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
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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

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the conclusion of the WebKitGTK+Hackfest this week in A Coruña, Spain. The hackfest was held from November 29 to December 5 and was hosted by Igalia at its offices. There were attendees from Red Hat, Motorola, Collabora and Igalia.

The hackfest was extremely productive, and highlights of the work accomplished there include:

• new design and other improvements for Epiphany, including a rewrite of the Ad Blocker extension and fixed security status
• a consolidated WebKit2 API (for better browser stability)
• work to improve accelerated compositing issues and support
• discussion about HTML5, with a focus on improved video support, notifications and history
• better accessibility support as well as accessibility bug fixing work for WebkitGTK+
• improvements to JavaScriptCore
• a replacement plugin for Flash videos

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

Photos of the event are available here and here.

A new GNOME initiative called Every Detail Matters was announced today. It aims to help to take GNOME’s software to the next level by coordinating work to make it more polished and refined. A key part of the initiative will be the identification of small details that could be improved.

Every Detail Matters will also make it easier for volunteers to get involved in GNOME. Announcing the initiative, Allan Day said that Every Detail Matters is a great way to contribute to GNOME. ‘If you want to contribute to GNOME but were unsure where to start, Every Detail Matters is perfect for you’, he wrote in his announcement.

To get involved check out the Every Detail Matters wiki page.

GNOME is participating in the Google Code-In 2011 (GCI), which takes place from November 21, 2011 – January 16, 2012. Google Code-In gives pre-university students aged 13-17 the opportunity to participate in a variety of FOSS projects. The last GCI included 361 students from 48 countries who completed over 2000 tasks.

Andre Klapper, who is GNOME’s Google Code-In coordinator, said: “GNOME is proud to be among the 18 organizations participating in this year’s Google Code-In. We are providing several dozens of small tasks, including coding, translation, documentation writing, artwork, marketing and design. The contest is a great way for students to learn how to contribute to free and open source software development.”

There is still time left to participate in GCI. It is easy to register on the GCI website. To view the tasks that are available for GNOME, just enter “GNOME” in the “Organization” field.

The Montreal Summit turned out to be a very fun and productive gathering last week. With the 3.2 release behind us, much of the discussions were at a pretty high level, and there was a lot of discussion about the state of GNOME and its path going forward. This was reflected in both the technical and non-technical sessions that were held.

The team present went through all of the features for GNOME 3.3/3.4 and discussed kicking off the 3.3 cycle generally. The discussion dovetailed nicely with the discussions currently underway on the mailing lists. There were presentations on Baserock by Lars Wirzenius, jhbuild by Colin Walters, as well as a number of sessions that facilitated discussion on matters related to GNOME strategy, one on the application menu, with Canonical contributing a good chunk of code toward an improved application menu, and one led by Marina Zhurakhinskaya on Google’s Summer of Code program and how to improve and maximize GNOME’s participation in it. There was a lot of great brainstorming and coming to agreement on all sorts of issues. Other blogs by GNOME hackers give more detailed views on their participation at the Summit:

• Matthias Clasen blogged about his work during and after the Summit to modernize the deprecation system in GLib and GTK+ by using annotations.
• Frederic Peters wrote an overview.
• Jean-François Fortin Tam wrote about his experience at the Summit, including talking to Olivier Crète, Guillaume Desmottes, Robert Ancell, Karen Sandler and others
• Tiffany Antopolski recapped the GNOME strategy session.
• Behdad Esfahbod pointed out that there were quite a few new participants that got their start with the GNOME Women’s Outreach Program.

Many thanks to the sponsors who made this event possible:

As part of the Outreach Program for Women in GNOME, the GNOME Foundation is sponsoring at least three internships for women from December 12, 2011 to March 12, 2012. The application deadline is October 31, 2011. These internship dates are aimed at the college women in the Southern Hemisphere who will have a school summer break during this time. However, any woman who has relevant experience and is available for a full-time internship is welcome to apply.

As part of the application process, we are asking women to take the time to learn about the participating projects and make a contribution to the one they are interested in. These projects include ones in programming, graphic design, documentation, and marketing. The applicants are encouraged to work together with the project’s mentor on their first contribution and are supported by their mentor and other project contributors during their internship.

Here is the program flyer designed by Máirín Duffy.

This is a third round of the Outreach Program for Women internships. The two previous rounds took place from December through March and from May through August in the last year. With the help of Collabora, Google, and Mozilla who sponsored additional internships, the program itself has had 8 participants each of the previous rounds. Also, the program helped encourage women to apply for Google Summer of Code in GNOME and resulted in 7 female participants in Google Summer of Code this year.

The participants’ contributions included work on GNOME Shell, Cheese webcam application,  Anjuta IDE, Empathy chat application, Evince document viewer, GCompris educational software, Getting Things GNOME! task management software, GNOME accessibility, documentation for the GNOME desktop and applications, graphic design of the desktop icons and marketing materials, and Zulu translations.

Please consider applying for the program, being a mentor, sponsoring an internship, or helping us spread the word.

A big “Thank You!” to all the sponsors, Technologiestiftung Berlin (TSB; in English, Technology Foundation of Berlin), Humboldt University of Berlin, and nearly 800 attendees who gathered from around the world to make a successful Desktop Summit 2011!

Attendees gathered in Berlin to review progress, share ideas and work together on various free software projects relating to desktop and mobile user interfaces. While many participants were from Europe as expected, other contingents came from Brazil, India, the US and beyond. The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. sponsored travel and accommodation costs for 80+ attendees.

More than 50 volunteers pitched in to help the Desktop Summit run smoothly–preparing the venues and cleaning up afterwards, helping with registration, selling t-shirts, recording video streams, chairing sessions, running errands, managing networks, and more. Desktop Summit organizers–mostly volunteers–worked for nearly a year to coordinate all the details that made the event successful. The collaborative spirit of Free and Open Source technology was an essential factor in how the group worked together.

c-base, the world-renowned hackerspace, hosted the Summit’s pre-registration event sponsored by Igalia, where attendees had a chance to meet face to face in a relaxed environment and become acquainted. While working on projects via email and the Internet is efficient and productive, personal contact is also important, and to that end, two evening parties organized by the Summit provided opportunities for people to spend time together without the stress of project deadlines. The Summit thanks Collabora and Intel for sponsoring these events.

Other social activities included the traditional soccer and volleyball matches, sponsored this year by SUSE. As participants mostly concerned themselves with having fun (as well as a bit of beer drinking), it was not clear which of the KDE or GNOME teams won. On Tuesday, there was a SUSE-sponsored ice cream dessert gathering, and unofficial curry cook-outs on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, attracting about 35 people each evening with food, drinks and conversation–both work and fun.

As one of the foremost free and open source gatherings, the Desktop Summit was in the right setting in the City of Berlin. At the Summit, the City announced the winners of its open source competition “Berlin – Made to Create”, a program promoting Open Source and open standards ideas and solutions. At the same session, the GNOME and KDE communities also announced their outstanding contributors.

The Intel AppUp workshop on the first day of the BoFs (Birds of a Feather sessions) was one of the most sought after events at the Desktop Summit. The “sold-out” session explained several aspects of Intel’s long term strategy for the MeeGo operating system, including a considerable push with developers to create mobile apps. After the session, each participant received a tablet PC to support their development efforts. Within a few hours, people were already creating hot new stuff.

From Tuesday to Friday, 85 BoFs and countless informal hacking sessions took place. Two hacking rooms and the hallways were full of people working on projects. BoFs ranged from small working groups to popular and multi-faceted projects to the introduction of new projects. The GObject Introspection Room shows the kinds of work undertaken at the Summit: a dedicated space with 12 to 20 people at any time, it ran the duration of the Summit, and was primarily focused on bugfixing GNOME API bindings. The KDE community also participated by working on bindings between GObject libraries and Qt/C++ and smoothing out other cross-desktop issues.

As another example, the KDE Release Team got together to talk about their strategy for Git versioning migration and the move to Frameworks 5. The BoF session was well attended, and included release team members and downstream packagers. In a short time, the team gathered feedback and came up with a plan for adding predictability to the release team’s work and output, and for making the work within the team more effective and sustainable. Working remotely, this would have taken considerably longer and would not have achieved such good results.

The fifth Text Layout Summit was held concurrently with Desktop Summit 2011. At present, there are several font and text shaping technologies and no unified system library. As a result, complex text layout scripts such as Arabic or Myanmar are not well supported, and Western/European fonts often lack advanced text formatting capabilities. As FOSS applications are intended for use by all nationalities and languages, this is a serious shortcoming. Text Layout Summit 2011 made substantial progress toward a common approach, especially with Graphite, which is focused on the minority languages of the world.

The Desktop Summit is an important enabling event, making it possible for teams to learn, share and make substantial progress in their Free and Open Source projects.

During the GNOME and KDE Annual General Meetings (AGMs), the respective projects recognized the achievements of members, made important announcements and reflected on the lessons learned over the past year.

New Executive Director Karen Sandler led the GNOME AGM, with the recent release of GNOME 3 being a central topic. Many perspectives were contributed, including design, marketing, bug fixes and quality. Numbers were presented on GNOME release parties, member registration and finances. The location of the 2012 GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC) was revealed. With 3 impressive bids to host GUADEC, La Coruña, Spain, was chosen! The GNOME community looks forward to seeing its members next summer.

At the KDE e.V. AGM, President Cornelius Schumacher presented the work of the Board and KDE e.V. activities of the past 12 months. KDE e.V. organized or helped to organize several successful international conferences such as Akademy 2010 in Tampere, conf.kde.in in India, Camp KDE in San Francisco, and financially supported 21 contributor sprints. Cornelius Schumacher also explained the e.V.’s role in supporting and representing the KDE community in legal issues like domain handling, trademarks and similar areas. Frank Karlitschek, Treasurer, gave an overview of the financial situation of KDE e.V. and the budget for 2011. There were reports from the sysadmin, community and marketing working groups, and from the representatives of KDE e.V. to the Free Qt Foundation.

This year, two positions for the board of directors were up for election. Both candidates, Cornelius Schumacher (running for his third term) and Lydia Pintscher, now the newest member of the Board, were elected.

Speaking for both organizations, Pintscher said, “We consider Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin to have been a huge success for the collaboration among free software desktop communities. We learned a lot during the first Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria and were able to improve on many big and small things that made a real difference for the conference. We are looking forward to seeing the results of this work and to increased future collaboration.”

The location of KDE’s Akademy 2012 conference is still to be decided; a call for hosts has been made.

The Desktop Summit received favorable publicity from Radio Tux, which covered the Summit with their mobile studio. A successful press conference was also held, pulling together key GNOME and KDE contributors with about 15 local and international tech journalists. There has been other press coverage as well.