GNOME Foundation opens recruitment for further expansion

Orinda, CA.

Today, July 6th 2018, the GNOME Foundation has announced a number of positions it is recruiting for to help drive the GNOME project and Free Software on the desktop. As previously announced, this has been made possible thanks to a generous grant that the Foundation has received, enabling us to accelerate this expansion.

“These positions are key to ensuring that the Foundation remains sustainable and that we are able to support the community in key areas,” said Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. “It is my hope that we can continue to grow the Foundation so that these posts will continue to be funded, but to allow further positions to become available”

The Foundation is currently recruiting for four posts:

Development Coordinator
- This will ensure that we receive sufficient funds to continue our work delivering free software
Program Coordinator
- The Program Coordinator will free up time from those involved in organizational, administrative and logistical problems
Devops/Sysadmin
- The systems and services we run need proper maintenance and care. As Flathub continues to grow, more support is needed to achieve this.
GTK+ core developer
- GTK+ is core to our entire platform. Investing in development and maintenance of this toolkit will benefit the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem.

The Foundation is keen to hear from any person who is interested in applying for one of these posts. Details on how to apply and the application deadlines can be found on the Foundation’s Positions Available page.

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

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.

Castle-Alcazaba – photo CC0 Public Domain

GNOME moves to Gitlab

The GNOME Foundation is proud to announce that it has completed its move to GitLab. This is a huge milestone for the GNOME Project as it continues to improve its workflows and tools in order to support its growth and collaborate more with other free software communities.

After the evaluation of many tools, the GNOME community chose GitLab as the best free software tool to simplify the contributor experience, make decision processes more transparent and accessible to the wider community, and improve the stability and deliverability of GNOME Project software. As Adrien Plazas, maintainer of GNOME Games, says: “GitLab gave us easy access to a Continuous Integration tool that Games desperately needed, allowing us to catch early regressions in the Libretro cores we flatpak, and to look for unstable API breaks.”

GitLab is a centralized tool for hosting source code, issues, team communication, and other software development infrastructure under a single, unified experience. It enables GNOME contributors to interact and collaborate on projects more effectively than ever before. Cross collaboration among teams has already improved, with teams like Engagement and Design now interacting with the various projects that are hosted on the GNOME GitLab instance. The GNOME Foundation believes that the move to GitLab will encourage people with various skill sets, not just coding, to contribute to GNOME more regularly, as well as encourage contributors to explore other areas of the GNOME Project that they may not have initially considered.

The switch from many tools to a singular experience also significantly reduces the barrier of entry for newcomers to the GNOME Project, something that the GNOME Foundation is particularly interested in as it continues to focus on growth. Newcomers can immediately engage on active issues and provide feedback on open merge requests — all without needing to sign up for and interact with a myriad of disparate tools. “After switching to GitLab, I noticed almost immediately an increase in contributions from people I hadn’t met before. I think GitLab really lowered the threshold for people getting started,” says Philip Chimento, maintainer of GJS (JavaScript Bindings for GNOME). The ease-of-use, reduction in communication issues, and collaboration potential is so great that even downstream teams like Ubuntu and Purism are hosting their projects in the same environment.

Throughout the entire migration process, GitLab Inc. has been very welcoming and has helped GNOME contributors along the journey by answering questions and working on issues that were blockers for GNOME’s mass migration. “As an open core company ourselves, GitLab is eager to participate as an ecosystem player and enable the growth of more free and open sources projects. We admire GNOME’s work over the years and are happy that we can provide a platform that can help them improve their project and enable them to grow as a community,” said GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij.

The GNOME Foundation wishes to acknowledge the huge amount of effort that went into migrating a project that has been around for over 20 years, and which has been using many of the same tools for nearly as long. While many people contributed along the way, the GNOME Foundation wants to give a special thank you to Carlos Soriano and Andrea Veri for their tireless work in completing GNOME’s migration to GitLab, and for ushering in this new age of contributions within GNOME.

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce that GitLab will be sponsoring GUADEC 2018, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference, which will be held in July of this year. In addition, GitLab will be covering the Continuous Integration costs for all GNOME projects! The GNOME Foundation wishes to extend a big thank you to GitLab, and looks forward to continuing its partnership to grow to new heights.

Lastly, visit GitLab.com to see a video that we made with GitLab to promote GNOME and Free Software, which includes interviews with some of us. We are grateful for this opportunity!

Anonymous Donor Pledges $1M Donation Over Two Years

GNOME Foundation plans to invest in growth

Orinda, CA.

An anonymous donor has pledged to donate up to $1,000,000 over the next two years, some of which will be matching funds. The GNOME Foundation is grateful for this donation and plans on using these funds to increase staff to streamline operations and to grow its support of the GNOME Project and the surrounding ecosystem.

While the GNOME Foundation has maintained its position as a proponent of the GNOME Project, growth has been limited. With these funds, the GNOME Foundation will be able to expand and lead in the free software space.

“I am very excited to lead the GNOME Foundation during this time. We are honored by the trust given to us and will work hard to justify that trust. This particular donation will enable us to support the GNOME project more widely, and tackle key challenges that the free software community faces. As a substantial element of this donation is matched funds, we will continue to fundraise for general events and specific projects, and hope that the generosity of all our donors continues.” says Executive Director Neil McGovern.

Details about the donation and the areas of investment will be announced individually in the coming weeks.

About 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. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most 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 in a large number of popular mobile devices.

The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME, 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 is supporting the pursuit of software freedom through the innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org. Become a friend of GNOME at https://www.gnome.org/friends/

For further comments and information, contact the GNOME press contact team at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

Announcing the GNOME internship program

The GNOME Foundation is proud to announce the creation of a new GNOME internship program matching strategic projects and valuable contributors, available from today to all who are interested!

The goal of the GNOME internship program is to bring development towards topics that are critical to further GNOME goals. To achieve such important tasks, software engineering and non-engineering projects are welcome, and everyone is encouraged to apply. Since these tasks are considered to be of higher complexity than other internships programs in the free software community recommend, GNOME internships will have a stipend of $8000 for a 3 month period. The GNOME Foundation is now able to redirect funds for specific topics that can be raised through campaigns and other initiatives.

With this, we are also pleased to announce the first round of internships, which will be focused on privacy and security with the funds of the privacy campaign we ran some time ago!

Check out the wiki page https://wiki.gnome.org/Internships and take a look at the first round of projects at https://wiki.gnome.org/Internships/2018/Projects, we encourage you to tell people about applying.

Feel free to send an email to internships-admin@gnome.org or reach to Carlos Soriano (csoriano at irc.gnome.org) if you have any questions, feedback, or thoughts about the program.

Students to work on improving GNOME this Summer

16 students will work to improve GNOME through the Google Summer of Code program this summer.

The students will work on a range of projects improving GNOME technologies and popular applications. Examples of include, a GTK4 port of Nautilus, improvements to GNOME Games , Pitivi UI polishing, GJS examples tutorials, improvements to Logs and more.

Details about the projects can be found on Google’s Summer of Code page. We are (very) lucky have this group of dedicated people who’s work will come to benefit GNOME users.

The students will blog about their experience on Planet GNOME. We wish them best of luck in their endeavor. Also many thanks to the mentors who makes the program able to run.

GNOME.Asia Summit 2018 Call for Papers is now open

GNOME.Asia Summit 2018 invites proposals for presentations at the conference.

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

picture from Chi-Hung Lin – https://www.flickr.com/photos/92585929@N06/27325096293, CC BY-SA 2.0

The conference will be co-hosted with COSCUP 2018 which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan from 2018-08-11 until 2018-08-12. We welcome proposals by newcomers and experienced speakers alike.

Please submit yours at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKnffsc_Ke2ZEP3fInJkAwEzXFUM24HZ7dYYluoGLmHMQjZw/viewform

Chinese Version(local language) 中文版（本地語言）請參見：https://openingsource.org/2003/zh-tw/

Important Information

The deadline:
- Submission: 25th of May
- Notification of acceptance: 2018-06-01 until 2018-06-05
- Full programme published: Early July
Conference:
- Conference date: Aug 11th – 12th , 2018
- Venue: National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Contributing to GNOME

Latest developments
Writing applications for GNOME 3
UI design
QA and testing
Accessibility
Human Interface Engineering (Icons and Graphic Design)
Marketing/Engagement
Asia success stories / Local GNOME Projects
GNOME and Education
FOSS outreach programs, including Google Summer of Code

Developing GNOME on mobile devices (smart phones, tablets)
Developing GNOME on embedded systems or open hardware

Contributing to Linux and F/LOSS

Linux kernel and development
The development and promotion of open-source operating systems
About Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, and other distributions
The development and promotion of other open-source projects

Open Source Enlightenment and Related Story

The Knowledge and Spirit of Open Source
Open Source stories of your own
How to optimize the process and improve efficiency with the help of open-source tools
How to engage non-technical clightning talksontributors in Open Source Projects
How to engage more female contributors in Open Source Projects

Emerging Technologies

Artificial Intelligence
DevOps with AI
Deep Learning
AR & VR
Big Data
Distributed systems
Open Source DevOps

We are also interested in other topics related to Free/Libre and Open Source Software which are not listed above.

There will be an opportunity for speakers and GNOME Foundation members to request sponsorship by the GNOME Foundation. Please submit applications to the GNOME Travel Committee https://wiki.gnome.org/Travel .

A standard session will be scheduled for 45 mins (35 mins talk + 10 mins Q&A). The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or BOF. If you need more time or additional resources, feel free to get in touch with the organizing team.

For those who would like to participate but are not sure if they’d like to do a full talk, we have shorter lightning talks. These are a 10 minutes presentation to demonstrate your work or promote an interesting topic. These talks will be grouped together in a single session.

Please provide a short abstract of 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 by following the schedule.

Submission deadline: 2018-05-20

Confirmation of paper acceptance: 2018-06-01 until 2018-06-05

All interested contributors are highly encouraged to send in talks.

The GNOME.Asia 2018 Team

*More information about GNOME Asia Summit 2018 is available at: https://2018.gnome.asia/

Call for GUADEC 2019 Bid Proposals

The GNOME Foundation would like to invite bids for hosting GUADEC 2019. GUADEC is the biggest gathering of GNOME users and developers, which takes place in Europe every year, and you could make it happen next year!

If you are interested in submitting a bid to host GUADEC 2019 in your city, please send an intention to bid by end of the day on Sunday, May 6th. Bids will be due on June 3rd, and you can talk to the Foundation Board and previous GUADEC organizers to find out more about what is involved.

Your bid should demonstrate that:

The location is easily accessible by plane or train
You have a motivated local team with a few core members, preferably with experience in event organization
A good venue is available to host the event
There are affordable accommodations and places to eat
There is local industry and government support

Deadlines

Intention to bid: end of the day Sunday, May 6th
Bid submission: end of the day Sunday, June 3rd

Intentions to bid and bid submissions should be made by e-mail to foundation-announce@gnome.org and board-list@gnome.org. Both intentions and bids should also be added to: https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2019/Bids.

Bids from previous years are available for reference. While organizing a conference such as GUADEC is a huge undertaking, people from the GNOME community have been there before you and will be there to help.

You can find more information at: https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/HowTo, including an overview of the sorts of things you should include in the proposal.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Foundation board at board-list@gnome.org.

GNOME.Asia Summit 2018 to be held in Taipei, Taiwan

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce that the upcoming GNOME.Asia Summit 2018 will be hosted in Taipei, Taiwan between Aug 11 – Aug 12, followed by a local tour on Aug 13.

The 2018 edition of the summit will take place at the National University of Science and Technology of Taiwan (commonly known as Taiwan Tech), and will be co-hosted with COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters), a major local open source conference held annually in Taipei since 2006.

The GNOME Foundation is excited about co-hosting this years summit with COSCUP as it will foster a stronger tie between the local open source community in Taiwan and GNOME, and has hopes of attracting wider interest and contributors.

Taiwan is a fantastic location for GNOME.Asia 2018 as the city is a major hub of technology and innovation. Taipei is home to a very active free and open source community, with weekly meetups, monthly hackfests, and over 50 annual conferences for various free and open source projects. Taiwan Tech itself was established as the first higher education institution of its kind within Taiwan’s technical and vocational education system.

Apart from the great setting for our free software conference, Taipei City holds many cultural landmarks and internationally renowned architecture that will surely delight GNOME.Asia 2018 participants. For example, Taipei 101 (formerly called the Taipei World Financial Center), is among the world’s tallest buildings, and Taiwan’s National Theater and National Concert Hall are some of the first modern performing arts facilities to be established in Asia. With the added benefit of having world-famous hot springs and night markets, there’s sure to be something of interest for everyone.

This year, the GNOME.Asia Summit will have two devoted track sessions that will be held separately from the COSCUP tracks in order to provide dedicated space for the GNOME community to discuss relevant topics.

Organizers also hope to provide a space for GNOME activities like Birds of a Feather sessions (BoFs) and hackfests, in order to encourage more contribution by GNOME.Asia participants into core areas of GNOME. The GNOME.Asia Summit 2018 website will be released in the upcoming weeks with more information about the event. In the meantime, any questions about the conference can be sent to asia-summit-list@gnome.org, and interested sponsors can send queries to gnome-asia-committee-list@gnome.org.

We also encourage those interested in the summit to follow @GNOMEAsia on Twitter, or our main @GNOME social media accounts, for more up-to-date information on various activities and key dates for the conference.