News – Page 34 – GNOME Foundation

Welcome to More New GNOME Foundation Members

Many new members have been joining the GNOME Foundation recently, which is always great news. The latest to join are:

Olivier Sessink (Bluefish’s author, huge Bugzilla’s contributions)
Antono Vasiljev (GObject Introspection, Bug triaging and fixing, GNOME Esperanto Translator)
Christian Hergert (contributions to Glib, GTK)
Nick Richards (GTK+ and Empathy code contributions)
Eduardo Lima Mitev (Instrospection related fixed to Grilo, glib)
Guillaume Emont (Code contributions on Gstreamer and Grilo, bug triaging and fixing, blog posts about GNOME technologies)
Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (Deskbar-applet and Zeitgeist maintainer, code contributions on several GNOME Modules)
Raluca Elena Podiuc (GsoC’s student working on integrating Cheese with Empathy)
Srishti Sethi (GsoC’s student workin on GCompris, represented GNOME at FUDCon India 2011)
Daniel Espinosa Ortiz (Libgda’s maintainer, GNOME-DB’s contributions, bug fixing and triaging)
Chandni Verma (GNOME’s OPW internship working on Empathy, GNOME’s Asia organization and Marketing contributions)
Daniel Williams (NetworkManager & ModemManager maintainer, code and bug triaging / fixing contributions over several GNOME Modules)
Joone Hur (WebKitGTK+ and WebKitClutter contributions, GNOME Promoter in South Korea)
Tamara Atanasoska (Anjuta’s contributions during GsoC, GNOME Promoter in Macedonia)
Guido Günther (krb5-auth-dialog’s developer, NetworkManager & ModemManager code contributions)
Damien Lespiau (Clutter-GStreamer’s Maintainer)
Philippe Normand (WebKitGTK, Gstreamer)
Yu Liansu (GNOME’s OPW internship, GNOME Design)
Margaret M. Ford (GNOME’s OPW internship, GNOME Design)

A warm welcome to our new members! They join a magnificent community of contributors.

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

Hong Kong to host GNOME.Asia 2012, June 9-15

It is with great pleasure that the GNOME Foundation announces that Hong Kong has been selected as the venue of our upcoming GNOME.Asia 2012. GNOME.Asia 2012 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 release and to help make GNOME as successful as possible.

Hong Kong is well known for being one of the largest cities in Asia, with a thriving cultural scene, solid infrastructure, and robust public transportation system. Many countries have a visa-free period for travel with Hong Kong and the city has well integrated international connections. We believe that hosting the event in Hong
Kong will bring the spotlight on GNOME and make an impact locally, regionally and internationally in terms of business and community building. Aside from being a business capital, Hong Kong is also well known as a tourist destination that is famous for its food, shopping and many attractions.

Potential sites for the conference are the Breakthrough Youth Village Campsite and City University of Hong Kong, and reasonable rates for accommodations have been arranged.

We would like to thank everyone who participated in the GNOME.Asia 2012 bidding process, especially the great work from Team GNOME Hong Kong and Team GNOME Indonesia. We look forward to working with you more in the future!

GNOME Hackfest Double Bill in Brno, Czech Republic

Two major GNOME hackfests will be simultaneously taking place in Brno, Czech Republic, this week. A GTK+ Hackfest will focus on the GNOME toolkit, while a Doc Sprint will be an important opportunity for our documentation writers to prepare for the upcoming GNOME 3.4 release.

The GTK+ hackfest will begin on Friday, 2/17 and will combine presentations and working sessions. The event will be a chance to plan GTK+ development, and will include discussions of Clutter integration, accessibility support and how to meet user experience goals. Visit the GNOME wiki for more details and a list of attendees from the GNOME community.

The Doc Sprint will also begin on Friday, 2/17. It will be an intensive work session for the GNOME Documentation Project, with the goal of updating and creating current documentation for the release of GNOME 3.4. This group will be updating GNOME help and GNOME application tutorials, improving GObject overview, and more. See the GNOME wiki for details and a list of attendees.

Both hackfests are being hosted by Red Hat, as a part of its 2012 Developer Conference which is occurring February 17-21. The Developer Conference is open to all Linux and JBoss developers, admins and users. Entrance is free and registration is not required. There will be breakfasts, snacks and a party catered by Red Hat on Friday evening.

The GNOME Foundation Welcomes Ten New Members

The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee is proud to announce our newly approved Foundation Members. Please welcome and thank them for their great and valuable contributions to GNOME!

They are:

Sergio Villar Senín (WebKitGtk+, libsoup and Epiphany)
Christy Eller (GNOME’s OPW internship, GNOME Marketing and gnome.org’s development)
Julita Inca Chiroque (GNOME Documentation, GNOME’s OPW internship)
Aurimas Černius (Gnote’s maintainer, Lithuanian translations for GNOME)
Martin Pitt (Debian / Ubuntu packaging for GNOME, PyGObject, Bug triaging and fixing)
Neil Roberts (Cogl’s maintainer, Clutter’s contributions, GNOME’s esperanto translator)
Jasper St. Pierre (Many contributions on mutter / gnome-shell, author of the extensions.gnome.org website)
Shaswat Nimesh (Speaker at Gnome Asia Summit 2011, GUADEC Committee member, Founder and coordinator of Chennai GNOME User Group and GNOME’s advocacy in India)
Michal Hruby (Zeitgeist and Synapse developer)
Vibha Yadav (Evolution and related modules, GNOME.Asia 2011 as a speaker)

Congratulations to our new members!

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

Excellent Progress Made at GNOME Accessibility Hackfest

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the successful conclusion of the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest which was held from January 18th to 22th at Igalia’s offices in A Coruña, Spain. There were attendees from several companies and organizations including Red Hat, SUSE, Igalia, Mozilla and Nokia with different backgrounds and expertise in areas like GTK, ATK, AT-SPI2, Qt, WebKitGtk+ and Gecko.

Picture of the attenders to the hackfest

Some rights reserved by mariosp

The hackfest was very productive, some of the highlights included:

It was agreed to remove key events emission from GTK+ as soon as an alternative implementation is provided. Several approaches for this implementation where discussed.
Accessibility support for WebKitGtk+ has been further improved with a big refactoring of the code, as well as exposing WebKit2Gtk+ accessibility hierarchies to ATK/AT-SPI.
Ideas for a more efficient and effective AT-SPI2 cache policy were discussed, with the goal of keeping DBus messages traffic to a minimum.
There was an important discussion about global vs per-object events. The aim here is to make sure that only the relevant events are sent to accessibility clients. In the short term, the current goblal-events hook-based implementation will be maintained, but we will be exploring alternatives.
It was concluded that in order to enable accessibility support by default, we shouldn’t use ATK-bridge as a module, but integrate it in the core platform. Several possible approaches were discussed, and we set the aim of having a concrete plan decided by the time GNOME 3.4 is released.
These and other accessibility underpinnings were worked on, which will effectively improve the experience of GNOME users who need accessibility features.

There are many challenges in the near future of accessibility and GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!.

The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

See GNOME at FOSDEM 2012, February 4-5th

GNOME will be very present at FOSDEM 2012. The Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a major two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. It happens every year in Brussels, Belgium.

GNOME will have a booth at FOSDEM this year, with T-Shirts for sale, stickers and more. GNOME developers will be available to answer questions and will be demonstrating the latest GNOME technologies. GNOME community members will also be attending FOSDEM including Karen Sandler, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, as well as members of the GNOME Release Team.

There are going to be many talks about GNOME, covering topics ranging from new technologies, community organization and design. Most of these talks will be held in the Cross-Desktop Devroom (H 1308). Here are some of them:

Saturday Feb 4 11:20 H.1308 50 minutes	GStreamer 1.0 – the next generation of your favourite multimedia framework	Tim-Philipp Müller
Feb. 4 17:00 H. 1308 30 minutes	GNOME 3: Every Detail Matters	Allan Day
Feb 5 13:30 H. 1308 40 minutes	How to trick a developer into being a designer?	Seif Lotfy & Allan Day
Feb 5 13:30 H.1308 40 minutes	Make your applications smarter via Zeitgeist	Seif Lotfy
Feb 5 09:15 H.1308 40 minutes	GNOME 3.4 accessible: Status, news, future	Alejandro Piiñeiro Iglesias
Feb 5 15:00 H.1308 40 minutes	WebKitGTK+ status and roadmap to WebKit2	Mario Sanchez Prada
Feb 5 15:45 H.1308 30 minutes	Getting into GNOME: Impressions of a new maintainer	David King
Sunday Feb 5 16:20 H.1308 30 minutes	Web Applications in GNOME	Xan López
Sunday Feb 5 10:45 H.1308 30 minutes	Boxes, use other systems with ease	Marc-André Lureau & Zeeshan Ali

As usual, there will be a GNOME Beer Party on Saturday night. Held at “La Bécasse” (rue de Tabora 11 (2 minutes from the Grand Place) from 20:00-00:30 in the city center (NOT “La Bécasse” by ULB/FOSDEM!)

If you are a GNOME contributor, let us know if you will be attending FOSDEM at: https://live.gnome.org/Brussels2012/Attendees.

GNOME wins 2 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards in 2011

Every year, Linux Journal magazine sponsors a contest wherein its readers vote for their favorite open source applications in a variety of categories. In 2011, GNOME won Best Desktop Environment and GNOME 3 came away with the coveted Product of the Year award. Considering the awards were decided by over 12,000 voters in 2010, this is a great honor for GNOME.

Linux Journal reports that “GNOME 3 represents a drastic change in the way we compute on the desktop“, and says the readers have proven “that change isn’t always a bad thing, and GNOME 3 wins!”.

Hackfest Plans to Improve GNOME Accessibility

GNOME accessibility contributors will be gathering for a four day hackfest in A Coruña, Spain, next week. Together, they will be working to enhance GNOME’s assistive technologies, which allow people with disabilities such as visual, movement, hearing, cognitive and language impairments to use GNOME software.

The hackfest will be focusing on two key GNOME accessibility technologies – ATK and AT-SPI. These facilities allow GNOME applications to be used through accessibilty technologies, such as screen readers.

The hackfest is being hosted by Igalia who, alongside the GNOME Foundation, are sponsoring the hackfest. See the hackfest wiki page for more details.

GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing accessibility efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!

GNOME Launches Campaign for Accessibility

Today the GNOME Foundation announces a fundraising campaign to kick off 2012 as the Year of Accessibility for GNOME.

GNOME has held accessibility amongst its core values from the project’s inception. Because of this commitment, along with the efforts of many dedicated developers, GNOME 2 became an award winning accessible free desktop environment.

“For me, GNU/Linux and GNOME equal freedom, and without all of the hard work which has been put into all of this wonderful software, I would truly be at a loss. This is why further development and maintenance of accessible software is so important to me.” —Read the rest of Robert Cole’s story.

With the advent of GNOME 3, GNOME has started down an exciting new path in terms of usability, which will include users of all ages and abilities. This drive is not only necessary for those with disabilities but is also increasingly needed for our devices work for any user. The GNOME accessibility team is working hard, but its resources are more limited than in the past.

With your help we can tackle the accessibility team’s many goals, making GNOME the best and most accessible desktop available today. Please help us make 2012 the Year of Accessibility at GNOME! Donate $25 or more today and ask your friends to donate too.

GUADEC 2012 in A Coruña, Spain: July 26 – August 1

GROTON, Mass — December 13, 2011 — GUADEC, the primary GNOME User and Developer European Conference (www.guadec.org), will be held in A Coruña, Spain from July 26 to 29, 2012, with hackfests and other meetings to be held on July 30 through August 1. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the GNOME development and user community who will discuss and direct the future of the GNOME project. Many participants from the overall free and open source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend.

Due to its excellent facilities, strong local organizational team and affodable local accommodations, A Coruña, Spain, was chosen out of the several excellent locations proposed for the 2012 event. The conference will be held at the University of A Coruña’s Faculty of Computer Science, which has shown a longstanding commitment to free and open source software.

Alberto Valderruten, Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A Coruña said, “This year we are celebrating our 25th aniversary of the Faculty of Computer Science, and are really proud to host GUADEC, one of the most important events for the Free Software Community. The organization of GUADEC 2012 in Coruña will support an increase in our students’ involvement in the Free Software culture.”

The core organizing team for GUADEC 2012 will consists of members from GHANDALF, a nonprofit association that promotes and spreads Free Software in Spain, GNOME HISPANO, an organization dedicated to GNOME for Spanish speakers, GPUL, a GNU/Linux Users and Developers Group, Igalia and the University of A Coruña. All of the core team members are dedicated to free and open source software, and are active in a number of free software organizations in Spain.

“We are really happy to invite one of the most awesome communities of free software developers to Coruña!” said Francisco Javier Tsao Santín of GPUL, and a member of the GUADEC 2012 local team

“We expect that the organization of GUADEC in Coruña will help to boost the development of the GNOME project with new ideas and contributions.” added José María Casanova of Igalia, and also a member of the GUADEC 2012 local team

GUADEC 2012 follows a successful 2011 Desktop Summit held in Berlin, a joint conference by the GNOME and KDE communities. As planned at GUADEC 2010, the 2012 conference will return its specific focus to GNOME, though future joint events may be planned again.

Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said, “The Desktop Summit in Berlin was a great conference. Both the GNOME and KDE Communities reported successful meetings and are focused for the year. 2012 will be my first GUADEC as Executive Director and will also be the first GUADEC since the release of GNOME 3. I think it is well-timed to be a productive gathering in beautiful A Coruña.”

A call for GUADEC 2012 conference papers will be issued early in 2012. Other announcements will also be made at that time with details about the CFP and session tracks.

Find more information

For more information about GUADEC please visit the event website: www.guadec.org
Follow our updates via identi.ca / Twitter at: @guadec

About GNOME and 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. In the 15 years since then, the project has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, GNOME is a 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 by a large number of popular mobile device manufacturers.

The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. It is 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 supports the pursuit of software freedom through the innovative, accessible and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. Find out more about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation through their websites: www.gnome.org / foundation.gnome.org

Become a Friend of GNOME today! Visit this link: http://www.gnome.org/friends/

Media Enquiries

Karen Sandler
GNOME Foundation Executive Director
email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
phone: +1-617-206-3947