GUADEC 2014 starts on Saturday in Strasbourg, France. To welcome attendees, and to kick start the fun, there will be a pre-registration welcome event on Friday 25th July at 18:00, at Foyer de l’Étudiant Catholique, 17 Place Saint Étienne (which is also the accommodation for sponsored attendees).
The event will be a chance for attendees to collect their conference badges ahead of time, all while having a drink, eating and chatting in a friendly mood.
GUADEC couldn’t happen without the help of volunteers. These are attendees that dedicate part of their conference experience to help the organizing team. They are there to make sure things run smoothly, and are always available to help.
Shivani Poddar was a volunteer during last year’s GUADEC in Brno, her first GUADEC both as an attendee and a volunteer. The experience was so remarkable Shivani is now back to volunteering. She’s coordinating the volunteer activities for this year’s GUADEC — and she guarantees it’s not too late to sign up to help!
We chatted with Shivani about volunteering at GUADEC, and how you can also help:
What can volunteers help with during GUADEC?
Volunteers can help with a number of different things. They can assist at the information desk, where they answer questions about the conference events, and help with registration and swag handling. They can also become a Session Chair, which means moderating the talks, making sure they start and end on time, and that attendees can ask questions. Another way volunteers can help is by, literally, running around and helping as needed — we call these the “runners”.
All of this happens during the conference, but there’s a lot to be done before it as well. Volunteers are welcome to help us with the pre-conference setup, which includes putting things in place, folding badges, and solving last-minute troubles.
You were a volunteer during last year’s GUADEC. How was the experience?
I personally loved the experience. Firstly, as interns [Shivani was a Google Summer of Code intern last summer], we don’t have to worry a lot about organizational tasks. So volunteering was a great way to contribute my bit to the conference. I not only learned about how things work (including running, being Session Chair, etc) but also got to meet a lot of new people because of it. I saw the effort people put in, and felt like contributing a lot more in the following year (read this year!).
How can attendees volunteer? Can anyone help?
Yes! And thanks to all volunteers, it means a lot!
If you want to help, all you need to do is the follow these steps:
If you want to volunteer (or are already one) and have any queries, ping me at #guadec on IRC. I will be happy to help you.
Thanks for the interview and for coordinating the volunteer work at GUADEC, Shivani!
GUADEC 2014 is just around the corner, and three exciting keynote speakers will be presenting during the conference. We took the opportunity to speak to Matthew Garrett, who will be giving one of those keynotes, about his keynote and about this year’s GUADEC.
Hi Matthew, many know you for your work on UEFI and secure boot. Have you learnt anything through that experience?
I learned about the importance of implementing security in a way that respects a machine owner’s freedom. The risk was that UEFI secure boot would end up as what the FSF call Restricted Boot – a mechanism that restricts what the user can run on their system in the name of security. Thankfully that didn’t happen, and instead we ended up with systems that allow the user to choose their keys.
The great part of this has been seeing other companies express interest in ensuring that the devices they manufacture respect user freedom in the same way. I’ve spoken to people who are working hard on rolling out similar functionality on other devices, allowing users to run the software they want to without having to give up security in the process.
What can we expect from your keynote at GUADEC?
I’ll be talking about why a free software desktop is still vital, and why GNOME should be that desktop. Commercial desktops are inevitably going to compromise user freedom for the benefit of proprietary software vendors or governments, but many users are still going to be willing to accept the lost of those freedoms if it improves their productivity. We need to produce something that’s not merely more free, but actively better.
You have been contributing to Free Software for some time. What is your perspective on the new open source generations, who are starting out with the web and GitHub?
The sheer prevalence of free software means new developers may be less aware of the struggles previous generations went through in order to build the current ecosystem. The risk is that we’ll slide back towards a more proprietary world, and we need to keep paying attention to attacks on our freedoms.
You have attended to several GUADEC: how is to be a keynoter this time with a FSF Free Software Award in your pocket?
It’s an honor. GNOME was the first free software project I became heavily involved with, and I still have many good friends in the community. I’m proud to be able to speak in front of an audience so committed to providing high quality free software for the benefit of all users, not just those with a technical background.
What do you expect from this GUADEC?
I expect to spend time with a wonderful community of smart, driven people. I expect to hear about inspiring projects, exciting features and meet a variety of new people. And, being France, I expect to find some excellent food and wine.
We’d like to thank Matthew for taking the time to answer our questions, and look forward to his keynote at GUADEC.
GUADEC is only a few days away, but some GNOME contributors are already gathering in Strasbourg to improve the GNOME document reader, Evince.
Their goals include: making further improvements to accessibility support, implementing tiling support to allow infinite zoom, improving the support for PDF annotations, revamping the comics back-end and reviewing and integrating pending patches.
The hackfest brings together members of the GNOME Accessibility team, and Evince developers. It also involves a number of Google Summer of Code students.
The event could not have taken place without the support of the GNOME Foundation.
You can learn more about the Evince Hackfest on the event wiki page.
Each GUADEC, a small number of special speakers are invited to deliver keynotes. This allows different perspectives, specialisms, and partners to provide their own unique view, and to provide the GNOME community with unique insights. We are excited to announce that the keynote speakers for GUADEC 2014 will be Matthew Garrett, Nathan Willis, and Jim Hall.
Matthew Garrett is a security developer at Nebula, a member of the Fedora Board and sits on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board. He is known for his strong opinions and for his important work on UEFI and secure boot for Linux.
Nathan Willis works as an editor at the Linux and open-source news site LWN.net. He is also an open typeface designer, contributor to the Open Font Library, and co-author of the book Design With FontForge. His keynote will discuss the ethics of software, particularly in relation to the automotive industry.
Finally, Jim Hall is a Free Software advocate, and is best known for his work on the FreeDOS Project. He has recently conducted user testing on GNOME as a part of his studies at the University of Minnesota, and will be presenting his results as a part of his keynote presentation.
We would like to thank these three speakers for keynoting at this year’s GUADEC, and are looking forward to their presentations in Strasbourg.
The GUADEC organization team is happy to announce the availability of the registration form for the upcoming GUADEC to be held in Strasbourg, France at Epitech, a software engineer school in the heart of the cityt! This year a list of the participants are available online at https://www.guadec.org/participant-list.
Once registered to the event do not forget we also provide a set of badges you can use to share on your website! Let everyone know you are coming to such a great event held in one of the most beautiful cities of Europe!
The GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC), is an annual conference taking place in Europe, whose prime topic is the development of the GNOME desktop environment which sees many participants from all over the world.
GUADEC, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference, is the largest GNOME event of the year, drawing contributors from all over the world. This year’s conference is approaching, and will be held in Strasbourg, from July 26 to August 1.
GUADEC is an invaluable opportunity for contributors to share what they have been working on over the past year, and to have face-to-face working sessions and meetings. As usual, it will consist of four days of presentations, followed by three days of BoFs (“Birds of a Feather” sessions).
Strasbourg looks set to be an excellent location for this year’s event. The local area has a strong Free Software community and, as the home of the European Parliament and European Court of Human Rights, is a highly symbolic city. Strasbourg is also known for its beauty, culture and food. As one of this year’s conference organisers said, “it is a lovely city, and we hope that attendees will fall under its charm”.
The schedule for this year’s GUADEC has now been published, and gives an idea of what we can expect from the event. GTK+ and the GNOME application development platform are a major theme, with talks on GTK+, GStreamer, geoclue and Wayland. Application development will also be a focus for this year’s event, with talks about core apps, such as Documents, Photos, Web and Boxes, as well as other applications, including Pitivi, Corebird and SDAPS, a paper surveying tool.
A number of talks cover exciting new developments in the GNOME project. Ones to watch include Christian Hergert’s presentations on GOM and Builder, Alberto Ruiz on Fleet Commander and Emmunuelle Bassi’s talk on the GTK+ Scene Graph.
As usual, the GUADEC schedule also includes important non-technical talks, on subjects such as usability testing, documentation, outreach, intellectual property and funding models for open source projects.
More details about this year’s GUADEC, including key note speakers and social events, will be made in the coming days and weeks. Watch this space.
The life of Matt Dalio changed when, at very young age, he lived for a year in Beijing, China.There he was able to discover difficulties suffered by many children, many of which were orphans.
Starting from this experience Matt decide to start the China Care Foundation an association that has raised over $14 million to provide support to special needs Chinese children.
But Matt has also a dream: to improve lives of millions with use of free software in his latest endeavour, Endless mobile.
Matt shared with us his visions and projects during his keynote talk, at GUADEC.
Q: Your life changed when you first went to China at the age of 11. Do you think that the spirit of cooperation inside the China Care Foundation is comparable in any way to inspiring free software communities?
A: When I was first learning about the free software community and talking with individuals in that community, I was struck by just how much we have in common. We all want to give free access to people who need it. We all believe in the power of software to unlock the potential in people.
China Care Foundation is very much a collaborative effort. In the years since I founded it, the network of individuals who contribute — from dollars to volunteer time to giving an orphan a true home — has grown immensely. Right now, in addition to individual contributors, China Care has clubs on 52 campuses around the United States; college kids collaborating to give live saving surgeries, foster care placements, and adoptive families to orphans in China. It has been incredible to see this network of people, from their respective places in life, working towards the same goal. There’s so much power in that.
Q: Tell us about your keynote at GUADEC.
A: Staggering statistic: 5 billion people on earth do not have Internet access.
We think that computers are everywhere, but they aren’t. 80 percent of the world does not have access. Isn’t that amazing? And yet you’d never know walking around our little corners of the world. What we don’t realize is that for all of the towns that we drive between and cities that we fly between, they are all pretty much part of the same little subset of the world. It’s like walking around on dry land and not realizing that 80 percent of life on earth exists under the sea. You wouldn’t know it unless someone told you about it.
My goal was to tell people about it. To give a vivid picture of what it looks like. To help people understand what the *middle* of the pyramid looks like. These are people who want computers. They have electricity. They are literate. And they have money. It’s not just that computers are too expensive for them. The real problem is that technology has never been built with them in mind. What does someone do when they live in a place that has no hope of getting Internet access? What is a computer without the Internet? It’s a Microsoft Word machine. So who would buy such a thing? And yet that is 80 percent of the world.
The examples go on and on, of cases where you think about how what technology could be for someone in that market. It could be infinitely more powerful than it is for you or I, because that person is also lacking access to the basic necessities. There are not enough good doctors to give quality health. There are not enough teachers to give quality education. There are not enough good jobs. Yet a computer with the right applications can be answers to all of that. Just being able to search Wikipedia for Dengue Fever can be enough to save a life. Imagine what else you can do? A link to Khan Academy or Code Academy is enough to change the direction of a life.
Technology has solved innumerable problems in the world, and yet the people who build technology don’t make a living of understanding what it means to people who do not have technology. So there isn’t really anyone building software for that part of the world, and those who do go way down to the bottom of the pyramid where there all sorts of other challenges.
My goal was to speak to the Gnome community about just how large of an opportunity this can be for Gnome. Billions of people are waiting for a computer. Waiting for an operating system that is built with them in mind. And with just a little bit of effort and a little bit of understanding, we can reach them.
Q: What did you expect from GUADEC?
A: I certainly did not expect what I got. The response to my talk was overwhelming in the volume of support. Goodness, what a community. Plus, it was just such a great community of quality human beings. Really, I am proud to call it a part of my life.
If you missed Matt’s talk at GUADEC, read more on the Endless Mobile webpage!
GUADEC, the GNOME annual European conference, wrapped up last week in Brno, Czech Republic. Over the course of the core conference days, there was a total of 42 talks on a range of subjects, including technological developments and plans, design, and community outreach. There were also two sessions of short “lightning talks” as well as the GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting. The majority of these sessions were recorded, and are now available to view online.
The videos provide details on the many exciting new developments that are currently happening in GNOME, including hi-resolution display support, our new geolocation framework, new applications, fantastic progress made by our outreach initiatives, Wayland support, and WebKit2 integration.
GUADEC 2013, GNOME’s annual European conference, just finished in Brno (Czech Republic). The event was a huge success. Hundreds of contributors participated, including volunteers, interns, and the employees of many companies. The schedule had a high quality of talks on a wide range of topics. The GNOME project also used the conference to meet with our partners and make exciting plans for the future, including significant developments in GTK+, Wayland, geolocation support and application sandboxing/bundling.
None of this would have been possible without our generous sponsors. Google and Red Hat provided gold level sponsorship. Canonical, Collabora, and Igalia were our silver level sponsors, and Mozilla was a bronze sponsor. Those who registered as professionals at GUADEC also provided critical support.
Thank you to all for your support, and for helping to make GUADEC such an exciting, rewarding and productive event.
