Oh well, I think I have been delaying my posts to this blog too much recently. First my motivation-related post, which got deleted and then re-added, now this one about conferences: I intended to write about Fórum GNOME as soon as I got home, but that was not possible, and I took much longer than I expected to put some time into writing about it.
As I had foreseen, it has been an indescribably great opportunity to get to know some people. I will not mention any of them, though, because they were many and I would really rather not forget anyone. It was wonderful to meet you all! Of course, besides the fun, it has been perfect for having some important discussions and spreading the word of our beloved GNOME (not that this is not fun, anyway).
Lucas gave a very good talk on GNOME in general, briefly explaining what it is, summarizing the history and showing some of the amazing improvements that are coming with 2.14. The next day, we gave a mini-course on GNOME translation: one person out of 10 knew what GNOME was (perhaps strong indication that we are failing in doing our part to reach 10×10?). Even with this initial disadvantage, though, we managed to make those who attended finish up the translation of GNOME 2.12, and one of them (curiously enough, not the one who initially knew what GNOME was) has been working hard on the translation of 2.14! I can surely say it was worth it.
After a city tour in Curitiba together with some nice people and a round of sadness and farewell, I was coming back home. Not long after I arrived I was already packing up again, though: the day after I got home, I was heading to Florianópolis for SOLISC. As maddog usually says, we have lots of conferences in Brazil – perhaps too many. 😉
But I cannot say it has not been great. Izabel was going to give a talk whose title was GNOME, but was more like “contributing to GNOME”. She had not gotten prepared, so I helped her during the presentation, and later gave a talk on GNOME programming. It was not planned, so I had to prepare the talk while I was there, which I would also publish, if OpenOffice had not eaten them for breakfast. I was quite a useful round of evangelizing.
Now I just have to find some more conferences to attend… FISL, perhaps?