GNOMG

GNOME 3.8 released!!!

Six months of hard work have paid off – the GNOME community has released GNOME 3.8!

Check out the release notes and the press release which has some great quotes from our partners.

Kudos to the release team, the marketing team and every other GNOME team. This is the best release yet!

The good press has already started to roll in.

I have some thoughts about the new release in light of my experience at LibrePlanet over the weekend that I hope to publish soon but I wanted to just get the congratulations out there. Great work everybody!

Some things I’ve recently been up to

Apologies, I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting what I’ve been working on!

In the past couple of weeks I’ve:

• written a proposal for a grant for the Outreach Program for Women
• with Marina, developed a formal sponosrship structure for OPW and started contacting organizations and sponsors about the next round of internships
• worked with the GNOME.Asia team – the conference is shaping up very impressively!
• started working with Sri and Flavia on the press release for GNOME 3.8, and requested some quotes from some prominent people.
• worked a bit with Flavia – I’m just a co-mentor for this round’s OPW and I’m again struck by how much more I wish I were doing as a mentor. Thank you thank you thank you to all of the great GNOME mentors (and mentors from other projects). And a thank you to Flavia for keeping me focused and also for reaching out to other folks as well.
• worked on the annual report, following up with contributors, writing content and proofreading and editing – we’re almost there!
• partially wrote my talk for LibrePlanet, which is coming up this weekend. I’ve got to get that finished and polished in the next day or two!
• discussed speaking at a couple of conferences and also at a for-profit company, I’ll keep you posted about upcoming conferences and mention below the ones coming up soon.
• worked on a few annoying legal related matters, including a couple of things that have been sitting on my desk for a long time
• wrote a new template invitation letter for conferences to help with the visa application process for GNOMEes who need visas to travel to our hackfests and GUADEC
• reviewed our form 990, along with Shaun and Rosanna
• prepared for the a11y grant proposals to come in, and sent out a reminder about the deadline, which was at the end of last week.
• had my usual meetings – one on one with Andreas, the GNOME.Asia meeting, a board meeting, etc.

Upcoming speaking engagements

• I’m speaking at LibrePlanet this weekend. It’s a great conference with an awesome freedom-loving audience! I’ve been speaking here for the past few years so it’s really exciting to be asked to give one of the keynotes.I’ll be talking about idealism in free software communities, mostly inspired by the awesomeness of the GNOME community and its struggles following the introduction of GNOME 3
• Next month I’ll be at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, where I’ll be speaking in three different sessions. I’ll be speaking on the legal track (though with a talk that’s not really that much of a legal talk), giving a talk about the Outreach Program for Women and moderating a panel about GPLv3 issues in the auto industry. Should be busy but fun!

Come speak at GNOME.Asia in Seoul!

All Gangnam Style jokes aside, I wanted to remind you that the 2013 GNOME.Asia summit has its Call for Papers deadline coming up on March 8. I’m really hoping to make it to South Korea this time because I know how awesome the summit has been in recent years! On top of that, there’s a lot of exciting things going on in free software in South Korea, there’s a solid GNOME team based there and they’re providing excellent leadership for the conference! On top of that, Max and the usual GNOME.Asia contributors continue to provide impressive dedication and enthusiasm.

Don’t forget to submit your proposal at http://2013.gnome.asia/cfp/

Your Cyborg

I’ve been remiss about posting this, but I was interviewed by Canadian Broadcast about medical devices recently. Here is the podcast of the show, which interviews a few people about this (they don’t get to this segment until quite a bit into the file). While they wound up not publishing my discussion specifically of GNOME, the website does link back to this blog. I was happy to hear the discussion framed as one about freedom, and was interested to hear what the other speakers had to say.