Sri Ramkrishna

It’s that time again, and we are in our 7th year doing this conference (if you include LAS GNOME).

This year, LAS will be held in Tirana, Albania and we are going all out this year to make it the best conference representing apps on Linux.

For those who don’t know or have not heard of Linux App Summit, the idea is to have desktops work together to help enable application developers to build apps on the Linux platform. It’s a parallel effort to the Flathub and Snapstore app stores.

LAS is positioned to promote third party developers, inform the ecosystems are the advances on the desktop, and for developers, designers, and contributors working on the desktops to meet each other and discuss how to move the platform forward as a community.

LAS’s success depends on all of you. If you’re passionate about making Linux as a viable alternative to proprietary platform then we need your help! Linux enables local control of your technology that you can adapt to your needs. Build local ecosystems enabling a local economy. A community driven platform will protect your privacy, safety, and security without bowing to shareholders or to politicians. This is the place to tell us about it!

So, I ask all of you to attend LAS, help drive our numbers up. Have a great idea that you won’t to share with this ecosystem of developers? Implemented something on a phone, in an automobile, or something else? Have a great concept? Want to update all of us on what the next version of your app is going to do?

Through here, we can find out what is missing? What do we need to do move forward? What are the trends we should be looking at?

Feel free to reach out to our team and we’ll be happy to answer any questions at info@linuxappsummit.org.

You can submit a talk at https://iinuxappsummit.org/cfp. You can register for the conference at https://linuxappsummit.org/register.

Can’t come in person or give the talk in person? Not to worry! LAS is a hybrid conference and you can attend from remote even though we would love to meet you in person.

Finally, we are looking for sponsors. If you know of a company who would make a great sponsor please reach out. If you’re interested in sponsoring LAS, you can email us at sponsors@linuxappsummit.org. For more info at https://linuxappsummit.org/sponsor.

Last month, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend GUADEC in Guadalajara. It was thrilling to see everyone in person after a two-year absence. Even better, after many attempts we finally were able to have GUADEC in Mexico!!

For those who don’t know, the genesis of all that came from these chain of events 2016. At the time, I was working at Intel, and one of the kernel developers at Guadalajara, who just happened to be the keynote speaker at GUADEC, connected me to Manuel Haro – he had a conference called CISOL that he was running and needed a keynote speaker.

It so happened that Neil McGovern had recently became the Executive Director of GNOME just a few weeks ago. I told Manuel that Neil would be the better option but he ended up wanting both of us to speak. So we both ended up in Zacatecas, MX. Incidentally, that was when I first met Neil and this sparked the beginning of a beautiful friendship!! So, really it seems quite fitting that his GNOME adventure began and ended in Mexico!!!

The conference itself was great, I enjoyed a number of the talks especially the ones by Endless folks. I missed some that I’m grateful to be able to go back and  watch.

I gave a talk around ecosystems and the GNOME community. This was quite a personal talk for me and centered on how communities should always be reaching out to other communities. I used Linux App Summit as an example of how this worked in practice and its effects on the ecosystems. We are mightier as a meta community than we are as individual silos if you want the tl;dr.

It’s mildly ironic that the attendees likely were interested in a technical talk. 🙂 There is a certain amount of self selection there – as a project, we tend to talk about our woes around resource management or growing community – but it’s important that we all have agency and that solving people-problems needs to be a shared goal.

This GUADEC was a very special one for me. My wife, Aarti, also joined me on this trip. While not her first open source conference, this is the first one where she was a speaker/workshop lead. Her workshop was all around understanding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) from the point of view of an educator. As a person who teaches young humans,  she provided observations, facts and visual presentations to help understand how young girls and persons of color become discouraged from entering STEM fields. Big props to the audience who bought their authentic selves and listened and participated with their full heart and and souls. There was laughter, tears, and authentic heartfelt expressions of wanting to be an ally. To my wife, this was her first exposure to the GNOME community – and they did not disappoint. It was certainly a bonding experience for her with many in the GNOME community. My wife is an amazing human, and I’m lucky to be part of her life and have her light join mine on this journey of ours.

Guadalajara was amazing – the random acts of kindness that we experienced while walking this city made this city special for us. It also felt like home, and by that I mean – it felt like we were in India. The sights, the smells, and the flora. Even the monsoon level rains and the flooding – all familiar things for us. The food was amazing – and it comes down to the fresh, local produce that we as Americans do not appreciate. The intensity of flavors and spice made the same food you get in the U.S. feel bland. We intend to return with the rest of our family and be able to enjoy Mexico a bit more – in the meanwhile, I’ll be working hard on my Spanish so that I can be my authentic self. As a social person, it really kills me that I cannot express myself and forced to use English in a non-English speaking country.

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring mine and Aarti’s trip.

Some may know that I’m involved, as part of building an app ecosystem, in figuring out how to measure Free Software communities. We formed a working group within the CHAOSS project.

One of the things that we want to do is figure out community metrics for both KDE and GNOME. This post is related to GNOME but should be universally applicable.

Going forward, the importance of making decisions through data is going to be more important. We know that we are under-resourced, and we vaguely know where we are under-resourced but we have no data to conclusively show anything about our community.

If we have successes, we should be able to demonstrate that. If people want to donate or be part of an advisory board – then they have something to assess. And yes, the data could also prove or disprove aspects of our community if we are honest with ourselves. Metrics should be thoughtful and tell the right and accurate story.

Collecting data has always been a challenge for Free Software – this is because we are all rightly skittish about giving up our privacy. We should still be able to collect data without compromising privacy and by showing what decisions this data is driving and what questions are being answered.

Doing this can make us more goal-oriented. That’s going to be important.

To that end, in addition to working with the CHAOSS project, I’m also working with Georg of Bitergia and publishing the metrics that come from the GNOME GitLab. Right now, the work will require looking at metrics collections, making sure that it is accurate, and then building an engine that can be used by the community, maintainers, foundation staff, and Directors of the GNOME Foundation based on conversations within the community. I hope to do a lot of that at this years GUADEC.

There will be a series of blog posts where I’ll be talking about these metrics and going through the ramifications of building community metrics.

We are using Cauldron whose components are all developed under an OSI approved license. You can find the metrics for the GNOME community at https://cauldron.io/project/6416.

If you’re interested in being a fledgling data scientist, community manager, or just love to look at data – feel free to reach out. We would love to have you.

This series will also be cross posted to dev.to as well.

We will be having a conversation around extensions and the future of how we will be handling them based on policy, community, and other important factors.

If you are an extensions writer, then I would urge you to join our BoF to help understand what we will be doing with extensions going forward and also provide feedback. We do not want to do this in a vacuum.

https://events.gnome.org/event/16/

Looking forward to hearing from the community. Please understand some of things we will be talking about is:

* Centralilzing the location of extensions to the GNOME gitlab (not necessarily develop your extensions there, but if you want it on e.g.o then it will need to pass QA tests)

* Automatic QAing of extensions prior to release of gnome-shell.
* Policies
* Documentation
* Community building

See you there!

I wanted to pen something before the year is gone about the recent Linux Application Summit 2019. This is the 3rd iteration of the conference and each iteration has moved the needle forward.

The thing that excites me going forward is what we can do when we work together between our various free and open source communities. LAS represents forming a partnership and building a new community around applications. By itself the ‘desktop’ doesn’t mean much to the larger open source ecosystems not because it isn’t important because the frenetic pace of open source community expansion have moved so fast that these communities do not have organizational history of foundational technologies that our communities have built over the years that they use every day and maintain.

To educate them would be too large of a task instead we need to capitalize on the hunger for technology, toolchains, and experience that build and possess. We can do that by presenting ourselves as the apps community which presents no prejudice to the outside community. We own apps, because we own the mindshare through maturity, experience, and communities that spring around it.

From here, we can start representing apps not just through the main Linux App Summit, but through other venues. Create the Apps tracks at FOSDEM, Linux Foundation events, Plumbers etc.

In the coming weeks, I will be working with other conference organizers around the globe to see how we can create these tracks and have ourselves represent ourselves there.

LAS represented the successful creation of a meta-community and from there we can build the influence we need to build the norms we need to build on the desktop.

Looking forward to 2020!

Big thanks to the GNOME Foundation for their support of Linux Application Summit.

The GNOME Foundation has taken the extraordinary step of not just defending itself against a patent troll but to aggressively go after them. This is an important battle. Let’s me explain.

The initial reason for Rothschild to come after us they clearly believe that the GNOME Foundation has money and that they can shake us down and get some easy money with their portfolio of patents.

If we had lost or given them the money, it would have made us a mark to not just Rothschild, but to every other patent troll who are probably watching this unfold. Worse, it means that all the other non-profits would be fair game . We do not want to set that precedent. We need to set a strong message that if they attack us they attack us all.

The GNOME Foundation manages infrastructure around the GNOME Project which consists of an incredible amount of software over a nearly 23 year period. This software is used in everything from medical devices, to consumer devices like the Amazon Kindle and Smart TVs, and of course the GNOME desktop.

The GNOME Project provides the tooling, software, and more importantly the maintenance and support for for the community. Bankrupting the GNOME Foundation would mean that these functions would take a terrible blow and cripple the important work we do. The companies that depend on these tools and software will also be similarly hit. That is just one non-profit foundation.

There are many others, Apache, Software Freedom Conservancy and the FSF amongst others. They would be just as vulnerable as we are now.

What Rothschild has done is not just attack GNOME, but all of us in Free Software and Open Source, our toolchains that we depend, and the software we use. We can’t let that happen. We need to strongly repudiate this patent troll, and not only defend ourselves but to neuter them and make an example of them to warn off any other patent troll that thinks we are easy pickings.

Companies, individuals, governments should give money so we can make a singularly statement – not here, not now, not ever!  Let’s set that precedence. Donate to the cause. GNOME has a history of conquering its bullies. But we can’t do that without your help.

An American President once said “They counted on us to be passive. They counted wrong.”

Donate now! 

I’m currently writing this at Minneapolis airport. Having ramen and sushi, before boarding my flight to CDG and ultimately to Malaga and Almeria. GUADEC is always the most special time being able to meet absent friends, and of course the scheming, the plotting and rabble rousing and that’s just the things I’m doing! 🙂

I’m presenting this year with a community talk. Which the slides are being written on the flight . This will be a busy GUADEC as there are a lot of things going on, projects that I’m looking to complete, a conference that I need to promote, and a lot of conversations about all things engagement, website, and various other things. There might even be a special blog post later! 😉

See ya there!  I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation of which I would not have been able to attend.