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GNOME widens its developer outreach with Circle

Today the GNOME project is officially launching a new initiative, called GNOME Circle. Circle aims to broaden the range of partner initiatives that GNOME supports and has a relationship with.

In the past, to be a part of the GNOME project, development projects needed to be hosted on GNOME infrastructure and follow GNOME’s development rules. This created a barrier to entry for many developers who were focused on their own personal projects.

GNOME Circle aims to change that, by lowering barriers and building relationships with developers who are doing great things with the GNOME platform. To become members, projects must simply be open source software and use the GNOME platform. Both applications and development libraries can apply. Projects don’t need to be hosted on GNOME infrastructure, nor do they need to follow GNOME’s release schedule.

Circle projects will be eligible for a range of benefits, including promotion and GNOME Foundation membership, which gives access to travel and marketing funding and services including an @gnome.org email address, blog hosting, video conferencing, and a gnome.org Nextcloud account. Even more benefits are planned for the future.

Commenting on the initiative, GNOME Foundation Executive Director Neil McGovern said “Independent developers do fantastic work using the GNOME platform, and I’m thrilled that the GNOME Foundation is going to be supporting more of them than ever before. With GNOME Circle, we’re excited to be growing the GNOME community and building a stronger and more vibrant developer ecosystem.”

More information and details about existing GNOME Circle projects can be found on the initiative homepage. Developers who are interested in applying are encouraged to fill out the simple application form.

GTK: At the Heart of GNOME

At GNOME, we’re celebrating the ways we are building the future of software and community by looking back at our 2020 accomplishments and forward to our 2021 plans. These accomplishments and plans are made possible by the support we recieve from donations and our Friends of GNOME. Learn more about how you can get involved.

GTK is at the heart of the GNOME application and software development kit. GTK is used to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for desktop environments, applications, and window managers. Since the GTK 4 development process began in 2016, we have about 250 individual contributors, with more than 100 active this year.

Thanks to the funding received by the GNOME Foundation in 2020, the GTK development team was able to run hackfests, including one we were lucky enough to have at FOSDEM. This funding also supported Emmanuele Bassi, Core GTK Developer at the GNOME Foundation, working on GTK full-time. For most of 2020, Emmanuele worked on implementing a new accessibility interface for GTK 4, to ensure that more people can use GNOME applications, including those with disabilities. We are building a diverse and sustainable free software computing ecosystem where everyone can be empowered by technology they trust. Since Emmanuele works directly for the Foundation he’s uniquely able to focus on the needs of the community, project, and users to support these goals.

GTK is a project with a long history, and throughout that history, it has gone through multiple iterations. A new major release is on the horizon. After four years of development that included a complete overhaul of the internals of the toolkit, GTK 4 promises to be faster through hardware acceleration; more efficient, in terms of performance and power consumption; and more ergonomic, for both application developers, and end users. Over the past four years, the GTK team has continued work on the existing stable versions of GTK and put out multiple releases.

In 2021, the GTK team plans to improve the project with features that have been long requested, such as:

an animation framework for application developers
accessibility support on non-Linux platforms, such as Windows and macOS
a new UI design tool, integrated with GNOME Builder
improved portability
simpler installation and out-of-the-box developer experience
better documentation

Even after more than 20 years, GTK is still a project run by volunteers, without any single corporation determining its direction; nevertheless, many companies have adopted it as part of their platforms and products, and contribute employees time to its development. Another thing that makes GTK special is that it does not require a Contributor License Agreement, meaning everyone who works on it keeps rights and ownership over their contributions. Your support and donations allow GTK to continue being run by volunteers.

GTK is made by the people who use and care about it and its development reflects the needs of its users. We’re excited about the role we play in the making of GTK and are looking forward to the upcoming release of GTK 4 and another year of GTK development.

We’re Building the Future of GNOME

GNOME is built by people. People who are passionate about what they’re doing and care about everyone using, studying, and modifying the technology they are making. The GNOME community is a collection of amazing, inspiring people who come together to do amazing things, to push the project forward, raise awareness, teach, learn, share, organize events, and create the place we call our home within free software. Our community includes millions of people using GNOME as a desktop environment, bringing ideas into the world with GTK, and packaging their apps to Flathub.

GNOME is also supported by our generous network of donors — our Friends of GNOME. Whether someone donates $5 or $5,000, we value those contributions just as much as any merge request. Donations build up GNOME, provide necessary infrastructure, and power new initiatives.

In 2020, donations supported:

GTK4 development;
Technical and infrastructure support for Flathub.org;
Our legal case against Rothschild Patent Imaging, a patent assertion entity;
GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, GNOME Onboard Africa Virtual, and the Linux App Summit;
Hackfests, including accessibility and GTK hackfests at FOSDEM;
A supported instance of video chat software Big Blue Button for GNOME and free software community use;
Two internships through Outreachy; and
Community and staff training to make the community more welcoming and safe for everyone.

Our plans for 2021 are even more ambitious and involve sustaining our ongoing work while building up new initiatives and support for the growing GNOME project and community. In the upcoming year, we will:

Organize GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, Pan African GNOME Summit, and the Linux App Summit;
Host virtual social events at conferences like FOSDEM;
Have hackfests for teams and working groups across the project;
Progress on the Community Engagement Challenge, including the winner’s celebration at GUADEC 2021;
Lead in technical and infrastructure development, including more services for the community;
Release two more GNOME editions;
Find more opportunities to push forward smaller projects within the GNOME ecosystem;
Hire more interns for paid internships in free software;
Provide financial and logistical support for people speaking at conferences and participating in events on behalf of GNOME; and
Launch new initiatives, including Faces of GNOME, web site updates, new swag, and increased conference participation.

In order to build the future of GNOME, we need people to join us and become Friends of GNOME. To help support our 2021 initiatives, we’re looking for 50 new Friends of GNOME to join by January 5, 2021. Every donation helps grow the GNOME project and supports our community.

Learn More

GNOME.Asia 2020 Registration is Open

We’re excited to announce that the Registrations for GNOME Asia Summit 2020 are open! You can now register online.

GNOME Asia Summit 2020 will take place online November 24 – 26.

Topics covered include the GNOME desktop and a range of other topics that are GNOME specific and general to the free software and tech communities. The summit brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a place for users, developers, leaders, governments and businesses to discuss present technology and future developments.

More information about the GNOME Asia 2020 Summit including is available on the official website. The GNOME Asia Summit will be three days of stand out keynotes, engaging and educational sessions, and skill building Birds of a Feather sessions and workshops, so register today.

GUADEC 2020 Group Photo

There are many challenges with online conferences, but one of the biggest one is having hundreds of people turn on their cameras for a group photo during a livestream.

Along with many other new approaches, we came up with a solution for our photo as well! GNOME has a long tradition of mosaic pictures and we decided to bring that format back again.

A big thank you to all participants for sending us their pictures and to Jonathan Blandford for the tremendous work of putting all pieces together!

Looking forward to see you all at the next GUADEC!

GNOME.ASIA 2020 Call for Papers are now Open!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2020 invites you to participate as a speaker at the conference on the 24th and 26th of November 2020 by submitting your abstract.

GNOME.Asia Summit is the featured annual GNOME conference in Asia. It focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and platform development tools. The Summit 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.

The possible topics are, but not limited to :

Contributing to GNOME
UI design
Accessibility
Human Interface Engineering (Icons and Graphic Design)
Marketing/Engagement
Developing GNOME on embedded systems or open hardware
Contributing to Linux and FLOSS
Linux kernel and development
The development and promotion of open-source operating systems
Distributions, including Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD
The development and promotion of other open source projects
We are also interested in other topics related to Free/Libre and Open Source Software which are not listed above.

Sessions will be scheduled for 25 or 50 minutes (Q&A included). The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or Birds of a Feather session (BoF).

If you need more time or additional resources, feel free to get in touch with the organizing team.

Submission Criteria

Please provide a short abstract of your presentation (under 200 words). Also include your name, biographical information, title, and desired length of session. Please submit your proposal to the following link: https://events.gnome.org/event/24/abstracts/.

The reviewers team will evaluate the entries based on the submitted abstracts and available time by following the schedule.

Submission deadline: October 18, 2020

GNOME 3.38 Released

The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. Version 3.38 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and, as always, includes many new features and performance improvements.

Watch the release video here.

This release showcases a new Tour application, highlighting the main functionality of the desktop and providing first time users a nice welcome to GNOME.

Several core utilities have been visually refreshed, giving them a more polished and elegant experience.

For developers and advanced users, Boxes now allows editing a virtual machine’s libvirt XML directly, enabling them to change advanced settings not available in the user interface.

The complete list of features and improvements are in the release notes.

GNOME 3.38 is code-named “Orbis” in recognition of the most recent GUADEC, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The GNOME Project is supported by the GNOME Foundation. We rely on donations to continue to drive the project forward. If you appreciate the work we do, please consider joining as a Friend of GNOME.

Press

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Neil McGovern to Keynote at Open Source Summit Europe

GNOME Foundation Executive Director Neil McGovern will deliver a keynote at Open Source Summit Europe.

In the talk “Patently Obvious: The Year Open Source Got Sued”, Neil McGovern will discuss the GNOME Foundation’s triumphant legal settlement with Rothschild Patent Imaging, a non-practicing entity. In September 2019, Rothschild Patent Imaging alleged that GNOME was in violation of one of its patents. In May 2020, the case was resolved under the representation of Shearman and Sterling LLP. You can read more about the resolution online.

Open Source Summit Europe is a conference hosted by the Linux Foundation, traditionally taking place in Europe. This year’s conference will be October 26 – 29, taking place entirely online. Previous years have brought together thousands of attendees from all over the world.

While Neil McGovern’s session is not yet scheduled, we will update you once it is. If you can’t wait for Open Source Summit Europe, you can watch “The Growth of GNOME” from GUADEC 2019 or check out a more recent interview with OpenUK.

GNOME Welcomes Two Technical Writers from Season of Docs

GNOME is participating in another round of Google Season of Docs! We have a long history of mentoring and outreach, and consider Season of Docs to be a continuation of those efforts. Season of Docs was started by Google in 2019 to bring technical writers and free and open source projects together. Projects will allow writers to gain experience in contributing to FOSS while learning about the technical complexities and helping projects improve their documentation. This year we welcome two new technical writers.

Our first writer, Pranali, will be working on updating GNOME Applications Help Documentation. Pranali has experience in technical writing and documentation and has worked with organizations like Haiku OS and Red Hat in the past. This project will be mentored by longtime GNOME Foundation members and contributors, Shaun McCance and Petr Kovar.

Our second writer, Wisdom, will focus on GObject Tutorial Consolidation. Wisdom is a member of our GNOME Africa community and has a background in writing, development, and UX/UI Design. This project will be mentored by GNOME Foundation GTK Core Developer Emmanuele Bassi.

Google Season of Docs projects were announced on August 16 and our technical writers will now begin the community bonding period during which they’ll learn more about the GNOME community and the people in the projct. Docs development will start on September 14 and run through to early December when the writers will submit their final projects for evaluation.

See all projects selected for this year’s Season of Docs: https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/participants.

Linux App Summit 2020 Call for Talks now open!

Linux App Summit. Online, November 12-14, 2020

GNOME has teamed up with KDE to bring the Linux App Summit (LAS) online for 2020! LAS is THE conference for people interested in establishing Linux as a great end-user platform. At the Linux App Summit, we work on making app creation for users easy and worthwhile.

LAS will be a virtual conference this year and will run from Thursday, November 12th to Saturday, November 14th. Our goal is to engage people in multiple time zones throughout the event and make the content available online afterward.

The Call for Talks is now open! Please take a look at the suggested topics and send in your ideas by September 15th. We encourage new speakers, so don’t hesitate to submit a talk!

We hope to see you at LAS 2020!

Learn More