GUADEC 2018 Almeria – reflections

It’s been a couple of days since the BoF days ended.  I’ve been spending most of post-guadec traveling around Spain and enjoying myself immensely.  I leave to go back to the U.S. day after tomorrow so now seems like a perfect time to write up something about my experience this year.

Almeria was a grand time, as usual being able to connect with friends and acquaintances is a large part of what makes GUADEC special.  I found all the evening events to be spectacular and full of surprises.  The beach party was awesome, and the flamenco night was just spectacular.  I was really moved by the music and the dancing.  There was clearly a lot of different influences there.

The little skit with Nuritzi, and others was really a special surprise and they did seem to do a fairly decent job with barely any direction.  🙂

Overall, it was a fabulous GUADEC.  I think several people made this observation, but it seemed that our community was in decline over the years thanks to the market’s focus on webapps.  Nobody seemingly is interested in desktops or help funding them.  But this year it seems we have a new generation of enthusiastic young people who are very much interested in moving the platform forward.  We’ve had more downstreams represented this year.  Next year, let’s try to increase that outreach by adding XFCE and Mate to the mix.  Only by diversity are we going to be able to improve our platform and the ongoing discussions with GNOME’s downstreams have been beneficial for everyone.

The other observation is that the engagement team, thanks to the move to GitLab is becoming more of a core function of GNOME.  There is definitely a feeling that our we present ourselves to the world is an important part of the project’s functions and of course we want to be able to help as much as we can to improve GNOME’s image to the outside world.  We shouldn’t be afraid to communicate even if there are forces out there that seek to bring us down.  We shouldn’t also be afraid to listen either.  So we’ll continue having an internal discussion about listening as well.

I was the winner of this year’s Pant’s award!  I’m so so grateful for all of you for the recognition knowing that the work I do is valuable.  It’s truly is a labor of love for me to help build relationships between GNOME and the community.  I would have given a few words at the time, but I probably would have gotten emotional so I demurred. 🙂

BoF days were great, and we had some work done.  We’ve kicked off some more projects that hopefully get some attention during the year.  The engagement team is still double or triple booked on projects.  If you are interested in joining us we would love to have you.  We have all kinds of things that are generally non-technical but also fun!  So reach out through the comments or some other way.

I would like to personally thank the GUADEC organizing committee for all their hard work.  Things got started pretty late, but thanks to great dedication by the team were able to get things accomplished.  Bravo!  Also thank you to the KDE Hispano team who help run the registration booth.  Never a more friendly bunch of people!

At last, I want to make a final plea that the CfP for Libre Application Summit (hosted by GNOME) – LAS will be closing in about 10 days.  This isn’t a desktop conference, but a conference focused on applications and the eco-system.  Please spread the word as much as you can so that we can continue to expand this conference.  It will be our vehicle to talk about how we can start building a market for the Linux platform and the accomplishments of those involved in desktops, toolkits, and design.  http://las.gnome.org/  I’m working on adding more stakeholders like KDE to the conference so that the conference represents everyone.

My trip was funded by the GNOME Foundation and I’m grateful for them sponsoring me.