GNOME Foundation

Category: News

  • GNOME Launches New Round of Outreach Program for Women Internships and Improves Other Outreach Initiatives

    The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce its latest round of the Outreach Program for Women Internships, for which it has been able to accept ten outstanding applicants. GNOME’s efforts are made possible by the strong sponsorship that the program has received from free software companies and organizations committed to increasing the involvement of women in technology. Google and Mozilla have each sponsored two participants, Collabora, the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat have each sponsored one participant, and the GNOME Foundation has sponsored the remaining three from its general funds. The Software Freedom Conservancy adds an eleventh intern to the Outreach Program for Women. In addition, among 29 participants, GNOME accepted five women for Google Summer of Code, who all got involved through the outreach program.

    John Sullivan, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation which joins this year as a new sponsor, commented, “The Free Software Foundation is proud to sponsor an internship in GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women. The free software movement is about freedom for everyone, but we have a long way to go to make that a reality. This program’s past achievements in expanding the community by welcoming and retaining newcomers have moved us closer to that goal, and we can’t wait to hear this summer’s success stories.”

    This is also the Conservancy’s first participation in the program. It is sponsoring its own participant for the Twisted Project. Twisted maintainer and mentor Jessica McKellar said, “Programs like this encourage free and open source communities to reflect on how to be more welcoming and supportive of people of all backgrounds. The success of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women has been tremendously inspiring; I am pleased that Twisted is joining it in tackling stereotypes in open source head-on this summer while working with our new contributors on some exciting projects.”

    Previous rounds of the program have been very successful, and have helped in other mentorship and outreach efforts of the project. When GNOME started the current Outreach Program for Women two years ago, it had an initial list of nine mentors from eight projects who were eager to help with the program. Connecting newcomers with mentors who can guide them in their initial contributions proved to be the most important aspect of the outreach effort. For that reason, GNOME recently moved the list of mentors that was built up for the Outreach Program for Women to be a part of the GNOME Love initiative. There are now 37 mentors from 22 projects who any newcomer can contact any time throughout the year in this ever-growing list. The GNOME team also started a page on the Google Summer of Code wiki that contains links to such lists of mentors in many free software organizations. That page currently has 15 organizations. In addition to being a general resource to point students looking for an organization to join to, the list is also used to spread the word about Google Summer of Code and mentorship opportunities among technical women groups at many universities.

    The Outreach Program for Women demonstrated that an initial contribution to the project by an applicant increases their involvement with the project, prepares them for the work during the internship period, and serves as an important selection criteria. This year, GNOME also required the students applying for Google Summer of Code in GNOME to make a contribution to the project they are applying to work on, not just to supply a link to a bug they fixed in any free software project. As a result, all successful applicants demonstrated their ability to work on the project they proposed and discussed their proposal with their potential mentor.

    The GNOME community is very proud of the accomplishments of the last round’s Outreach Program for Women participants, which include the following:

      • Kasia Bondarava committed Belarusian translations for 35 GNOME modules. With her help, Belarusian translation coverage went from 67% to 88%, making Belarusian a new officially supported language. She also made a comprehensive comparison of different translator tools and advocated for better translator comments.
      • Christy Eller has tremendously improved the web development process in GNOME and created the new Friends of GNOME pages.
      • Susanna Huhtanen created comprehensive developer documentation about writing GNOME applications in JavaScript.
      • Patricia Santana Cruz added support for sharing videos and images with different online services, improved hotplug connection of camera devices, and added recorded time when making a video in the Cheese webcam application.
      • Sophia Yu ported Swell Foop game from JavaScript to Vala, completely reworking its implementation, and updated several other games to use new GNOME APIs.

    The detailed accomplishments of all 11 program participants can be found at https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2011/Accomplishments

    Over three quarters of the women involved in the program have stayed connected to the GNOME community. Better still, Outreach Program for Women participants have a strong tradition of becoming mentors in GNOME. Luciana Fujii Pontello and Ekaterina Gerasimova mentored Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women participants in previous rounds. Tiffany Antopolski, Anita Reitere and Srishti Sethi mentored Google Code-In participants. This round, Christy Eller will co-mentor a Web Development intern and Tiffany Antopolski will mentor four Documentation interns, three of whom will be working on Developer Documentation along with Tiffany. Many former participants have also presented at free software conferences and local events to raise awareness about GNOME and their work. Many have helped with the outreach program by spreading the word about it, improving the materials available about the program, and guiding new applicants.

    The Outreach Program for Women is organized by Marina Zhurakhinskaya, with help and support from Karen Sandler, Rosanna Yuen and the GNOME Board of Directors. The essential work is done by the program’s mentors in helping the applicants and eventual participants contribute to their projects. For more information about the Outreach Program for Women, visit http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/women

    GNOME 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 environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. GNOME’s software 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 community is made up of hundreds of contributors from all over the world, many of whom are volunteers. This community is supported by the GNOME Foundation, an independent non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal assistance. The Foundation is a democratic institution that is directed by its members, who are all active GNOME contributors. GNOME and its Foundation works to promote software freedom through the creation of innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experiences.

  • Students accepted for Google Summer of Code in GNOME

    The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce that 29 students have been accepted to work on GNOME through Google Summer of Code this year. The students will work on a wide range of projects improving the core GNOME 3 experience, GNOME technologies, and popular applications. Some applications that the students will work on are Documents, Web, Boxes, Calculator, Banshee, Getting Things GNOME!, Activity Journal, and GCompris.

    Organizing the Outreach Program for Women helped GNOME improve the resources available for all newcomers and guidelines for the Google Summer of Code applicants. With the GNOME mentors list now available as part of the GNOME Love initiative and with each project idea on the GNOME Google Summer of Code ideas page including a potential mentor, we were able to ensure that the students connect with a potential mentor for the idea they were proposing. We also required the students to make a contribution to the project they are applying to work on. As a result, all successful applicants demonstrated their ability to work on the project they proposed and discussed their proposal with their potential mentor. The GNOME community is thrilled to have these talented and dedicated contributors have a chance to spend the whole summer working on GNOME!

    The GNOME Foundation is deeply grateful to Google for its generous support of free software projects and for being included in the program for the eights year in a row! Also, a special thank you to the mentors who help guide the students!

    For more information about the accepted projects please visit the GNOME project page on the Google Summer of Code website. The students will blog about their work on Planet GNOME throughout the summer.

  • Official Announcement and Invitation to GNOME.Asia 2012

    GNOME.Asia Summit is Asia’s primier GNOME user and developer conference, spreading the knowledge of GNOME across Asia.

    This year’s conference will be held in Hong Kong on June 9 and 10. The conference follows the release of GNOME 3.4, 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 groundbreaking GNOME 3 and help make GNOME as successful as possible.

    To learn more or submit a paper, see the official GNOME.Asia 2012 website.

  • New GNOME Foundation Members for March

    Last month, GNOME Foundation have had more members to join its warm family. We are happy to announce that the new members are as follows:

    • Dan Vrátil (Evolution’s porting to WebKit, Bugzilla contributions)
    • Stefano Candori (GNOME Activity Journal maintainer and Zeitgeist
    • Andres Gomez (Organized GUADEC in the past, sponsors GNOME through Igalia (co-owner), coded various GNOME Mobile apps)
    • Robert Nordan (Tomboy, Pinta)
    • Antigoni Papantoni (PiTiVi, participated in GStreamer hackfest, OPW
    • Javier Hernández Antúnez (Developer and member of the GNOME a11y Team, Accerciser co-maintainer, Contributor to the openSuse GNOME 3.2 live images)
    • Yuri Myasoedov (Coordinator of the Russian translation team, also maintain the GNOME russian website, gnome.org.ru)
    • Tim Waugh (CUPS printing system, GNOME Control Center and Gtk+ printing framework)
    • Chris Lord (Contributions to some GNOME projects, as Clutter, Pinpoint, grilo, libsoup, gtkhtml2, libjana, contacts, dates)
    • Susanna Huhtanen (GNOME’s OPW internship, GNOME Documentation)

    They have all contributed significantly to the development of GNOME. Thank you all for your great help and welcome! You join our other amazing Foundation Members

    If you contribute to GNOME, you too can become a member of the Foundation. See the membership page for details.

  • Software Freedom Conservancy Joins GNOME Outreach Program

    The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to welcome the Software Freedom Conservancy to its 2012 Outreach Program for Women. The Outreach Program for Women seeks to engage women in the development, documentation and general improvement of open source and free software. Concurrently with the Google Summer of Code, the Outreach Program for Women additionally funds internships for women to spend the summer participating in and contributing to free software projects while being mentored by an experienced member of the free software community.

    The deadline for applications to both the Outreach Program for Women internships and Google’s Summer of Code is April 6th. GNOME has made available a list of Google Summer of Code project ideas that are suitable for either this outreach program or Summer of Code. Conservancy’s internship is with the Twisted project, which has also made available full details and application requirements on the internship on its wiki. The Conservancy’s internship will follow the internship rules outlined by the GNOME Foundation’s Outreach Program for
    Women.

    Conservancy and the GNOME Foundation urge women who aspire to get involved with free software projects this summer to act fast! The deadline for applications for all these programs is just days away!

  • GNOME 3.4 Released

    The GNOME Release Team has announced the availability of GNOME 3.4. This latest version comes six months after the last GNOME release and includes major new features, significant updates to a host of GNOME applications, and a huge number smaller fixes and refinements. Matthias Clasen, who oversaw the completion of the release, described it as “a great leap forward for GNOME 3”, adding “we hope that our users enjoy it.”

    GNOME 3.4 introduces a range of new features. A new document search facility allows quick access to content stored both on your device and online. Smooth scrolling means that moving through content is slick and graceful. New application menus, which are located on the top bar, provide a useful way to access application options and actions.

    The new release includes big enhancements to GNOME’s applications. The GNOME web browser, now known as Web, has been given a beautiful new interface for 3.4, as well as significant performance improvements. Documents and Contacts also sport updated interfaces and new features. These application enhancements are the result of a major development drive which is in the process of creating a new suite of modern and stylish GNOME 3 applications.

    Polishing and refining GNOME 3 has been a big focus for this release. This effort has resulted in a multitude of bug fixes and many other minor improvements. There are updated interface components, a much more polished visual theme, better hardware support, and much more. These changes add up to a major step forward in the quality of the GNOME 3 user experience.

    Full details of the changes found in GNOME 3.4 can be seen in the release notes.

    The new release continues GNOME’s tradition of regular and predictable releases, and incorporates an amazing 41,000 contributions made by 1275 people. Planning has already begun for the next GNOME release. If you want to be a part of our community, you can join us. You can also support us by becoming a Friend of GNOME.

    Those wanting to try GNOME 3.4 are advised to wait until it is made available through distributions. More information about how to get GNOME 3 can be found on our website.

    Read the press release: GNOME 3.4 Released: a Big Leap Forward

  • GNOME 3.4 Release Candidate Finalized

    The GNOME Release Team’s Javier Jardón announced the availability of the 3.4 Release Candidate yesterday. This is the final development version of GNOME 3.4, and puts the next version of GNOME 3 on track for completion next week. GNOME 3.4 promises to deliver major new features, updated applications and wide-scale improvements to the GNOME 3 user experience.

    The remaining time until the GNOME 3.4 release will be devoted to testing and essential bug fixing.

    Members of the press who would like details about the release should contact gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

  • GNOME to Participate in Google Summer of Code 2012

    GNOME will be participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) once again this year. GSoC gives students from around the world the chance to work on free and open source software projects. Since its inception in 2005 more than 6000 students from 100+ countries have had a chance to learn from some of the best hackers in the world. The GNOME Project has enabled more than 160 students to take part in GSoC in the past, and this will be the 7th year in a row that the project has participated.

    Google Summer of Code is a great opportunity for post-secondary students to contribute to free and open source software projects during their summer vacation, for which they receive financial support. This year’s GSoC will run between May 21 – August 24.

    GNOME will once again be offering exciting and interesting projects to work on. You can see our list of suggested projects on the GNOME wiki. The deadline for applications is April 6. For more information see the GNOME Summer of Code page. You can also find information on the Google Summer of Code website.

    Many thanks to Google for continuing to support free and open source software through this fantastic scheme.

  • The GNOME Foundation Continues to Grow

    The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee is proud to announce our newly approved Foundation Members. Welcome, and thank you for your valuable contributions so far!

    So here we go with our newly approved members:

    • Simon Schampijer (PyGobject patches, Bugzilla contributions, GNOME Hackfests)
    • Rūdolfs Mazurs (GNOME Latvian translator)
    • Peteris Krisjanis (GNOME Latvian translator)
    • Giovanni Campagna (GNOME Shell Developer)
    • Felipe Erias Morandeira (GNOME Design and UI development)
    • Erick Pérez Castellanos (GNOME Contacts App code contributions)
    • Daniel Mustieles Garcia (GNOME Spanish Translation Team Coordinator and Translator)
    • Debarshi Ray (Strong code contributions to many GNOME modules: Gnote, Tracker, Libchamplain, Solang, GNOME Fedora packager)
    • Luis Menina (GNOME French translator, GNOME-FR secretary, and contributor, Bugs triager)
    • Juan Suarez (contributions to Epiphany, Totem, Glib)

    Information about the GNOME Foundation can be found on its webpages. If you would like to become a member, check out the membership page.

  • GUADEC 2012 Call for Participation

    February 28, 2012: A Coruña, Spain. A public Call for Participation has officially opened for the 2012 GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC) conference. Grupo de Programadores y Usuarios de Linux (GPUL), this year’s organizers of the event, anticipate a wide range of speakers and hundreds of participants to once again make this conference a highly informative and community-building event.

    You can read the press release and register in the paper submission system here.

    GUADEC 2012 will be hosted in A Coruña, Spain, from July 26 – 29. Now in its 13th year, GUADEC is one of the largest annual meetings of free and open source software developers, GNOME foundation leaders, individuals, governments and businesses from around the world. Speakers include leading names from the GNOME, UNIX, GNU/Linux and Free and Open Source software. With additional days from July 30 – August 1 allocated for hackfests and meetings. A Coruña has already seen several successful GNOME-related hackfests over the past three years, and GUADEC will be held in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A Coruña.

    The 2011 release of GNOME 3 has significantly refreshed development of the GNOME project. Topics are of particular interest for GUADEC 2012 include:

    • Design of the core user experience
    • Writing applications for GNOME 3
    • Integration of web life into the desktop
    • Adapting GNOME to new types of devices
    • Improvements to and unification of desktop plumbing
    • Outreach to new contributors
    • Organization and governance of the project
    • GNOME’s 15th birthday

    Submissions that do not fit into these categories are also welcome, provided that they are of relevance, or inspiring to the GNOME community. You can access the secure online submission system directly via gpul.org.

    The Call for Participation for GUADEC 2012 will follow these dates:

    • April 14: Deadline for submission of abstracts
    • Presentations will be reviewed by the program committee
    • April 28: Notification of speakers
    • End of April: Call for Lightening talks
    • July 26 – 29: GUADEC 2012 in A Coruña, Spain
    • July 30 – August 1: hackfests and meetings

    If you are interested in organizing a workshop, a BoF session or a project room during this second half of GUADEC, please wait for a later separate call for participation.

    The program committee will consist of the following members: Andre Klapper, Allan Day (Red Hat), Ryan Lortie (Codethink), Michael Meeks (SUSE), Lennart Poettering (Red Hat), Christian Schaller (Collabora) and Vincent Untz (SUSE).

    About the GNOME Foundation

    Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of the GNOME project. The foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

    GNOME, the default graphical environment in many major GNU/Linux and Unix systems, has millions of users around the world and the support of large enterprises and small business. Holding its main tenets as freedom, accessibility and usability, GNOME is well positioned to play a key role in future FLOSS projects.

    About GUADEC

    GUADEC is the GNOME Users And Developers’ European Conference. Held annually since 2000 in cities around Europe, GUADEC is the largest congress of GNOME users, developers, artists, translators, foundation leaders, individuals, governments and businesses in the world. Presentations are given by business leaders, government spokespeople, volunteers and motivated developers on a range of topics including the future directions of the GNOME Project, Unix, GNU/Linux, Free and Open Source software, new features, exciting ideas and modern development techniques.

    More information about GUADEC, GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.guadec.org, www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.

    Follow GUADEC developments: identi.ca/GUADEC & twitter.com/GUADEC

    For general questions please contact the GUADEC team.

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