News – Page 7 – GNOME Foundation

GUADEC 2021 starts this week!

Our largest community conference, GUADEC, starts in just a few days and we couldn’t be more excited. This year’s conference will be held virtually and runs from Jul 21-25. Registration is open and by donation so let us know you’re coming by signing up online.

Schedule

This year’s schedule is packed full of great talks, BoFs, Workshops, and social events so make sure to check out our full schedule for all the details. All times are in UTC, however, you can change the timezone by clicking the clock icon at the top right of the timetable page.

The conference is organized into two tracks. On the schedule Track 1 activities and talks are shown in the left column, and Track 2 activities and talks are shown in the right. Both tracks require a pin code to enter, this can be found in the attendee update email sent to everyone already registered, or in the registration confirmation email for new registrations.

Track links and instructions for connecting to Big Blue Button can be found on guadec.org.

This year’s conference has two fantastic Keynote Speakers, Shauna Gordon-Mckeon and Hong Phuc Dang. Learn more about both on guadec.org.

Recordings and Captioning

All talks will be recorded under the license CC-BY-SA and added to the GNOME YouTube channel after the conference is over. We will also be providing live captioning for both tracks. For links and more details on live captioning visit guadec.org.

Conference Chat and Hallway Tracks

Each track will have its own chat within Big Blue Button, we welcome attendees to chat there as well as in our hallway track which will be open for the entire conference. Track links and more information can be found here.

Social Events

Don’t forget about the social events! We’ve scheduled activities for each conference day, from wine tasting to tea parties, there’s something for everyone, find the details for each here.

We’re kicking off the conference with a Welcome Party!

Grab your favorite drink and meet your fellow GNOMEies at our pre-conference party on Tuesday at 19:00 UTC in TRACK 1 for an informal chat and socialize hour.

Thank You to Our Sponsors

Special thanks goes to our awesome sponsors, Red Hat, Canonical, openSUSE, Arm, AWS, Codethink, Dell, Fedora, Igalia, Centricular, and GitLab!

See You Soon

Don’t forget to grab your GUADEC 2021 shirt from the GNOME Shop and make sure to share your GUADEC experience with us on social media by using our hashtag, #GUADEC2021. Follow GUADEC updates on Twitter from @GUADEC and @GNOME, or on Mastodon from @gnome@floss.social

Red Hat Joins GUADEC 2021 as a Gold Sponsor

Red Hat is a Gold Sponsor of GUADEC 2021! We’re pleased to welcome them back to GUADEC for another year. As a Gold Sponsor, they will be hosting office hours on Wednesday, July 21. This will provide an opportunity for attendees to talk directly with Red Hat, about a range of topics, including the many GNOME-related activities they have going on.

“As one of the many active contributors within the vibrant GNOME community, Red Hat is very pleased to also be among the sponsors of this year’s GUADAC event,” said a representative from Red Hat. “Community is about connections, and as we move into a world that is waking up from decreased social contact, those connections are more important than ever. GNOME remains an incredible part of the open source ecosystem, and the conversations made at GUADEC amongst users and contributors are a big reason why GNOME continues to be successful! We are thrilled to be a part of these conversations and look forward to participating in the GUADEC 2021 online event.”

Kristi Progri, lead organizer of GUADEC, says “On behalf of everyone at GUADEC organizing team, I would like to express our sincere gratitude for the generous sponsorship to GUADEC, We’re happy they’re joining us again at GUADEC to help build GNOME and show the community what they are working on.”

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT.

About GUADEC

GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters together for a week of talks and workshops. It takes place July 21 – 25 and will be online. This year’s keynote speakers are Hong Phuc Dang and Shauna Gordon-McKeon. Registration for GUADEC 2021 is open, please visit guadec.org to sign up.

About GNOME

GNOME is a free and open-source software environment project supported by a non-profit foundation. Together, the community of contributors and the Foundation create a computing platform and software ecosystem, composed entirely of free software, that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.

The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that believes in a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. We do this by building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem.

GUADEC 2021 Call for Participation: BoFs, Workshops, and Lightning talks

We are happy to announce that we have officially opened the call for workshops, BoFs and lightning talks.

We highly encourage everyone to submit a session. These sessions are a great way to share your thoughts with others, discuss various topics, receive feedback and help specific projects move forward. Bofs and Workshops can be either 1 (one) or 2 (two) hours and lightning talks are 10 minutes.

Each session is self-organized and it is up to the hosts and participants to decide if the session is to be loosely oriented around a set of topics, or have a well-defined agenda. Lightning talks will be scheduled by the organizing team.

All requests are due by June 6th, late requests will not be scheduled.

Available Times

BoFs and workshops: July 23 and 24
Lightning talks: July 24 from 15:00-16:00 UTC
Intern talks: July 23 from 15:00-16:00 UTC

Spots are limited. We will do our best to accommodate all requests, but please note that we may not be able to fit every proposed session into the schedule. If your session request is accepted and added to the schedule you will be notified by email.

To submit a request please fill out the short form online.

Submit a Proposal

Definition of Terms

Lightning Talks

Lightning Talks describe works in progress, new and untested ideas, or opportunities for collaborative work. Lightning talks are an excellent way to spark discussions and get feedback on an idea.

Workshops

A workshop is a period of discussion or practical work on a particular subject in which a group of people share their knowledge or experience.

Birds of a Feather

Birds of a Feather (BoFs), provide an environment for people with similar interests to meet for informal discussions.

GNOME 40 Release

We are proud to announce the release of GNOME 40. This release is the first to follow our new versioning scheme. It brings a new design for the Activities overview and improved support for input with Compose sequences and keyboard shortcuts, among many other things. Improvements to core GNOME applications include a redesigned Weather application, information popups in Maps, better tabs in Web, and many more.

More information about the changes in GNOME 40 can be found in the release notes:

https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/40.0/
https://forty.gnome.org/

GNOME 40 will be available shortly in many distributions. If you want to try it today, you can use the just-released Fedora 34 beta or the openSUSE nightly live images which both include GNOME 40.

https://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Medias/images/iso/

We are also providing our own installer images for debugging and testing features. These images are meant for installation in a vm and require GNOME Boxes with UEFI support to boot:

https://os.gnome.org/download/40.0/gnome_os_installer_40.0.iso

If you are interested in building applications for GNOME 40, look for the GNOME 40 Flatpak SDK, which is available in the www.flathub.org repository.

This six-month effort wouldn’t have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world: developers, designers, documentation writers, usability and accessibility
specialists, translators, maintainers, students, system administrators, companies, artists, testers, and last, but not least, our users.

GNOME would not exist without all of you. Thank you to everyone!

Our next release, GNOME 41, is planned for October 2021, after our yearly GUADEC conference, which will be online again. Until then, enjoy GNOME 40.

GNOME to apply for Season of Docs 2021

We will be applying to participate in another year of Google Season of Docs.

The Project

Audit and Build Project Documentation Tree

The Problem

The GNOME Project has a storied history dating back to the early days of Open Source. In that time frame, the project has grown substantially and with it our body of documentation in our wiki. Unfortunately, our documentation has not kept in sync with the reality of the state of the project.

Phase 1 requires that the candidate audit the entire wiki and work with community members to go through the content and remove content that is no longer applicable or plain wrong. There will be some that clearly need to be archived and some that need to be flagged to be updated. For those that need to be updated, the candidate will work with community members and their mentor to update the documentation to the current situation.

Phase 2 is more challenging. Taking the experience from the audit – modernize the current documentation structure. The candidate will work with their mentor to build a documentation tree that will make sense for the current direction of the GNOME Project. This could mean taking advantage of modern infrastructure like GitLab or looking at alternative documentation technologies that promote easy contributions with low overhead. The key goal is to be able to have an efficient documentation life cycle that will allow GNOME to maintain its documentation into the future.

How We Measure Success

A successful internship will require these tasks to be complete:
Audit the entire wiki located at https://wiki.gnome.org/
Remove all documentation that is determined to be expired
Flag all documentation that needs to be updated and gets updated
Build a proposal document that the GNOME project will evaluate and approve as the future direction of manageable documentation for the years ahead
[Bonus] We have picked an infrastructure technology and created actionable items that volunteers will be able to work on and complete

Recommended Skills

Must have: Basic knowledge of terms and their meanings in the general tech industry and computer languages. Had at least one or two technical documentation projects in the past.

Nice to have: Knowledge of open source, its development model, and some knowledge of the GNOME development model.

Volunteers

Sriram Ramkrishna will help with answer questions about the wiki, and make introductions to community members
Sriram Ramkrishna, Kristi Progri will review what will need to be removed/archive. and communicate to the community
Sriram Ramkrishna, Kristi Progri will review changes to areas that need to be updated
Sriram Ramkrishna will provide any assistance and/or executive decisions on content
The GNOME engagement team will review the proposal document on Gitlab for approval
The GNOME engagement team will provide feedback and guidance on the proposal document

Contact Us

Technical writers interested in working on this project should send an email to gsod-team@gnome.org. Please include links to your technical writing work or portfolio, résumé, or CV.

Budget

Budget Items	Amount	Total
Technical writer	9000	9000
Volunteer stipends (one Mentor)	500	500
Project t-shirts (10 t-shirts)	200	200
Total		9700
Downstream donation(10% of the amount)	970	970
Total Amount		10670

All amounts in USD*

About GNOME

GNOME is a worldwide community that creates a desktop environment, applications, and the underlying technology. GNOME has a long history of design-oriented development, and of working on all parts of the stack to create a good user experience. The GNOME documentation team has worked on both user and developer documentation for over two decades and was one of the pioneers in creating modular, topic-oriented help.

The GNOME community is loosely organized, with many teams working on different parts of the project. We strongly value all kinds of contributions, including design, documentation, translations, and outreach. GNOME is more than code.

GNOME has a long history of working with mentoring and outreach programs, including the GNOME Newcomers initiative, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy (which was incubated in GNOME as the Outreach Program for Women).

Please read our code of conduct.

GUADEC 2021 Call for Participation is Now Open

The GNOME Foundation is excited to announce that the call for participation for GUADEC 2021 is now open.

Proposals can be submitted on the event page: https://events.gnome.org/event/9/abstracts/ 17

GUADEC, the GNOME community’s largest conference, is taking place between the 21st to 25th of July and will be held online but with a possibility of having a hybrid conference in Mexico as well if travel turns out to be possible by then.

The GNOME Foundation is looking for talks on a wide range of topics including but not limited to:

Application development
Privacy and security
Community and team building
Design of user and developer experience
Use of GNOME technologies outside the desktop
Newcomers initiatives
Project planning and governance

The first two days of the conference, 21st and 22nd of July, will be dedicated only to talks. We have a shorter schedule than we usually have in person in order to avoid exhaustion.The other two days, 23rd and 24th, will be BoFs and workshops, and the last day is a free/fun day for everyone who would like to stay around and chat with others.

Talk submissions are due by the 30 of March, 19:00 UTC.

Additional updates about GUADEC 2021 can be found on the event website and on our social media channels. Press inquiries and questions regarding the event can be sent to: guadec@gnome.org

Welcome to 2021

Our Fall 2020 fundraiser ends today, January 5. We’re thankful for everyone who donated to support our work.

Welcome to 2021! A new year feels like a time for new beginnings, even though the challenges from 2020 still hang over us. But in the midst of all this, we continue to build free software and a welcoming, supportive community. We do this because we know that even in a world with issues that are so immediately pressing, we must also ensure that the foundations of technology are things that empower people, that people can trust, and that we can continue to use for the hard, amazing, inspiring work still needed.

GNOME helps users. We believe strongly that in order to create good technology, it must be trustworthy. We do this through the creation of world class technology that meets the needs of users — GNOME works for everyday people. This also means that people know a technology is working in their best interests. With rigorous scientific methods and passionate end user advocacy, GNOME is designed for users, by users.

We dedicated 2020 to making sure that GNOME software works for everyone through a focus on accessibility. This work is certainly not finished, but we’re proud of how far we’ve come. With the newest release of GTK4, we’ve completely revamped our accessibility toolkit. The updated layout implementation creates new possibilities for designing interfaces for a variety of user needs and preferences. We know that GNOME must be usable by everyone, whether that is due to disability or simply geography. There are more than 140 translations of GNOME in progress, which includes the billions of people who do not speak English.

GNOME helps people making technology. GTK, a GNOME Foundation project, is a complete set of UI elements implemented to make all sorts of software usable. Since everything in GNOME is free software, not only is it available to people working on software, but the parts, the code, and the designs are available as well. Anyone can look at how any part of GNOME is constructed and reuse that work. We’re excited to hear more about the ways you use GNOME tools to build a better world.

GNOME helps its contributors. We cannot stress enough the impact GNOME has on the lives on the individual community members. With both mentorship and internship, GNOME helps people break into tech and move to the next stage of their careers. Whether it calls for skills that are technical, social, public speaking, project management, writing, or everything else that is required to make a project as large and complete as GNOME succeed. Working on GNOME builds confidence for contributors. People learn to trust their skills and intuitions. They learn that what they do is valuable to the world at large.

GNOME is not just an end, but a means to give people the tools, skills, and resources they need to accomplish what they need to create a brighter future. We except 2021 will be a challenging year, but one we have high hopes for. We’re going to continue to build amazing things thanks to the support of our donors, contributors, and supporters.

Looking Back on 2020 with Neil McGovern

We’re in the final days of our 2020 fundraiser. As a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, all donations to the GNOME Foundation are tax deductible within the United States. Learn more about how you can support the GNOME Foundation and its work.

2020 has certainly been a unique year. It’s a year where billions of people have changed the way they work, socialize, and live their everyday lives. As various restrictions were introduced globally, people started to use their computing more and more.

At GNOME, we have a vision. We want to see a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. We want to deliver this by building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem.

In the last year, we’ve had a number of large challenges to face. We canceled all of our travel and had to find new ways of working. Our three main conferences were moved online and this has meant it was more difficult to find sponsors. However, it has also brought new opportunities. We held our first GNOME Onboard Africa Virtual and had an onboarding event in Paraguay with Universidad Catolica.

At the end of 2019, a patent assertion entity brought charges against GNOME for violating one of their patents. We looked at this as something we could settle quickly for our own sake, but we knew it was an opportunity for GNOME to take a stand for all free software. We spent most of 2020 working on this case, alongside an amazing team of lawyers, with the support and energy of the entire FOSS community. We are extremely pleased with the settlement we reached, which opened up Rothschild Patent Imaging’s entire portfolio of patents for use by all projects released under an Open Source Initiative approved license. This created a bright new opportunity in FOSS for growth and innovation.

GNOME does great things for GNOME technologies and GNOME users, but we’re part of a bigger community of free and open source software. This community is a group of individuals, projects, foundations, and non-profits that come together build a brighter future for everyone by building a future for computing that includes everyone.

I have been in free software for over 20 years, starting as a contributor hacking away on my favorite projects to where I find myself today as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. I am more excited about the future of free software than I ever have been before. Working with this team and the GNOME community inspires me every day. In it I see the best of what free software has to offer. There is world class technical excellence and enthusiastic contribution, and there is also such amazing compassion and thoughtfulness extended to contributions, users, and everyone who might one day find themselves touching the GNOME ecosystem.

Neil McGovern

Executive Director

GNOME Foundation

Building A Career With GNOME

Sriram Ramkrishna has contributed to GNOME for more than twenty years! In addition to being active within the Project and a Foundation Member, Sri is a Friend of GNOME. Sri’s career has been shaped by his experiences with GNOME.

It’s been a year of giving – where I make a regular monthly contribution to the GNOME Foundation.

You might ask why I donate even though I spend so much time working on the GNOME Project. The answer lies in the fact that I can wholly attribute my success in my career to being part of GNOME. I want to give back.

In the U.S., a lot of graduates of universities give money to their alma mater because the education they received gave them the opportunities to succeed, and so give back as a way to pay it forward. It’s in that same vein that I also am donating.

When I started with GNOME I was a systems administrator working on UNIX systems. When I had my first project in GNOME it was a non-coding project. My contract with my employer prohibited me from doing freelance coding so I had to find other ways of contributing. It wasn’t a big deal — I actually disliked coding unless it was to solve specific problems for myself. Besides GNOME had plenty of ambitious smart coders already!

Instead, I explored a broad set of new skill that are only now considered useful and strategic. Developer relations and project relations were things that relatively were unknown when I started in 1998, but became quite valuable. With GNOME, I moved from water cooler IRC conversations to giving talks at conferences and engaging with the free software community and the wider open source community.

I was given an opportunity to hone a craft that is now seen as very valuable and pertinent in this grand world of open source ecosystems that I would never had a chance to explore if I had stayed in my lane as a systems administrator. Now I engage with some of the smartest people I have ever known — and amazingly enough have a mutual respect.

Working on a desktop environment isn’t easy — the engineering that is involved is only a part of what needs to be done in the project. Managing user expectations, dealing with internal conflicts, and being the most reasonable person in the room are skills are valuable skills that are needed in every project — and no project can provide that opportunity more than GNOME.

A Message from the President

Rob McQueen was a teenage GNOME user who later became President of the Board of the GNOME Foundation. Rob shared his passion for GNOME and vision for the future with us, and we’re excited to share with you. Learn more about how you can support us in building this future.

I started using GNOME when I was a teenager because I had an old computer, and wanted to learn more about how the Internet worked. I installed Debian and set up GNOME because it was free and helped me use my computer the way I wanted. GNOME’s principled position on software freedom turned me into a user, and it is what has inspired me to become active in the community, run for the Board of Directors, and ultimately find direction in my life, using software as a means to promote global equality.

I’ve been on the GNOME Board of Directors for several years now, elected by the GNOME Foundation membership to realize their vision for the future of GNOME. I am the CEO of a nonprofit called the Endless OS Foundation, and I have four children, but I always make time for my GNOME responsibilities because I believe in the power of the project to bring computing to those who didn’t enjoy the same opportunities in life as me.

I believe in software freedom, and GNOME does too. When I was that curious teenager, access to source code was enough, but I now understand that user freedom is the goal. We must hold technology accountable and resist control by external parties who restrict how people can access information and technology, and you as a user need to be able to trust the systems you are using.

As with all free and open source software projects, GNOME has areas for improvement. I am particularly concerned about retaining and growing our contributor community. We have fantastic efforts around engagement and outreach, including events, internships, and newcomer initiatives. However, not enough of these people stay around. I want GNOME to grow sustainably, and part of that is having a strong and diverse contributor base that reflects the users we want to reach.

One of the reasons people don’t stay around is because they cannot afford to. I am privileged in my ability to work on GNOME – as are many contributors. We have the financial resources and time to focus on building better technology for others, or maybe even do so as part of a paid job, but most are not in that position. In a perfect world, the Foundation would be able to address this directly with a budget of millions, but, we don’t yet live in that world. To reach our goals, we’re building partnerships through initiatives like GNOME Circle, creating structured opportunities for projects and organizations to join the Foundation; organizing the Community Engagement Challenge with Endless; and working to remove barriers and provide incentives to get involved with the GNOME ecosystem.

I’m excited about everything GNOME has done in 2020 – I had fun at GUADEC even though I was home, as opposed to in Mexico. Flathub grew to over 1000 apps and now provides a compelling independent app store, helping people do the things they need while embracing free and open source software on their personal computer. From a technology geekery perspective, GTK4 looks really, really cool. GTK3 came out nearly 10 years ago, and some of the ideas that GTK4 brings to life have been building for nearly that long. Together with an amazing team of contributors from across the GNOME ecosystem, the Foundation also employs Emmanuele Bassi to work on GTK full time, and version 4 is going to be here .

For me, 2021 will be a year of working on Foundation strategy and outcomes. The Board of Directors has been looking in depth at what we’re building and for who, and how we can make sure GNOME works for everyone, regardless of their ability, geography, or resources. We’re going to reach more users and bring them the control and trust they need from their technology.

Rob McQueen

President of the Board of Directors

GNOME Foundation