A happy end of year to all

December 26, 2013 Uncategorized Comments Off on A happy end of year to all

As another year comes to a close, I’m happy to reflect on some of last years highlights (and in no particular order)!

  • We met our goal on our privacy campaign (we’re now evaluating the best ways to use the money – let us know if you have any ideas).
  • Work was done by Igalia with the money from the accessibility campaign to improve document accessibility in GNOME.
  • We were present at many conferences around the world, and I had the honor of keynoting at LibrePlanet, GNOME.Asia, FSCONS, and Minga por la innovación tecnológica in Ecuador and speaking at a few others. Many of us were also featured in interviews and articles.
  • GUADEC was a success in Brno, and even Lionel Dricot admitted that “rumors of the death of GUADEC were greatly exaggerated”. The talks are still available to watch with the files available too
  • Thanks largely to Marina Taylor’s efforts, we had multiple GNOME newcomer tutorial sessions and one that I was able to attend at the GNU 30th
  • GNOME 3.10 was released with many improvements, and noticed for its polish and speed, among other good things. Allan Day’s post about the release is a good summary.
  • The marketing team had its first dedicated hackfest in years, and emerged the engagement team, with a more refined view of what makes GNOME special as a community and a project
  • Two new members joined GNOME’s advisory board – the Linux Foundation and Private Internet Access
  • Some prominent new projectsand companies are choosing the GNOME desktop and GNOME technologies.
  • GNOME seems to be improving in adoption generally, especially in more ideologically driven communities. I was pleasantly surprised at a number of conferences when I asked how many people were using GNOME 3 and a majority raised their hands. I loved sitting in the back of other people’s talks and seeing so many GNOME screens in front of me. In Ecuador I was excited to hear about a new GNOME-based distro in the works as well as government deployments underway in Latin America.
  • Andrea Veri has been working hard to make sure that GNOME has made real progress on the sysadmin front (if you’re not subscribed to infrastructure-announce, you can see an example of the kinds of things he’s been up to on his blog.
  • We ran the Outreach Program for Women, which this year involved more organizations and participants than ever before.
  • We organized many hackfests and meetings, including the first FreeDesktop Summit.

There’s a lot more I could write about, but these things really stand out to me. So many thanks go to the GNOME community. Here’s a holiday card that our president Andreas Nilsson made:

gnome-happy-holidays

Please don’t forget to donate to your favorite charities as the year ends! This is my usual donation roundup, and this year is no exception: