by guillefuertes, CC-BY-SA 2.0
Did you come to GUADEC in Alméria? Did you decide to avoid the sweltering heat and stay home? Were you thwarted by visa bureaucracy?
Now is your annual chance to praise and complain. Please give us your GUADEC feedback via the traditional wiki page or… *drum roll*… this form if you attended GUADEC or this form if you did not.
Big thanks to Rūdolfs for sorting out the forms for this year.
If you’re planning to volunteer at GUADEC this year and be part of the selfless redshirt team (we’ve got 100% survival rate so far!), please register before the end of this week so that we have a better idea of which t-shirt sizes to order. If you can’t register soon, you can still volunteer even if you register on site!
by Olav Vitters, CC-BY-SA 4.0
In fact, you should register even if you’d like to skip volunteering this year to help us estimate attendee numbers! Ismael needs to make enough sangria for everyone.
I’m planning to do a day trip to go scuba diving at GUADEC this year. If you’d like to join me, drop me an email or find me on IRC. There’s a few of us interested in going, so the more, the better! This is not an official GUADEC event. For the official schedule, see this page on the website.
CC0, by skeeze
By the way the page for finding room buddies at Residencia Civitas for GUADEC is now up on the wiki. You should go book your accommodation!
GUADEC 2018 is taking place in Almerîa, Spain this year and now is the time to submit your proposals! The submission deadline for talk submissions is tomorrow, on the 29th April.
You are welcome to submit presentations, discussion panels or propose some other format for your talk. This year, there will be short and long talk slots available. Short slots are around 25 minutes long, longer slots are 40 minutes.
You can find more information and submit a talk at https://2018.guadec.org/pages/submit-a-proposal.html
If you have any questions about talks or have problems submitting one, please get in touch with guadec-papers@gnome.org
Lightning talks will be available for signup on the day!
GUADEC is almost upon us! With just over a week to go, it’s time to register and check out the schedule.
If you want to blog about GUADEC and tell everyone that you’re going or speaking there, you can find the badges (and the slide templates) on the website.
There will be slots for unscheduled talks and discussion panels during the core days. You will have an opportunity to propose a topic in the morning which other attendees can +1 if they are interested in it. At 16:00 on Friday, 13:30 on Saturday and 16:00 on Sunday, the most popular talks will be posted to the schedule board, so make sure to check back regularly!
Lightning talks will take place on Sunday the 14th of August, you will be able to sign up on the day!
We had a grand total of 59 sponsorship applications for GUADEC (up 5 on 2013) and a budget of €30,000 (approximately $43,000). The requests amounted to $63,799 which we calculated would be more realistic at $61,899 after verifying travel and accommodation costs. We were able to offer sponsorships to the amount of $39295 to 58 applicants. We helped find an alternative source of sponsorship for the applicant who was not offered sponsorship.
The applicants consisted of 32 Foundation members, 11 speakers, 24 GSoC students, 2 OPW interns and 1 journalist.
The first application was received on the 12th of May (thank you for being organised) and seven applications were late (one of which was over a month late).
Some people who couldn’t make it to GUADEC did not tell us so beforehand. Unfortunately, the lack of communication has cost the Foundation a little bit of money as we did not have a chance to cancel the rooms which has been booked for those people. At a time when the sponsorship budget is very tight, this could have been handled with more consideration.
9 people sent in their receipts past the deadline.
A fair few people used the plain text application form when sending in their sponsorship requests, which I find easier to process than the LibreOffice form as I don’t need to open it in another application.
In somewhat related news, the Travel Committee is now verifying considerably more stringently that the sponsored attendees for all events fulfil their duties.
(André is always happy when the Foundation can help people come to GUADEC.)
It is traditional for the documentation team try to meet a few times per year for hackfests, alternating between Europe and North America to help the whole team make it to at least one event per year. The hackfests serve two purposes: getting work done and motivating/rejuvenating the team.
This year, we met in Norwich to work on user docs for 3.12, in Berlin for the developer experience hackfest, at GNOME.Asia to guide new contributors to GNOME and at Open Help in Cincinnati for the best documentation conference and lots of awesome improvement to the sysadmin guide. We also hung out together at GUADEC. It’s unfortunate that not all the team members could make it to Open Help and GUADEC.
GUADEC was interesting this year. It was great to meet up with old friends, meet lots of new people (/me looks at Shobha) and new old people who I should have long since met by now. Tarte flambée and whisky were had by all. Hair happened to some. Tea, damsons and mirabelles also happened (shortly after we returned, I found a mirabelle tree in the shared green space across the road from our house). It was nice to see everyone enjoying themselves at the picnic and football. Bastien always wins.
It was a shame to not see as many documentation team members at GUADEC as we’ve had in previous years and the team didn’t really have a proper hackfest either (although we did participate in a screenshot automation BoF). Spending two days in board and adboard meetings isn’t fun, but is necessary and generally much more productive than phone meetings. I was disappointed to see an anti-harassment policy for the conference: it is a shame that it is thought that the community is tending in the direction of harassing behaviour to a point where there is a requirement for the community to enforce the law (harassment and discrimination are illegal in many, if not all, European countries). I want to be part of a community built on mutual respect, not distrust and inability to communicate. It also seems that the policy can only be used by specific individuals, not everyone, which does seem counter-productive.
It seemed to me, having been involved in GUADEC organisation for the last four years, that 2014 was an especially challenging year. I appreciate all the work that Alexandre and the team have put into making it happen. I foresee even more challenges for 2015, but I’m sure that we will all be there to support the new team.
3.14 was a bit of a slow release cycle for documentation as the team as a whole have not had much free time to work on updating it. I would like to thank the translation teams for being awesome and helping out by filing bugs and patches (both of which are very welcome). There are currently rather a lot of documentation patches and branches to review, so I will be concentrating on those in the next few weeks. I hope that the team will be able to hold another hackfest in January or February to prepare for 3.16, but this is currently a bit of an uncertainty unless we can find sponsors to help with travel. If you know of anyone interested in sponsoring the hackfest please get in touch with the team or with me.
Thank you to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel and accommodation at GUADEC, and to Liam, Ella, Finn and Martin for looking after the chickens. I wouldn’t have been able to make it to GUADEC without you.
Online GUADEC 2014 registration is now open at https://www.guadec.org/register/
There is a limited number of rooms available which can be booked on registering and lunch vouchers can also be purchased.
The venue has changed to a more central location with better access to the city centre. It now looks like:
“Strasbourg hotHohenlohe a” by Ralph Hammann – Own work. Licensed under <a title="Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
” href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0″>CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The GUADEC videos had been put up a little while back on SuperLectures, where they will be available at least until next year. As a more permanent solution, the videos are also available on http://videos.guadec.org/2013/ (incidentally, this also means that we’ve run out of space on our backup machine).
If anyone is interested in creating a pretty website, which is gnome.org-like, for downloading the videos, they should come forward as I hope we will have more videos to add next year.
Also, I found out this year that there were no videos from the Desktop Summit 2011 (Berlin) because, after the network failure, the USB hard disk impromptu backup solution did not work as the camaras produced data too fast and the recordings were jittery.
GUADEC may be over, but there’s still plenty of follow-up work going on, like processing the reimbursements for sponsored attendees.
The Travel Committee has received only around 30% of receipts so far, but that has been enough to almsot give some of us a mental breakdown as it takes around 20-30 minutes to process each set of receipts if there are no problems.
For the sake of our sanity (and If you want your reimbursement to be processed quickly and painlessly) please make sure to send all of your email receipts as PDFs and all scans as JPEGs or PNGs. Forwarded emails, .docx and .doc files are problems which kill bunnies. Please don’t kill bunnies.