News – Page 8 – GNOME Foundation

“GNOME has been my favorite”

Clarissa Lima Borges started in GNOME as an intern, and has continued to be an active member of the community. We are able to have interns, including those through Outreachy, thanks to support we receive from donations and our Friends of GNOME. Learn more about how you can get involved.

I am a GNOME contributor, Foundation member, former Outreachy Intern and former Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student. As an Outreachy intern, I worked on usability research for GNOME programs like Calendar, Gedit, Settings, Nautilus, and Notes. After my internship, I continued in the GNOME community and later took part in GSoC, where I started development of the UI library for GNOME’s web ecosystem.

GNOME has been my favorite desktop environment since I started using Linux. As an undergraduate student I used it to study and develop my projects. It has been my long term friend. When I applied to Outreachy, I saw that there was a project for UX research on GNOME and it was the perfect opportunity for me to help a project that I love and also to learn about usability.

When my internship ended, I had the chance to go to GUADEC, the GNOME conference, and give a talk about my internship. I was very happy that so many people were excited about what I did. Everyone was very nice and it made me want to continue in the community and contribute more.

Because of my Outreachy internship with GNOME, I learned that usability tests are valuable contributions and they can help open source projects to improve their interface and, consequently, have more users. So, in my undergraduate thesis, I proposed a contribution guide and an issue for complete and easy usability tests for open source projects.

Currently, I am finishing my bachelors degree in Software Engineering, and working at a company that creates solutions to help people, which makes me very happy. I am also organizing a mentorship program in Brazil to introduce FOSS to people underrepresented in tech. In Brazil, open source communities are very small because many people don’t have the opportunity to start or they face language barriers. Our goal is to create a safe space for those people to learn.

In GNOME, I learned a lot about communities, cooperative work, and how to be people oriented. These skills drew my employer’s attention. The most important thing I learned in the GNOME community is to be confident about my skills and that I have something to add, even in a big project like GNOME. I can’t even estimate how valuable this is for me.

Community Engagement Challenge Phase Two Winners Announced

On December 2, 2020, in conjunction with Endless, we announced the winners of Phase Two of our inaugural Community Engagement Challenge via live stream. These five projects are invited to participate in Phase Three, the final round of the competition, with the winners announced in early 2021. Phase Two project winners include:

BOSS: Big Open Source Sister – With a focus on women, this Brazil-based organization aims to reach underrepresented groups in tech to work and be mentored on open source projects.
For more information: https://github.com/BOSS-BigOpenSourceSister
Broadening Participation through Scaffolded Sustained FOSS Engagement in an Undergraduate Computing Curriculum – Redesigns an undergraduate computing curriculum, infusing it with FOSS and computing for the greater good.
First Contributions – Helps beginners contribute to open source projects through hands-on tutorials, a project database and an online forum.
For more information: https://github.com/firstcontributions/first-contributions/issues/33422
Leapcode – A gamified platform that rewards and motivates first-time open source contributors.
For more information: https://Leapcode.io (invite code: awesome-early-leapers-536)
OpenUK Kids’ Courses and Associated Digital Camps – Courses that teach children both to code and to learn about open source, via short and fun animated lessons.
For more information: https://openuk.uk | https://openuk.uk/openkidscamp/

“All of the projects we received were fantastic but we felt that these five best demonstrated the Challenge goal of creating dynamic projects that will inspire young coders and help them connect with the FOSS community,” said Neil McGovern, GNOME Foundation Executive Director. “We hope by running the Challenge we can strengthen the open source community and ensure that free software is available long into the future.”

The Community Engagement Challenge launched in April 2020. Twenty entries were chosen to participate in the second phase of the Challenge and were required to show proof of concept. Phase Three calls for a deliverable end product, with the winner receiving $15,000 and the second-place finisher receiving $10,000. The winner of this final round is currently scheduled to be announced in the spring of 2021. For more information on the Community Engagement Challenge or to view the entire list of Phase two participants, visit www.gnome.org/challenge.

GNOME Builds Community

At GNOME, we’re celebrating the ways we are building the future of software and community by looking back at our 2020 accomplishments and forward to our 2021 plans. These accomplishments and plans are made possible by the support we receive from donations and our Friends of GNOME. Learn more about how you can get involved.

We know the year we are leaving behind was difficult for many people, but throughout 2020 we’ve tried to provide a place where people could find belonging and even fun. We had a blast at all of our online events, we listened to many of you share your knowledge with us, and we connected with everyone during the social activities. Building these awesome events has given our 2020 more joy, and we hope they did the same for you.

GUADEC 2020 kicked off our year of online events in July. It was the biggest event on the GNOME calendar and with more than 600 people participating online, it became our largest GUADEC yet. We had 37 speakers and a variety of social events such as a museum tour, a tea party, and cocktail and cooking classes where people could socialize with each other.

The GNOME Africa community hosted GNOME Onboard Africa Virtual. This was first event of it’s kind and helped contributors across Africa learn about GNOME and find ways to get involved. It also helped build awareness about open source and GNOME in Africa. GNOME Onboard Africa took place from the 18 – 25 of September with 135 attendees coming from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Egypt, and South Africa.

In November we organized two more conferences, Linux App Summit (LAS) and GNOME.ASIA. We held LAS in collaboration with KDE and 310 attendees joined us for three days of talks, workshops, and social events. During the dedicated Birds of a Feather sessions many people where able to come together to discuss ideas.

Out final event of the year was GNOME.ASIA, which provides an opportunity for the Asian GNOME community to meet up, learn together, and share projects. We had 200 attendees and 20 speakers. GNOME.Asia included social events organized by the community, representing a range of interests and passions people have outside of GNOME.

Events weren’t all we did in 2020! Along with Endless, we launched the Inaugural GNOME Community Engagement Challenge in the Spring of 2020. This challenge was designed to encourage individuals and teams to connect coders to the free and open source software (FOSS) community and keep them involved for years to come.

The goal of the Challenge is to help address some of the current shortcomings of FOSS, including raising awareness and building the skills required to contribute; increasing the number of people (youth and adults) who are trained in coding; and increasing diversity among GNOME contributors.

The first two phases of the Challenge have been beyond our expectations. We received 149 proposals from 38 countries, which included both well developed programs and brand new projects. The creativity and dedication represented in the Phase One Winners is inspiring. Among the exceptional twenty Phase One projects, we have: a FOSS friendly computer refurbishing program powered by students; a streamlined method for creative contributions to projects; a business analytics platform; and an accessibility tool for people with motor disabilities.

We’ll be announcing the Phase Two winners with a live event on December 2.

The Challenge will continue into 2021, announcing the winners with another event in Spring. We’re planning events in Europe, Asia, and Africa. We’re bringing GNOME to places we’ve never been before through projects like the Challenge and events like GNOME Onboard Africa. While these initiatives are largely funded by sponsors, they are organized by an excited community and Foundation staff. Thanks to the donations and support we receive, we are able to spend our time focused on the needs of the GNOME community and providing spaces for everyone within FOSS to come together to celebrate everything we can do.

GNOME widens its developer outreach with Circle

Today the GNOME project is officially launching a new initiative, called GNOME Circle. Circle aims to broaden the range of partner initiatives that GNOME supports and has a relationship with.

In the past, to be a part of the GNOME project, development projects needed to be hosted on GNOME infrastructure and follow GNOME’s development rules. This created a barrier to entry for many developers who were focused on their own personal projects.

GNOME Circle aims to change that, by lowering barriers and building relationships with developers who are doing great things with the GNOME platform. To become members, projects must simply be open source software and use the GNOME platform. Both applications and development libraries can apply. Projects don’t need to be hosted on GNOME infrastructure, nor do they need to follow GNOME’s release schedule.

Circle projects will be eligible for a range of benefits, including promotion and GNOME Foundation membership, which gives access to travel and marketing funding and services including an @gnome.org email address, blog hosting, video conferencing, and a gnome.org Nextcloud account. Even more benefits are planned for the future.

Commenting on the initiative, GNOME Foundation Executive Director Neil McGovern said “Independent developers do fantastic work using the GNOME platform, and I’m thrilled that the GNOME Foundation is going to be supporting more of them than ever before. With GNOME Circle, we’re excited to be growing the GNOME community and building a stronger and more vibrant developer ecosystem.”

More information and details about existing GNOME Circle projects can be found on the initiative homepage. Developers who are interested in applying are encouraged to fill out the simple application form.

GTK: At the Heart of GNOME

At GNOME, we’re celebrating the ways we are building the future of software and community by looking back at our 2020 accomplishments and forward to our 2021 plans. These accomplishments and plans are made possible by the support we recieve from donations and our Friends of GNOME. Learn more about how you can get involved.

GTK is at the heart of the GNOME application and software development kit. GTK is used to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for desktop environments, applications, and window managers. Since the GTK 4 development process began in 2016, we have about 250 individual contributors, with more than 100 active this year.

Thanks to the funding received by the GNOME Foundation in 2020, the GTK development team was able to run hackfests, including one we were lucky enough to have at FOSDEM. This funding also supported Emmanuele Bassi, Core GTK Developer at the GNOME Foundation, working on GTK full-time. For most of 2020, Emmanuele worked on implementing a new accessibility interface for GTK 4, to ensure that more people can use GNOME applications, including those with disabilities. We are building a diverse and sustainable free software computing ecosystem where everyone can be empowered by technology they trust. Since Emmanuele works directly for the Foundation he’s uniquely able to focus on the needs of the community, project, and users to support these goals.

GTK is a project with a long history, and throughout that history, it has gone through multiple iterations. A new major release is on the horizon. After four years of development that included a complete overhaul of the internals of the toolkit, GTK 4 promises to be faster through hardware acceleration; more efficient, in terms of performance and power consumption; and more ergonomic, for both application developers, and end users. Over the past four years, the GTK team has continued work on the existing stable versions of GTK and put out multiple releases.

In 2021, the GTK team plans to improve the project with features that have been long requested, such as:

an animation framework for application developers
accessibility support on non-Linux platforms, such as Windows and macOS
a new UI design tool, integrated with GNOME Builder
improved portability
simpler installation and out-of-the-box developer experience
better documentation

Even after more than 20 years, GTK is still a project run by volunteers, without any single corporation determining its direction; nevertheless, many companies have adopted it as part of their platforms and products, and contribute employees time to its development. Another thing that makes GTK special is that it does not require a Contributor License Agreement, meaning everyone who works on it keeps rights and ownership over their contributions. Your support and donations allow GTK to continue being run by volunteers.

GTK is made by the people who use and care about it and its development reflects the needs of its users. We’re excited about the role we play in the making of GTK and are looking forward to the upcoming release of GTK 4 and another year of GTK development.

We’re Building the Future of GNOME

GNOME is built by people. People who are passionate about what they’re doing and care about everyone using, studying, and modifying the technology they are making. The GNOME community is a collection of amazing, inspiring people who come together to do amazing things, to push the project forward, raise awareness, teach, learn, share, organize events, and create the place we call our home within free software. Our community includes millions of people using GNOME as a desktop environment, bringing ideas into the world with GTK, and packaging their apps to Flathub.

GNOME is also supported by our generous network of donors — our Friends of GNOME. Whether someone donates $5 or $5,000, we value those contributions just as much as any merge request. Donations build up GNOME, provide necessary infrastructure, and power new initiatives.

In 2020, donations supported:

GTK4 development;
Technical and infrastructure support for Flathub.org;
Our legal case against Rothschild Patent Imaging, a patent assertion entity;
GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, GNOME Onboard Africa Virtual, and the Linux App Summit;
Hackfests, including accessibility and GTK hackfests at FOSDEM;
A supported instance of video chat software Big Blue Button for GNOME and free software community use;
Two internships through Outreachy; and
Community and staff training to make the community more welcoming and safe for everyone.

Our plans for 2021 are even more ambitious and involve sustaining our ongoing work while building up new initiatives and support for the growing GNOME project and community. In the upcoming year, we will:

Organize GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, Pan African GNOME Summit, and the Linux App Summit;
Host virtual social events at conferences like FOSDEM;
Have hackfests for teams and working groups across the project;
Progress on the Community Engagement Challenge, including the winner’s celebration at GUADEC 2021;
Lead in technical and infrastructure development, including more services for the community;
Release two more GNOME editions;
Find more opportunities to push forward smaller projects within the GNOME ecosystem;
Hire more interns for paid internships in free software;
Provide financial and logistical support for people speaking at conferences and participating in events on behalf of GNOME; and
Launch new initiatives, including Faces of GNOME, web site updates, new swag, and increased conference participation.

In order to build the future of GNOME, we need people to join us and become Friends of GNOME. To help support our 2021 initiatives, we’re looking for 50 new Friends of GNOME to join by January 5, 2021. Every donation helps grow the GNOME project and supports our community.

Learn More

GNOME.Asia 2020 Registration is Open

We’re excited to announce that the Registrations for GNOME Asia Summit 2020 are open! You can now register online.

GNOME Asia Summit 2020 will take place online November 24 – 26.

Topics covered include the GNOME desktop and a range of other topics that are GNOME specific and general to the free software and tech communities. The summit brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a place for users, developers, leaders, governments and businesses to discuss present technology and future developments.

More information about the GNOME Asia 2020 Summit including is available on the official website. The GNOME Asia Summit will be three days of stand out keynotes, engaging and educational sessions, and skill building Birds of a Feather sessions and workshops, so register today.

GUADEC 2020 Group Photo

There are many challenges with online conferences, but one of the biggest one is having hundreds of people turn on their cameras for a group photo during a livestream.

Along with many other new approaches, we came up with a solution for our photo as well! GNOME has a long tradition of mosaic pictures and we decided to bring that format back again.

A big thank you to all participants for sending us their pictures and to Jonathan Blandford for the tremendous work of putting all pieces together!

Looking forward to see you all at the next GUADEC!

GNOME.ASIA 2020 Call for Papers are now Open!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2020 invites you to participate as a speaker at the conference on the 24th and 26th of November 2020 by submitting your abstract.

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

The possible topics are, but not limited to :

Contributing to GNOME
UI design
Accessibility
Human Interface Engineering (Icons and Graphic Design)
Marketing/Engagement
Developing GNOME on embedded systems or open hardware
Contributing to Linux and FLOSS
Linux kernel and development
The development and promotion of open-source operating systems
Distributions, including Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD
The development and promotion of other open source projects
We are also interested in other topics related to Free/Libre and Open Source Software which are not listed above.

Sessions will be scheduled for 25 or 50 minutes (Q&A included). The session could be a technical talk, panel discussion, or Birds of a Feather session (BoF).

If you need more time or additional resources, feel free to get in touch with the organizing team.

Submission Criteria

Please provide a short abstract of your presentation (under 200 words). Also include your name, biographical information, title, and desired length of session. Please submit your proposal to the following link: https://events.gnome.org/event/24/abstracts/.

The reviewers team will evaluate the entries based on the submitted abstracts and available time by following the schedule.

Submission deadline: October 18, 2020

GNOME 3.38 Released

The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. Version 3.38 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and, as always, includes many new features and performance improvements.

Watch the release video here.

This release showcases a new Tour application, highlighting the main functionality of the desktop and providing first time users a nice welcome to GNOME.

Several core utilities have been visually refreshed, giving them a more polished and elegant experience.

For developers and advanced users, Boxes now allows editing a virtual machine’s libvirt XML directly, enabling them to change advanced settings not available in the user interface.

The complete list of features and improvements are in the release notes.

GNOME 3.38 is code-named “Orbis” in recognition of the most recent GUADEC, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The GNOME Project is supported by the GNOME Foundation. We rely on donations to continue to drive the project forward. If you appreciate the work we do, please consider joining as a Friend of GNOME.

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