visit this link: http://www.gnome.org/friends/

    Media Enquiries

    Karen Sandler
    GNOME Foundation Executive Director
    email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
    phone: +1-617-206-3947

  • GNOME contributors prepare for Developer Experience Hackfest

    Over 20 GNOME contributors are preparing to travel to Brussels, Belgium, for a three day hackfest this week. The event aims to improve the GNOME development experience by making it easier to create GNOME applications. Hackfest participants have wide-ranging plans and will be looking at development tools, documentation and development frameworks. They will also work on plans to make it easier to install and distribute GNOME applications.

    Collaboration is an important part of GNOME’s culture, and the project is seeking to work with other upstream communities in the effort to improve its developer experience. As a result, members of the Linux kernel community will be joining the GNOME contributors in Brussels, where it is hoped that an agenda for future collaboration can be established.

    The FOSDEM conference immediately follows the Developer Experience Hackfest, and the hackfest participants will be there in full force. FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of free and open source software developers in the world, attracting several thousand hackers annually. There will be several presentations made by GNOME contributors, as well as a GNOME Booth and GNOME Beer Event.

    The GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest is being sponsored by the Betagroup Co-working Space and the GNOME Foundation.

    GNOME_Foundation

  • Help make GNOME safer than ever!

    GNOME was founded with the goal of promoting software freedom. We remain committed to the empowerment of our users, and are always looking for ways to improve our software. We want people to be safe, in control, and enriched by the software they use. The GNOME community was inspired by the keynote delivered by Jacob Appelbaum on the topic of privacy at this years’ GUADEC and was reminded of our mission. To this end, GNOME is working on a new campaign focused on privacy. Through this campaign, we aim to enhance GNOME 3 so that it offers one of the most secure computing environments available.

    Proceeds from the privacy fundraising campaign will be used to fund development efforts such as:

    • application containment
    • enhanced disk encryption support
    • Tor integration
    • user control over diagnostic reporting features
    • robust VPN routing
    • application integration with system-wide privacy settings
    • controls for how GNOME devices are identified on local networks
    • anti-phishing features for Web, GNOME’s web browser

      • Donate today to help make GNOME safer than ever!

  • GNOME WebKitGTK+ hackfest

    The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the conclusion of the WebKitGTK+Hackfest. The hackfest was held December 9-12 and was hosted once again at the Igalia offices in A Coruña, Spain. This hackfest has been very successful with more than twenty attendees from Igalia, Collabora, Adobe, Intel, Samsung and Red Hat.

    WebKitGTK+ hackfest 2012 picture by Joone Hur

    The hackfest was extremely productive, and highlights of the tasks that were worked on there include:

    • Many improvements in Web, the GNOME web browser: a new incognito mode to minimize the risk of being tracked both on the internet and in your own computer, a slick new UI for the search, revamping the creation of Web applications by selecting better icons and names, adding undo close tabs, preventing empty download-only windows and preliminary work for the integration of the Document Viewer in the browser.
    • Switching from Pango to Harfbuzz to render complex text.
    • Porting the WebAudio backend to GStreamer 1.0.
    • Better DOM bindings.
    • Many bugs fixed for accelerated compositing with Clutter, both in ELF and GTK+ ports.
    • Stabilization of  the libsoup API.
    • Improvements in the memory use of the V8 Javascript engine.
    • 2D-canvas accelerated support using Cairo OpenGL.
    • Better HTML5 media controls.
    • A new API to retrieve a screenshots from web pages.
    • Progress in accessibility support.
    • Documentation.

    The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

    GNOME Foundation

  • GNOME.Asia 2013 to be held in Korea

    The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce that Seoul has been selected as the venue for the upcoming GNOME.Asia Summit 2013.

    The Asia Summit organizing team was very impressed with the Korean local organizers’ proposal. The GNOME community in Seoul is committed to GNOME’s success and to promoting the use of GNOME and GNU/Linux in Korea and the rest of Asia. The local community has been very active, organizing monthly events called “The GNOME Tech Talks & Hackfest”.

    Seoul is a convenient and exciting place to hold the conference. With great public transportation and solid international flight connections, it will be easy for attendees to travel to the event. Seoul also has great tourist attractions, many universities with strong student communities, and is home to many of Korea’s largest technology companies. Interest in Free and Open Source Software is growing more than ever in Korea. The organizing team believes that hosting the event in Seoul will expand GNOME’s presence and increase participation in the area.

    “We are excited about the high level of interest in GNOME in Asian countries. By having an annual GNOME event in Asia, we further our goal of spreading Free Software and provide venues for GNOME collaboration,” said Karen Sandler, the Executive Director of GNOME.

    “The conference will allow interested parties to discuss the then released GNOME 3.8, the future of GNOME, as well as other topics, especially concerning the needs of GNOME developers in Asia,” said Simon YoungKi Hong, lead of the local organizing team. “With various stakeholders of different aspects in GNOME, the conference will be a great opportunity to celebrate and discuss features and enhancements to GNOME.”

    The conference will be held this summer. More information will be posted on the website gnome.asia as the event is planned.

    We would like to thank everyone who participated in the GNOME.Asia 2013 bidding process, especially the great work from Team GNOME Seoul and Team GNOME Beijing!

  • GNOME 2010-2011 Annual Report

    link to the GNOME 2010-11 Annual Report

    The Web Version of the GNOME 2010-11 Annual Report is available for download (2.4 MB, PDF).

    The report, initially made available at the annual GNOME Foundation’s membership meeting, is a summary of GNOME community’s activities for the two years from 2010 to 2011. These years have been very exciting. A lot of love and energy was focused on releasing GNOME 3 which is the cornerstone of GNOME’s new vision of the free desktop that the project will be improving and polishing in the coming years.

    The report includes several articles about the transition to GNOME 3, accounts of various community activities and events around the world, interviews with GNOME Foundation members, and general information about GNOME Foundation development.

    The GNOME 2010-11 Report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0.

  • Brno to host GUADEC 2013 and Strasbourg to host GUADEC 2014

    It is with great pleasure that the GNOME Foundation announces that Brno, Czech Republic has been selected as the venue for GUADEC 2013. Each year, the GNOME User and Developer European Conference gathers GNOME community members from all across the world. We hope we’ll see you at Brno University of Technology from August 1-8, 2013.

    During the bidding process, the GNOME Foundation received a second outstanding proposal. As a result, the Board of Directors is also pleased to announce that GUADEC 2014 will be held in Strasbourg, France. Selecting the venue earlier will give the Strasbourg local team more time to prepare the conference, which has been asked for by previous organizing teams.
    For more information about GUADEC please visit the event website: www.guadec.org

    Follow our updates via identi.ca / Twitter at: @guadec

    Read the full press release

  • GNOME to Hold GUADEC 2013 in Brno; GUADEC 2014 in Strasbourg

    GROTON, Mass — November 20, 2012

    The GNOME Foundation is excited to announce that GUADEC (the GNOME User and Developer European Conference), will be held in Brno, Czech Republic from August 1-8, 2013.
    Brno is an excellent location for the Foundation’s primary annual conference and associated hackfests due to its very strong Free Software community and numerous local IT businesses.
    The organizing team for GUADEC 2013 will consist of the local GNOME team, the Brno University of Technology, Liberix (a Czech non-profit organization which supports free software in the Czech Republic), and Red Hat Czech.

    “We are thrilled to have GUADEC 2013 in Brno and hope to see you all in our amazing city.” says Florian Nadge, from the local Brno organizing team.

    During this year’s bidding process, the GNOME Foundation received a second outstanding proposal. As a result, the Board of Directors is also pleased to announce that GUADEC 2014 will be held in Strasbourg, France. Scheduling earlier will give the Strasbourg local team more time to prepare the conference, which has been asked for by previous organizing teams.

    “We are proud to be able to host GUADEC not only in France, 15 years after the first GUADEC in Paris, but also in a city that is central to Europe.” says Alexandre Franke, organizer of GUADEC 2014.

    “GUADEC has become an essential event for the GNOME community, providing a venue for critical issues to be discussed and new community members to integrate fully,” said Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. “Both Brno and Strasbourg promise to provide excellent experiences and I know we will especially benefit from being able to plan more than a year in advance for 2014.”

    A call for GUADEC 2013 conference papers will be issued early in 2013. Other announcements will also be made at that time with details about the CFP and session tracks.

    Find more information

    For more information about GUADEC please visit the event website: www.guadec.org
    Follow our updates via identi.ca / Twitter at: @guadec

    About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

    The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. In the 15 years since then, the project has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, GNOME is a popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized by a large number of popular mobile device manufacturers.
    The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. It is comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies. The Foundation is a member directed 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project. The GNOME Foundation supports the pursuit of software freedom through the innovative, accessible and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. Find out more about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation through their websites: www.gnome.org / foundation.gnome.org
    Become a Friend of GNOME today! Visit this link: http://www.gnome.org/friends/

    Media Enquiries

    Karen Sandler
    GNOME Foundation Executive Director
    email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
    phone: +1-617-206-3947

  • GNOME and its Partners Announce Internships for Women

    The GNOME Foundation, along with seven other free software organizations, is pleased to announce Free and Open Source Software internships for women. In an effort to get more women involved in FOSS, the coalition is offering stipends of $5,000 for work on software development, system administration, web development, user experience design, graphic design, documentation, and marketing. The organizations include:

    * Deltacloud – abstraction layer for the differences between the cloud providers
    * Fedora – GNU/Linux-based operating system
    * GNOME – GNU/Linux-based desktop environment and applications
    * JBoss – Java-based application server and related projects
    * Mozilla – software that promotes the goals of the Open Web
    * OpenStack – cloud deployment and management software
    * Tor – anonymizing proxy network
    * Wikimedia – wiki software and infrastructure for Wikipedia and related projects

    Participants will work remotely from home, while getting guidance from an assigned mentor and collaborating within their project’s team and the rest of the FOSS community. Any woman available for a full time internship who has not previously participated in the Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code is welcome to apply. College women from the Southern Hemisphere who will have a school summer break during most of this time are particularly encouraged to apply.

    GNOME has found the program to be extremely effective in the past. For example, attendance at GNOME’s annual conference, GUADEC, has improved from 4% (6 women) to 17% (41 woman) in just three years. During the last round of the program, the Software Freedom Conservancy joined GNOME and sponsored its own participant for the Twisted Project, we’re pleased that the seven organizations listed above have chosen to join this next round.

    Please visit https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen to learn more and apply. This program is organized by the GNOME Foundation. Please help us spread the word by forwarding this message to interested university and community groups.

    The mentorship opportunities are also available throughout the year for anyone interested in getting started contributing to FOSS outside of the internship program.

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