The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in the city center of Berlin at the Humboldt University, Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events.

Find the official announcement of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation here and the Desktop Summit website here.

Desktop Summit

The GNOME and KDE communities develop the majority of Free Software desktop technology. Increasingly, they cooperate on underlying infrastructure. By holding their annual developer flagship events in the same location, the two projects hope to foster collaboration and discussion between their developer communities. Furthermore, KDE and GNOME aim to work more closely with the rest of the desktop and mobile open source community. The summit presents a unique opportunity for all of us to work together and improve the free and open source desktop for all.

At the Desktop Summit 2011 the organizing team expects well over a thousand core contributors, prominent open source technology leaders, government, education and corporate representatives and hundreds of open source desktop engineers, usability experts and designers. Local and international IT industry are invited to learn about and join in developing the latest innovative desktop technology. The event is locally supported by the TSB Innovation Agency Berlin GmbH and the Berlin Senate.

Location

Berlin Mitte with the University

The conference will take place at the 200 year old Humboldt University in the district of Under den Linden, part of the city center of Berlin. This area has plenty of good hotels and hostels, great restaurants and shopping areas and good public transport – all that in walking distance. Cultural needs can be met by the near-by Deutsches Historisches Museum, the City Library of Berlin and many other prominent buildings and institutions. A must-see for visitors of Berlin, the Brandenburger Tor, can be found on the street the university is on.

The registration for the Desktop Summit will open on 1 February 2011 and a call for papers will be issued. Talk submissions will be due on 15th of March and one month later the conference program will be announced. Saturday 6 August kicks off 3 days of joint keynotes, talks and social events followed by four days of collaborative workshops. The conference officially ends on Friday, 12 August.

Important dates

• 1 February: registration for Desktop Summit will open; Call for Papers issued.
• 15 March: Deadline for travel & hotel reimbursement requests. Registration remains open until the conference.
• 15 April: Feedback on travel and hotel reimbursement requests.
• 6 – 8 August: Kickoff and joint keynotes, talks and social events
• 9 August: General Assembly of KDE e.V.; Gnome Foundation meeting
• 9-12 August: Collaborative workshops

Website up

Meanwhile the website went online on DesktopSummit.org where you can read a bit of information on the conference, its history, the upcoming desktop summit and the location. More content will be added over the coming months. You can also subscribe for news on the conference so you will be notified whenever there is something going on.

I interviewed the final candidates for the system administration position, we made an offer and … welcomed Christer Edwards as our new system administrator! He’s already done great work in just the past couple of weeks. Thanks to our interviewers Jonathan Blandford, Bradley Kuhn and Brad Taylor and a special thanks to Paul Cutler for putting it all together.

Kicked off some work with InitMarketing to do some of the template presentations for GNOME folks to use when presenting about GNOME.

Attended a few of the GNOME a11y meetings. Had conversations about GNOME a11y with the team, the FSF and others. There’s lots of good stuff happening there and people are working out how best to get things done and collaborate across projects and organizations. I wish I was at the GNOME a11y hackfest at AEGIS this week! (Speaking of which I feel terrible that Bryen Yunashko got robbed in Barcelona before his trip even really started. Terrible because I feel like Barcelona is my home town and crime has been climbing as fast as unemployment and I didn’t warn him. And terrible because his computer and his camera are part of the way Bryen communicates with the world and now he’s on a two week trip without them. If you’d like to help Bryen get set back up again, there’s a Pledgie campaign where you can donate.)

Had a GNOME advisory board meeting where we updated them on all the things going on and asked them for feedback. We had discussions about hackfests and events (including plans for the Desktop Summit 2011), the Outreach Program for Women, 2011 budget planning and GNOME a11y. The advisory board meets once a month; let me know if you have suggestions for meeting topics.

Talked to a CiviCRM contracting company about getting some of the integration and customizations done that we need, like integrating it with Paypal and Friends of GNOME. If there are any CiviCRM experts in the GNOME community, let me know!

Met with Peter Brown from the FSF and Brian Cameron from the GNOME Board of Directors to discuss areas where we might collaborate, like accessibility.

Put together the Free and Open Source Software booth for Grace Hopper with lots of help from these awesome women and all the organizations (Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, FSF, GNOME and Oracle) that sent us goodies to hand out. And thanks to the Grace Hopper folks who gave us the booth space!

We handed out 180 fliers about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women program too. I also helped out with the Open Source Track and that was a great success finishing with a Sahana codeathon. Thanks to Jennifer Redman for making the track and the codeathon happen. Thanks to the NSA for sponsoring it!

Both the attendees and the conference speakers at GHC were all extremely motivating. I got to meet with lots of interesting people including Heidi Ellis whose class is working on Caribou as part of GNOME’s a11y and HFOSS program.

Kept up to date on the Desktop Summit 2011 planning. A big thanks to Andreas Nilsson, Dave Neary, Reinout van Schouwen, Kat Gerasimova and others for representing GNOME at the Desktop Summit 2011 planning meeting.

Sent out the notice about the 2010 Q2 Quarterly Report. (It was published in August.) Thanks to all the teams that are already sending out a call for the Q3 report!

Reviewed the GNOME 2.32 release notes. Thanks to Paul Cutler for keeping the release notes going! He could use help with writing and with screen shots.

Put together email and website for launching the GNOME Ambassador program. Need to launch it now!

Announced that the GNOME Foundation and LWN will be giving an LWN.net subscription to all Friends of GNOME subscribers! Thanks, LWN! Sent out a call for people to help with our end of the year subscriber campaign.

Exchanged a few emails with women who applied to the GNOME Outreach Program for Women that are interested in marketing. Thanks to Marina Zhurakhinskaya for answering all the rest of the mails (even a few difficult ones) and making the whole program happen!

Met with Phil Robb from HP. Talked about Palm, GNOME and Accessibility.

Worked with the marketing team on a GNOME ad for Linux 92. Thanks to Joey Ferwerda and Máirín Duffy.

Funding.

• Cat Allman gave me the good news at Grace Hopper that Google has some funding for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women!
• Mozilla is funding the Snowy hackfest! Snowy is the server side of Tomboy Online.
• Working with several organizations on some funding for a11y. Worked with Joanie on a write-up of goals.

Pinged a lot of people about a lot of things. Extremely grateful to the GNOME community for all the hard work they do!

The GNOME Q2 Quarterly Report is available.

The second quarter of 2010 was a big one for the GNOME Foundation. We elected our new GNOME Board of Directors, raised enough money to hire a system administrator and held numerous successful events while planning for GUADEC, our annual get together!

In the report you can read updates from many of the GNOME teams from the release team to documentation to the Outreach Program for Women to … please take a minute to catch up on all the hard work these teams have been doing for GNOME.

Thanks to every one who helped put together the report.

During the week of July, I was at GUADEC 2010! There I attended the GNOME Board of Directors annual meeting, ran the GNOME Board of Advisors annual meeting, put together the Getting Things Done lightening talks and met with lots of people. It was a great GUADEC in a great venue with lots of good talks and conversations – we’ve been getting lots of good feedback. Kudos to the local organizing team! You can see all the videos of the talks at Flumotion’s website as it was streamed live and recorded! The videos are licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so please use and share them. (Flumotion was nominated for a Reader’s Choice Award for them. You can vote for them here.)

During the first week of August, I went on vacation.

Since then I’ve been trying to catch up on my Inbox, follow up on conversations, and generally make sure that I’m helping make great things happen in GNOME.

Attended LinuxCon in Boston and made a call for free (as in free software) web services. Pointed out several of the ones GNOME is working on. Ran into lots of interesting people but not enough time to talk to them all as much I’d have liked.

I met one on one with Rosanna. And Brian.

I attended board meetings. I think the new board is still figuring out who’s doing what and who’s good at what but they are coming together and their talents balance nicely.

Met with Nokia about the money they are providing to GNOME Mobile.

Tried to attend a webinar about Finances and nonprofits put on by our insurance company but had some technical difficulties. Will try again next time.

Had several interviews for magazines and blogs. Trying to push them towards other interesting GNOME people! (I do the same with speaking invitations, by the way. Which is why I’m really looking forward to the GNOME Ambassadors program.)

Had brief meetings with our attorneys and our accountant to get some clarifying information.

Attended the FSF’s women’s group meeting. (I don’t think it’s called that – that’s how I think of it. It’s a group of women in free software that are trying to make sure women know about opportunities in free software and to get more girls involved.)

Worked on the Free Software booth for Grace Hopper. Booked hotel for that.

Booked travel for Ohio LinuxFest.

Worked on getting GNOME representation at board and community level for the Desktop Summit 2011.

Finished the Q2 quarterly report with help from all the teams, Vinicius Depizzol and Vincent Untz!

Worked with LGM to help them get their reimbursements in order for LGM 2008, 2009 and 2010. (Rosanna is double checking them and processing them.)

Debating future travel. Latinoware, GNOME Forum Brazil, Desktop Summit 2011 planning meeting (how much of a role should I play in GUADEC – is it changing?), Boston Summit, … already going to Ohio LinuxFest and Grace Hopper and I’m enjoying being home for a while.

Had a meeting with LiMo, Samsung, Ryan Lortie, Alberto Ruiz and Vincent Untz at GUADEC.  To talk about GTK+ and upcoming related events.

Reviewed actual budget numbers for the year in preparation for helping with our 2011 budget. The year starts in October so now is the time to get in your requests for community events or other things you think GNOME should do in the next year.

Connected several people with great ideas with people I thought could help move them forward.

Pinged the MIT folks a few times, as did J5, and we now have rooms for the Boston Summit!

Following up with marketing team and others on numerous offers to give us pro-bono ads in magazines.

Met with a couple of advisory board members. Hoping to meet up with those I missed via phone soon.