Events – Page 9 – GNOME Foundation

First day of GUADEC 2014 wraps up in Strasbourg, France

The first day of this year’s GUADEC conference has wrapped up in Strasbourg, France. As usual, there were lots of fond reunions for long-standing contributors, as well as new faces who got their first chance to meet fellow GNOME contributors face-to-face.

In the morning, Jim Hall gave a well-received keynote on his user testing work on GNOME. Jim has been working closely with the GNOME Design Team, and has been helping to identify usability issues in GNOME’s applications. His presentation described his testing methodology, and presented the results of his tests. There was a positive response to Jim’s talk, and plans are already underway to resolve the issues he found for the next GNOME release, version 3.14.

The schedule also included a range of talks, covering both developments in GNOME, as well as more general issues in Free Software. There were presentations on GNOME’s geolocation framework, the new GObject to SQLite Data Mapper, and GStreamer. There were also talks on ownCloud design, women’s participation in technology, intellectual property, and Free Software business models.

The day ended with the first part of the GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting. Representatives from each of GNOME’s teams gave a summary of their work over the past year, including accessibility, documentation, design, engagement, the Release Team, system administration, outreach, and GNOME.Asia.

Tomorrow there will be more talks, another keynote, and lightning talks from GNOME’s interns.

GUADEC starts today!

GUADEC, the main GNOME conference, is about to start in Strasbourg, located in the eastern part of France. It will gather users, developers, governments and businesses to talk about the status and future of the GNOME project between the July 25 and August 1.

“More than 10 years after the first GUADEC in Paris, the French GNOME community is very proud and excited to host GUADEC once again.”
– Christophe Fergeau, member of the local organizing team

Strasbourg_Cathedral

As always, the conference schedule features talks, hackfests, and social events for the attendees. Besides that, Matthew Garrett, Nathan Willis, and Jim Hall will deliver this year’s keynotes. They will discuss topics such as the place of free software in the automotive market, the future of the desktop, and usability aspects of GNOME.

GNOME.org will be updated during GUADEC, sharing the highlights of the conference with those who couldn’t be there. You can also follow what’s happening via #guadec on Twitter and Google+. More information about GUADEC 2014 is available at the official GUADEC website, including the conference’s schedule.

The GNOME Foundation wishes everyone a great conference! And a huge thank you to the local organizing team for all the time and effort they put into making this year’s GUADEC happen!

Evince hackfest taking place in Strasbourg ahead of GUADEC

GUADEC is only a few days away, but some GNOME contributors are already gathering in Strasbourg to improve the GNOME document reader, Evince.

Their goals include: making further improvements to accessibility support, implementing tiling support to allow infinite zoom, improving the support for PDF annotations, revamping the comics back-end and reviewing and integrating pending patches.

The hackfest brings together members of the GNOME Accessibility team, and Evince developers. It also involves a number of Google Summer of Code students.

The event could not have taken place without the support of the GNOME Foundation.

You can learn more about the Evince Hackfest on the event wiki page.

Evince logo

GUADEC 2014: What to Expect

GUADEC, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference, is the largest GNOME event of the year, drawing contributors from all over the world. This year’s conference is approaching, and will be held in Strasbourg, from July 26 to August 1.

GUADEC is an invaluable opportunity for contributors to share what they have been working on over the past year, and to have face-to-face working sessions and meetings. As usual, it will consist of four days of presentations, followed by three days of BoFs (“Birds of a Feather” sessions).

Strasbourg looks set to be an excellent location for this year’s event. The local area has a strong Free Software community and, as the home of the European Parliament and European Court of Human Rights, is a highly symbolic city. Strasbourg is also known for its beauty, culture and food. As one of this year’s conference organisers said, “it is a lovely city, and we hope that attendees will fall under its charm”.

The schedule for this year’s GUADEC has now been published, and gives an idea of what we can expect from the event. GTK+ and the GNOME application development platform are a major theme, with talks on GTK+, GStreamer, geoclue and Wayland. Application development will also be a focus for this year’s event, with talks about core apps, such as Documents, Photos, Web and Boxes, as well as other applications, including Pitivi, Corebird and SDAPS, a paper surveying tool.

A number of talks cover exciting new developments in the GNOME project. Ones to watch include Christian Hergert’s presentations on GOM and Builder, Alberto Ruiz on Fleet Commander and Emmunuelle Bassi’s talk on the GTK+ Scene Graph.

As usual, the GUADEC schedule also includes important non-technical talks, on subjects such as usability testing, documentation, outreach, intellectual property and funding models for open source projects.

More details about this year’s GUADEC, including key note speakers and social events, will be made in the coming days and weeks. Watch this space.

GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest Underway in Berlin

GNOME contributors and developers are currently gathered in Berlin, Germany, for a three day Developer Experience Hackfest. The event is focused on the GNOME application developer platform. Participants working to ensure that developers can easily create high quality applications for GNOME.

Topics being covered at the event include:

GTK+ planning, and the roadmap for new widgets and capabilities.
Developer tools, including editors, DevHelp, and debugging tools.
Application development documentation, including tutorials, API reference documentation, and the GNOME developer website.

Detailed updates can be found on Planet GNOME.

The hackfest is being generously hosted by Endocode, and has been sponsored by the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME West Coast Summit Starts Today

The first GNOME event on the USA West Coast starts today. Held in San Francisco, the GNOME West Coast Summit brings together many senior members of the project for high-level technical discussions and planning. Major topics on the agenda for the event include Wayland, KDbus, application sandboxing, and application developer experience.

The summit is a great opportunity for those on the West Coast to get involved in ongoing GNOME initiatives. Participants from Intel, Red Hat, Yorba, Google, Endless Mobile and Elementary OS will be in attendance.

Several open evening events have been organized to coincide with the summit. On Wednesday there will be a local community meet-up, then on Thursday there will be another evening event at Noisebridge. Anyone in the local area should feel free to stop by – details are on the wiki.

Many thanks to Endless Mobile for providing the venue for the event.

FreeDesktop Summit Underway in Nuremberg

Developers from the major Linux Desktops (GNOME, KDE, RazorQt and Unity) are currently meeting in Nuremberg for the second FreeDesktop Summit.

The summit is a joint technical meeting from developers working on ‘desktop infrastructure’ on the major Free Desktop projects and the event aims to improve collaboration between the projects by discussing specifications and the sharing of platform-level components. GNOME developers are in attendance, and one report is already online. More updates will be posted to Planet GNOME.

Like last year, the event is supported by SUSE.

Check the report from last year to get an idea of what this event is about.

GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 T-shirt Contest

GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 will be held in Beijing, China in May 24-25, 2014. We are looking for YOUR help to design t-shirts for this year’s Summit. We need two new shirt designs, one for participants and another for volunteers.

The contest is open from now until March 31st, 2014. Voting will begin April 1st and run through April 3, 2014.

Everyone is encouraged to log in and vote at this page:

http://2014.gnome.asia/tshirts/

Prizes

No contest should be called a contest without some prizes! This year we have the following up for grab:

Winner: A Special gift from local team and two t-shirts with your winning design

Note: The final decision will be made by GNOME.Asia Summit Committee. Please understand that the highest vote score of the design may not be designated the final winner due to cost or other production considerations.

Good luck!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 is now Calling for Papers

GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 invites proposals for presentations at the conference. GNOME.Asia Summit is Asia’s GNOME user and developer conference, spreading the knowledge of GNOME across Asia. The conference will be held in BeiHang University, Beijing, China on May 24 -25, 2014. The conference follows the release of GNOME 3.12, helping to bring new desktop paradigms that facilitate user interaction in the computing world. It will be a great place to celebrate and explore the many new features and enhancements to the GNOME 3.12 release and to help make GNOME as successful as possible. We welcome proposals by newcomers and experienced speakers alike.

Click here to submit your presentation!

Possible topics include, but not limited to:

How to Promote/Contribute to GNOME in Asia

GNOME Marketing
Promotion of Free / Open Source Software
How to run a Local GNOME Users Group
Asia success stories / Local GNOME Projects
GNOME and Educations
GNOME Outreach Program for Women
Google Summer of Code

Hacking GNOME

Latest developments in GNOME
GNOME 3 & GNOME 3 Usability
GNOME Human Interface Engineering (Icons and Graphic Design)
QA and testing in GNOME
GNOME Accessibility
GNOME Coding How-to
Writing applications for GNOME 3
Integration of web life into the desktop

Adapting GNOME to new types of devices

Developing GNOME on mobile devices (smart phones, tablets)
Developing GNOME on embedded systems or open source hardware
On-going projects and success stories
Finding Free and Open Source friendly hardware manufacturers

Localization and Internationalization

Translations
Input methods
Fonts

Other topics could include any topic related to Free and Open Source Software not listed above.

Lightning talks! A five minute presentation to demonstrate your work or promote an interesting topic. These talks will be grouped together in a single session.

A standard session at GNOME.Asia 2014 will be scheduled as 45 mins (35 mins talk + 10 mins Q&A). Please take into consideration any time you will need for preparation. The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or BOF.

If you’d like to share your knowledge and experience at GNOME.Asia 2014, please fill in the form at before March 3th, 2014. Please provide a short abstract about your proposal (under 150 words). Include your name, biographical information, a photo suitable for the web, a title, and a description of your presentation . The reviewing team will evaluate the entries based on the submitted abstracts and available time in the schedule. You will be contacted before March 16th, 2014 on whether your submission has been accepted or not.

All interested contributors are highly encouraged to send in their talks. Please help us to spread the invitation to other potential participants. Even you do not plan to be a speaker, please consider joining GNOME.Asia 2014. This is going to be a great event!

GNOME Documentation Hackfest Concludes in Norwich, UK

The GNOME Documentation Team met in Norwich, UK, this week for a five day hackfest. Held from January 26 to January 30, the event was hosted at the University of East Anglia’s School of Computer Science. The hackfest was very successful, and included fifteen attendees as well as five remote participants.

Docs Hackfest 2014. Picture by Frederic Peters

The team used the event as an opportunity to prepare GNOME’s user documentation for the upcoming 3.12 release. Other highlights of the hackfest included:

A new, easy and more visual appealing design for the help viewer Yelp.
A major update of the long awaited GNOME Administrator Guide.
An improved and updated organization of the documentation of the email client Evolution.
New features in Mallard, the markup language used for writing the GNOME documentation, and the related tools.

The event was made possible by the sponsorship of the GNOME Foundation. Many thanks to the University of East Anglia for providing such a great venue.

Attendees from the hackfest will, along with many other GNOME contributors, attend this year’s FOSDEM conference in Brussels this weekend. GNOME will have a stand at the event, and there will be a party on the Saturday night.