Category: News

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.

GNOME Asia Summit 2013 – Call for Hosts

The GNOME.Asia Committee is inviting proposals to host the GNOME.Asia Summit during the 2nd quarter of 2013. The GNOME.Asia Summit is the featured annual GNOME Conference in Asia. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments.

GNOME.Asia Summit was held in Beijing, Ho-Chi-Minh City, Taipei, Bangalore and Hong Kong respectively over the last five years. The Summit’s preference is to find new locations each year as we spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and delivery of the event.

You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our official website: http://www.gnome.asia

For those of you who would be interested in hosting the next GNOME.Asia Summit in 2013 you are hereby invited to submit a formal proposal to the gnome-asia-committee-list <at> gnome <dot> org . The deadline for the proposals is October 28, 2012. Please email your proposal to gnome-asia-committee-list <at> gnome <dot> org. We might invite you to present your proposal in more details over our regular IRC meetings, or send you additional questions and requests. Results will be announced by the second week of November, 2012.

The conference will require availability of facilities for one week, including a weekend, during the 2nd quarter of 2013 (between March and June). Final event dates should avoid other key free software conferences or other events that may have conflict and will be confirmed together with other GNOME teams which might get involved.

Key points which proposals should consider, and which will be taken into account when deciding among candidates, are:

  • Local community support for hosting the conference.
  • Venue details. Information about infrastructure and facilities to hold the conference should be provided.
  • Information about how internet connectivity will be managed.
  • Lodging choices ranging from affordable housing to nicer hotels, and information about distances between the venue and lodging options.
  • The availability of restaurants or the organization of catering on-site, cost of food/soft drinks/beer.
  • The availability and cost of travel from major Asian and European cities.
  • Local industry and government support.
  • Please provide a reasonably detailed budget.
  • Provide plans for fundraising at a local level.

Please check the GNOME.Asia Summit check list and howtos when putting together a proposal. Please also feel free to contact gnome-asia-committee-list <at> gnome <dot> org if you have any questions.

Please help to spread the words and we are looking forward to hearing from you soon!

GNOME 3.6 Released!

GNOME 3.6

The GNOME Project is proud to present GNOME 3.6, the third update to the 3.x series. This latest version of GNOME 3 includes a number of new features and enhancements, as well as many bug fixes and minor improvements. Together, they represent a significant upgrade to the GNOME 3 user experience.

Andreas Nilsson, President of the GNOME Foundation, said: “The GNOME Foundation is proud to present this latest GNOME release, and I would like to congratulate the GNOME community on its achievement.” He described the release as “an important milestone in our mission to bring a free and open computing environment to everyone.”

Highlights for this release include:

  • Big improvements to notifications, including a redesigned Message Tray, smarter notifications, and other tweaks and refinements.
  • An enhanced Activities Overview with an improved layout.
  • A greatly enhanced Files application, with functional file search, a new Recent location, redesigned interface and lots of bug fixes and handy new features.
  • Integrated Input Sources, which makes inputting different character sets (eg. Japanese or Chinese) fast and easy.
  • Accessibility on demand, meaning that universal access features like the Orca screen reader can be enabled with the push of a button.
  • A new Lock Screen. This provides an attractive view when the device is locked, plus handy functionality like media controls and notifications.

There are many other enhancements in GNOME 3.6, including Online Accounts support for Microsoft Exchange, Facebook and Windows Live, much improved System Settings and a redesigned User Menu. Many GNOME applications have also received improvements, including Web, Empathy, Disk Usage Analyzer, Disks and the Font Viewer. This release also includes the first major release of Boxes, an application for using remote systems and virtual machines, and a development preview of the new Clocks application.

You can read about all the changes included in GNOME 3.6 in the release notes. This latest version represents 6 months of hard work by the GNOME community, an open, international association of individuals and organizations. GNOME works to deliver high-quality user experiences based on Free Software. Development is conducted in the open, and anyone can get involved. If you want to support us, you can become a Friend of GNOME.

Read the press release: GNOME 3.6 Released: Evolution in the Making

User Observation Hackfest Announcement

A group of GNOME contributors will be gathering to accomplish important work. A User Observation Hackfest that will be hosted at the openSUSE Summit in Orlando, Florida (USA), on September 21-23, 2012.  The purpose of this hackfest is to gather knowledge to seed GNOME’s Pattern language for user interfaces and consequently improve the GNOME 3 experience for users.

One key aspect of this hackfest is a day trip to the City of Largo, Florida.  The City of Largo has a significant deployment of GNOME in the public sector.  Giving us an exciting opportunity to watch and talk to every day people who use GNOME on a day to day basis and observe how GNOME works for them.

The User Observation Hackfest is open to everyone.  If you are a passionate about GNOME 3 then we would love to hear your voice.  Please come down, register, and see us at the hackfest!

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

As a side note, the openSUSE Summit will be running an original fundraising event called Pie for Pi in order to help the GNOME Foundation to sponsorize contributors to attend hackfests.

Sponsors

SUSE

 

City of Largo

 

GNOME Foundation

Congratulations to our summer interns!

This summer, the GNOME project has had the great pleasure of having a total of 39 interns working with us. This included 29 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) interns as well as 10 participants in the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (GOPW).

The internships officially ended yesterday, and we’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank everyone who participated in them. We have seen some fantastic work done over the summer, including awesome new features as well as documentation and artwork. It has been a joy to work alongside such enthusiastic and talented individuals. You can find out more about our interns from this summer, as well as from last winter’s GOPW internships, in the 2012 GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook.

We hope that all our interns have enjoyed participating in the GNOME project, and that they have learned from their experiences. They have all truly become members of the GNOME community, and we look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.

This summer has been one of the most successful ever for GNOME’s outreach efforts. The project continues to invest in our outreach programs, which are an important part of our mission to spread software freedom.

Once again: congratulations to all.

Official Announcement and Invitation to Boston Summit 2012

MIT Tang Center. Photo by Jackson Frakes CC Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License

This year’s GNOME Boston Summit will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Columbus Day Weekend (6th – 8th October), at the MIT Tang Center.

The Boston Summit is a three-day event for GNOME developers and contributors. Unlike traditional conferences, Boston Summit is all about getting developers together and getting things done. There will be lots of discussion and planning, as well as hacking and a small number of presentations. There are also plans to run sessions for newcomers and GNOME users, such as a GNOME “installfest” and opportunities to learn about GNOME technologies.

If you are planning on coming to Boston Summit 2012, please tell us!

Sponsors

Interview with incoming Board Member Seif Lotfy

Today’s interview is from Seif Lotfy, one of the new GNOME Foundation board members.

Where do you live/work?
Darmstadt, 30km south of Frankfurt Germany.

Why is open source/free software important to you?
I believe open source/free software promotes innovation, due to its nature of crowd sourcing.

How/when/why did you become involved in GNOME?
I started using GNOME in 2004. I had SUSE installed at that point. Later I switched to Ubuntu. I got involved trying to fix a bug in Gimmie that was keeping me away from using it. So I sat down and looked at the python code which seemed to me like pseudo code. 3 weeks later (after learning python) I had my first patch and Alex Graveley motivated me to fix more issues.

Why did you run for the GNOME Foundation Board?
I wanted to contribute to GNOME in more ways then just code, as well as push for more visibility of the board in the community.

What do you hope to accomplish during your term on the board?
I hope to improve and find ways to make GNOME more interesting for its current (as well as potential future) sponsors. Also I am looking forward to developing initiatives to improve the communication within the community

Do you think GNOME is heading in the right direction? Why or why not?
While I think the direction (GNOME OS) is very noble, I fear that maybe it was not thought out properly. I hope to be able to assess the long and short term implications with the rest of the board this year.

Have you attended GUADEC in the past? If so, when/where?
My first GUADEC was during Desktop Summit 2009 in Gran Canaria, it was really exciting. I have been to every following GUADEC (Desktop Summit) ever since.

What are you looking forward to most at GUADEC?
Meeting up with fellow developers that I communicate mostly online. Also enjoy outings after the hackfests.

Any other thoughts on GUADEC and/or GNOME?
GUADEC has always been awesome, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. And there wouldn’t be GUADEC without GNOME.

GNOME publishes the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2012

In the last year, the GNOME Outreach Program made several improvements to its central projects, the Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code. Some of these improvements are making sure each intern connects with a potential mentor ahead of time, contributes a patch to the relevant module as part of the application process, and has blog posts with progress updates incorporated on Planet GNOME. All of these requirements were made to help students and interns to connect to their projects early on.

These efforts are extended today with the publication of the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2012. In this book, you will find all participants from the Outreach Program for Women 2011/2012, Outreach Program for Women 2012 and Google Summer of Code 2012. Furthermore, all students and interns who will be at this years GUADEC are highlighted with a badge. Please take the time to get to know our newest contributors!

Download the GNOME Outreach Program Yearbook 2012

GNOME UX Hackfest Kicks off in A Coruña

GUADEC is only a few days away, but GNOME contributors are already gathering in A Coruña and getting down to some important work. Today marks the beginning of a two-day design event that is being hosted in the Igalia A Coruña office.

The UX Hackfest brings GNOME designers and developers together to review ongoing development initiatives. Features that are in development will be tested and discussed, and future development activities will be planned. The event aims to ensure that the next version of GNOME is the best ever.

The hackfest brings together members of the GNOME design team, in addition to key developers. It also involves a number of new GNOME contributors with the help of Google Summer of Code and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.

This event could not have taken place without the support from sponsors: Igalia and Red Hat. It has also been supported by the GNOME Foundation. Many thanks to all.

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

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