I can’t stop thinking big. In a world where I feel so small.

Returned from GUADEC and again it was a wonderful time. Big kudos to the organizing team putting together a great conference! For me to meet everyone is such a adrenaline rush, and I always feel so pumped when I come back.

Speaking of conferences, I spent a lot of time volunteering to understand the mechanics of running a local conference since you know, I have one of my own that is coming up in a few short weeks. Libre Application Summit presented by GNOME or LAS GNOME conference.

To say that starting a new conference with a new purpose is hard is an understatement. It is incredibly difficult to put a formal conference together. We did West Coast Summit for two years to make sure that this conference idea works. Huge kudos to openSUSE for giving the initial funding for this conference and taking a chance on my idea and vision of where I wanted to take this conference. I will say the same for the board as well for enthusiastically embracing LAS GNOME and the concepts behind it.

We live in a world of changing demographics and as a project we need to adapt to them. LAS GNOME is an attempt to show the world that desktops matter in this new world of containers, cloud, and consumer devices. No longer will we placidly write software and release them, but instead we are going to innovate, lead, and build the kind of eco-system that will show off our prowess.

LAS GNOME has two main goals –

1) Outreach externally: to companies, government, and organizations. We need to build relationships with them and combine efforts in building an application market.

2) Outreach internally: to the kernel, user space maintainers, and existing application organizations like Mozilla and Open Document Foundation. We need to improve the application story by improving the OS and creating the conditions for a measurable application market for devices running the Linux kernel.

Here is the thing – people, companies and organizations should know about desktop projects. We are the user space engineers of the Linux operating system. KDE created khtml which turned into WebKit and is now Blink and now one of the most popular webapp framework today. GNOME’s influence can be seen in dbus, systemd, logind, gstreamer, pulseaudio and various other core pieces of userspace. See GNOME Technologies.

Moving forward, flatpak is here and that too will have influence on how we think of applications today. The fact of the matter is, anything that gets put forth on a desktop project is going to be in every Linux based operating system out there. Nobody has more clout than we (desktop projects) do in what goes into a distribution. Do not underestimate our worth.

LAS GNOME will be in Portland, Oregon – Sept 19-23rd at the Eliot Center. The schedule is finalized except some tweaks here and there and now working on some great BoFs on open source marketing, linux graphics drivers, OpenQA/OBS, flatpak enabling/workshop, and hopefully a string of others on in the plans. Companies and individuals can expect a week of being able to talk with everyone across the Linux eco-system and understand how to get started in a single place.

I also want to thank everyone who have been working so hard on this conference. We’ve overcome so many obstacles and continue to overcome them as they arrive.

Finally, I want to thank the Foundation for sponsoring my travel to GUADEC and allowing me to network with our community and promote LAS GNOME.

Link to our schedule and website!