GNOME – Sri Ramkrishna

The GNOME Extensions Rebooted Initiative

With the advent of the new release of GNOME 3.38 – we want to start focusing next cycle on improving the GNOME Extensions experience.

I’m using my blog for now – but we will have a extensions blog where we can start chatting about what’s going on in this important space.

What Extensions Rebooted Initiative is about

It is not a surprise that most people are aware that a large number of extensions break after each release which causes a lot of friction in the community.

Extensions Rebooted is a collaborative effort to address the issues around the GNOME Shell extension ecosystem. We want to start addressing this by making a number of policy changes and technological improvements while building a sustainable community.

Here are some highlights on how we plan to creating a better experience for GNOME extensions:

Proper documentation of how extensions work, reasonable expectations to be an extensions developer, participating in the GNOME extensions community.
Build CI pipeline (a virtual machine) for extension writers to test their extensions prior to GNOME releases.
Centralizing extensions for break testing on the GNOME gitlab space
Creating a forum for extension developers and extension writers to work together for the GNOME release cycle

To appreciate and expand on the details of this project, you should check out the Extensions Rebooted Bof on the last GUADEC and my GUADEC talk.

The Extensions Rebooted initiative’s ultimate goal is to get the extensions community to work with each other, have closer ties with GNOME shell developers and provide documentation and tools.

Extension writers are encouraged to get involved and build this better experience. Consumers of extensions are requested to help spread the word and encourage extensions developers to participate so we can all benefit.

To get involved:

GNOME Discourse:

Use the “extensions” tag when submitting questions about extensions.

Chat:

There is an extensions matrix/irc channel (matrix preferred) located at: https://gnome.element.io/#/room/#extensions:gnome.org

Gitlab:

If you’re interested in helping develop tools, tests, and most importantly documentation then please visit https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/extensions-rebooted

The success of GNOME extensions cannot happen without participation and contributions from the community and so I hope that all of us who write extensions, who are interested in providing technical documentation, and have experience in CI pipelines/devops can come together and make extensions a sustainable part of the GNOME ecosystem.

The next post will talk about using a pre-built VM image that extension developers can use to test their extensions and have them ready to be used prior to GNOME 3.38 appearing on distributions.

West Coast Hackfest – Summary

Sorry this was supposed to have gone out some weeks ago and I lazed it up. Blame it on my general resistance to blogging. 🙂

This year, I helped organize West Coast Hackfest with my stalwart partner and friend Teresa Hill in Portland – with assistance from Kristi Progi. Big thanks to them for helping to make this a success!

Primarily the engagement hackfest was focused on the website content. The website is showing its age and needs both a content update and a facelift. Given our general focus on engagement, we want to re-envision the website to drive that engagement as a medium for volunteer capture, identity, and fundraising.

The three days of engagement hackfest was spent going through each of the various pages and pointing out issues in the content and what should be fixed. Fixing them is a little bit problematic as the content is not generally available on WordPress but embedded in the theme of which few people have access to. Another focus will be opening up that content and finding alternatives to create content without having to touch the theme at all.

Our observations going through them are as follow:

Our website doesn’t actually identify what we are as a project and what we work on. (eg the word desktop doesn’t show up anywhere on our website)
There is no emotional connection for newcomers who want to know what GNOME is, what our values are
We have old photos from early 6-7 years ago that need to be updated.
The messaging that we have developed within the engagement team is not reflected on the website and should be updated accordingly
We have items on our technologies that are no longer maintained like Telepathy
We have new items on our technology page that need to be added
We have outdated links to social media (eg G+ should no longer exist)

Our tour of the website has shown how out of date our website has and it is clear that it is not part of the engagement process. One of the things we will talk about in GUADEC is managing content and visuals on the website as part of the engagement team activity. We have an opportunity to really find new ways to connect with our users, volunteers, and donors and reach out to potential new folks through the philanthropy and activism in Free Software that we do.

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for providing the resources and infrastructure to have us all here.

The plans for West Coast Hackfest is to continue to expand its participation in the U.S. As a U.S. based non-profit, we have a responsibility to expand our mission in the United States as part of our Foundation activities. While we have been quite modest this year, we hope to expand even larger for next year as another vehicle like GUADEC as a meeting place for users, maintainers, designers, documentators and everyone else.

If you are interested in hosting West Coast Hackfest – (we’ll call it something else – suggestions?) then please get in touch with Kristi Progi and myself. We will love to hear from you!

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.

GNOME.Asia and Engagmeent update

I’ve been wanting to write a post on GNOME.Asia and the going ons with engagement for awhile, but never seemed to get the motivations to blog. 🙂

GNOME.Asia was an amazing event and I wanted to reach out to the organizers and thank them for the wonderful reception that I received while I was there. The trip to Chongqing was mostly uneventful other than the fact every Chinese official was gunning for my battery brick when going through airport security. After a long layover in Beijing, I was landed in Chongqing and met up with Mathias Clasen and proceeded to head to the hotel.

Next day, we went on a wonderful trip to some caves in the local area that Lennart found in Lonely Planet. We were very lucky to have Jonathan Kang with us to speak the local language as it would have been a challenging trip otherwise. But we got to see some really interesting statues that were many centuries old. There was one really especially interesting one that showed the Bodhisvatta with a thousand hands. It definitely had a presence! We came back in time to attend the reception although we were a little late.

I was lucky to have my talk on the first day which allowed me to not have to worry about my talk for the rest of the conference. This was my first time going to a GNOME.Asia conference and everything was impressive. First conference I’ve been to where there was a mini-drama with a fire-blower/fire-eater. That definitely left an impression!

I gave my talk shortly after the intro, and it was well attended and I think people enjoyed it. Most people know me that I tend to get a little energetic while on stage.

The rest of the conference, I enjoyed going to the english speaking talks, meeting with conference attendees, selfies, and everything else. We had a day for BoFs and of course, we had an engagement one. Well, Nuritzi and I had an engagement BoF. 🙂 Apparently, writing code is still the sexy thing to do. 🙂

The conference did drive an impetus to harness the energy in Asia, and not just China, but India, Japan, S. Korea and so forth. And after the conference, we started working in earnest to start organizing to bring in new members from Asia.

We had a lovely party on a ship, and a tour of Chongqing at night, that was really impressive. Chongqing is really large, like one city the size of the Bay Area and possibly a larger population. There was much fun to be had and of course more pictures and selfies and the like.

The next day was a walking tour of the city that our new friends took us around in the city. The city reminds me a lot of Portland, simply because it was perpetually raining and foggy. Which kept the pollution to a minimum. The food was delicious and very spicy. I’ve come to have a love/hate relationship with the szechuan pepper which while I like the spice, wasn’t overly fond of the numbness it causes. Where in the cities on the west coast, the smell of cannibis shows up, so does the aroma of szechuan peppers in Chongqing!

I went shopping on the last day of my trip there and finally the next morning headed back to Denver. Chinese security confiscated my power brick of which I was quite irate about. I had that thing for 3 years, and I hated letting it go. Of course as luck what have it, I needed it charged by the time I got out in Denver and had to spend an extra hour to charge my phone in order to go home. 🙁

Post conference, there has been a lot of re-organization to accommodate the Asian members of GNOME engagement. We have moved to a new time and hopefully we can use some of amazing talent that some of our new members have in some of the engagement things.

Thanks to Carlos, we were able to also start using gitlab as a way to project manage social media and you’ll find that in the past 6 weeks that GNOME engagement social media are tracked in issues, and are getting completed. The side effect is that work done by the engagement team are no longer opaque and instead the entire project can see what the team is doing. Our engagement internally with the rest of the project has improved markedly. We hope to continue making progress and improving the engagement team. Our meetings are half discussions and have work sessions so that we remove items out of our todo.

There has never been a better time to get involved with GNOME engagement. As a recent blog post by Christian Hergert has underscored, the project in order to grow needs to be able to have non-coding skills like project management, graphics artists, designers, and community managers. We’re also a bit of a counter-culture group compared to the rest of the project. So if you are interested in the people behind GNOME, the users of our software, or solving humanistic problems, come join us and let’s chat!

I would like to finally thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip to GNOME.Asia. I would not have been able to go otherwise.

The Creator has a Mastertape

Another year has gone by and it is yet again another year I promised to blog and didn’t. With social networking its hard to bother. Besides, you always feel that if you’re going to post to planet that it should be something insightful.

Anyways, this post is about recognizing people in the community who have worked hard in the background in support of all our releases in 2012 and in community outreach. The list is of my own compiling and mostly consists of people involved in marketing and sysadmin. It’s my hope that others will also step up and recognize people for the great work they’ve been doing in their own areas.

So onwards.. here is my list of awesome from the list of the awesomest! I’ll attempt to write a little something about that person so it’s not just a static list.

Karen Sandler – Karen has been such the hanger that we put our clothes on. Without it, things just drop. (yeah, crazy metaphor huh? 🙂 Karen has been helping fundraise, leading the efforts on Friends of GNOME, and communicating with our board of advisors and generally the person we all like to talk to if we’re frustrated or have some anecdote we want to share.

Emily Gonyer – there are few who have that kind of passion in GNOMEt that Emily has. She started as a GSOC candidate and has stayed on and continues to be very much involved in the marketing team. She’s been involved in community outreach and getting the forums started and is an outspoken critic in the true open source fashion. Emily also worked on the quarterly reports and has gone to GUADEC and FOSDEM.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya – Marina has been managing the GSOC and this year she has been able to expand GSOC to several other projects. Marina is responsible for wonderful diversity that we have in GNOME. Setting the standard that other open source projects should compare themselves against. The fact I get to put so many women on this list is a testament to her time and investment into this project. You rock!

Christy Eller – Christy spent her GSOC project helping us put out a new friends of gnome pages and a news.gnome.org site redesign. There has never been such a rapid and focused development on a web project. We joke about how long it’s taken us to do a new gnome.org. We had more things accomplished in that short time than I’ve ever seen in the history of GNOME.

Andrea Veri – Andrea started working as a part time sysadmin this year. If Christy was successful with web it was because Andrea was there supporting her and the rest of us. Andrea has been doing most of the sysadmin’ing for GNOME this past year and doing it with enthusiasm. We are fortunate to have such a dedicated person helping us.

Allan Day -He’s everyone’s mentor. He helps us understand the various designs that GNOME is working on. Help us gets our messaging together. Helps figure out how to react to various criticisms that are happening in the community. He’s been put through the emotional wringer with all the various criticisms that we face from our community. The marketing team is in his debt almost daily with his advice and commentary. Thanks Allan!

Sebastian Keller – Known as ‘borschty’ on IRC, Sebastian has spent a lot of his free time hanging out in #gnome on freenode and gimpnet answering questions and providing most of our visible support on IRC. It always amazing when people are willing to spend their time that way and helping out especially answering questions which as a lot of people can tell you takes a lot of patience. Sebastian also is one of two ops persons for #gnome as well.

Juha Sahakangas – Known as ‘Juhaz’ on IRC, Juha is the other person who spends a lot his time answering questions on #gnome on freenode. Again, a big thanks to him for both answering the questions and administrating the channel. It’s because of him and Sebastian that we have the visibility on freenode that we have.

If I missed you, it’s because I haven’t learned too much of what you’ve been doing. If you think I’ve missed someone then please write a blog post and tell us your heroes that deserve to be recognized for the year s that all of us know what they have done. These are just my personal ones.

Best wishes to the GNOME community and hope for a prosperous New Year! 🙂

Linux Plumbers Conference…

So I’ve been meaning to put a post on this but I haven’t had a chance thanks to school and what not. Having finished my exams and projects, I thought I would put in a word or two regarding the other thing I’ve been busy with and that is the Linux Plumbers Conference. This is my second year in a row in being part of the organizing committee of Linux Plumbers Conference!

Linux Plumbers Conference is one of those small conferences organized by developers for developers and thus have a highly technical focus. As a bonus, it’s held the same week as Linuxcon so you can get your taste of the O’Reilly type conference as well if laundry is an issue. 🙂 The goal is to improve the Linux platform, targetting the weaknesses and improving them. Last year we had the fast boot by Intel which started a distro war over boot time. and we had a piece of X put into the kernel, so things happen at this conference.

We are currently looking for paper submussions. Have an idea for the desktop but you need kernel developer support? This is your chance! Thanks to Jim Gettys to being our runner for the UI track. So if you have ideas that will help advance the Linux platform/ecosystem. Please submit your ideas! The conference is in Portland, OR Sept 23-25, 2009. I hope to see a lot of you there. As many can attest, Portland is an awesome city with some of the coolest people on the planet living here.

GNOME 2.24 release!!

Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to get this release out. Especially the release team. You guys rock!!

Had a busy couple of weeks, putting on Linux Plumbers Conference An exciting time and it was great to meet old friends and new ones. I think we were able to get all the goals we wanted. It was amazing watching something from conception to execution. We didn’t have a lot of problems.

We’re hoping to plan next years soon and see if we can top what we had. Those of you I got to meet last week, it was great hanging out and I hope we get to do it again! Our community rocks! 🙂

gnomefiles.org gone..

For those of you wondering what happened to gnomefiles.org like I did. Apparently, the site has bit the big one according to this post by Eugenia. This of course leaves a big hole in our community on where to go for new software for GNOME. I hope we might be able to get a site going quickly in order to replace gnomefiles.org.

This has been a public service announcement. Since I don’t think Eugenia has publicized this anywhere that I know of.

–update–

fixed broken link.

Alll my blogs begin with long time no post.. hah!

Well, look whose blogging! That’s right, it’s me. Let’s see if I remember how to do all this bloggy stuff…

Last time or was that episode? Episode then. I”m feeling peevish, I blogged I was defending vegetarianism and posted a picture. Sorry no picture this time. I have been eating good stuff though. 😉 Including a nice home made vegetarian pizza. Maybe I’ll post it. If y’all are nice to me and such.

Since then, I’ve been busy with school and not much time for GNOME other than to hang out. I guess I’m here for the beer this year. It was great meeting the lot of you at OSCON which seems to be the post destination after GUADEC. Sadly, none of you bought me a t-shirt. Shame on you. I thought I was the mascot, I guess it was all pillow talk.

I have approximately less than a year to graduate with a M.S. in C.S. at Portland State University. I can’t wait since it’s been a real pain doing work and school and people have noticed that my contributions have shrunk to a trickle.

Anyways, knowing this audience, y’all want to talk about GNOMEy stuff. Too bad. We’re talking about me. I’m taking over for Rich Burridge! But we’re going to talk bout furry felines, not kids. Which means we’re going to talk about David Schleef. Don’t worry, he loves when we talk about him. It makes Dirac development faster. Anyhoo, Every friday, I intend to post some cynical observation about *something*.

I do have some stuff to talk bout that isn’t about my boring life. That is that you may have noticed the GNOME Journal has been a bit stagnant due to its members being really busy with either their jobs or other projects that take up their time. Some of you are probably read Planet for fun, and sometimes think “what a great bunch of people, I wish I could help out. But I can’t because David Schleef won’t let me.” You DON’T need David Schleef‘s permission. (remember, Dirac code is speeding up now, keep talking about him!) No, we are looking for a few good people, preferably human, but we have known to take on Vulcans; we aren’t racist, green blood not withstanding, to help out with writing articles. Maybe you think “I don’t know what to write”, or maybe you’re scared. If your’e scared, it’s obvious you haven’t been to GUADEC. There’s nothing to be scared of. These people are pushovers. if you get into a situation, remember “beer is GNOME kryptonite” keep a can with you always. If they are Australian, Fosters will actually repel them it’s like holy water on vampires! ANYWAYS.. We have plenty of ideas we think would make good articles. We need people. You are of course free to write your own as well. Write what you think might be interesting and we’ll do the rest. Hope you’ll sign up. Send me some email, or join us on irc in the #gnome-journal channel. Bring your dog, we like pets.

The other thing is that I’ve been actually doing some hacking. Yes, surprising as that might be. I have taken an open source class, so I essentially got to take 8 weeks and learn glib/goject/sqlite and write me up a new backend for Rhythmbox. It’s not quite finished but most of the major sutff is done and I’m trying to get into a useable state before sticking it in bugzilla. One might be tempted to think sqlite is a superior solution cuz well it’s sqlite and it’s the best thing evah! Keep in mind the current backend is pretty damn good and is a result of several years of tweaking. It’ll be a while before this backend has any chance of being supported. Huge thanks to teuf and moch for giving their time to help me and answer questions. But the project has been good for me as I’ve finally got time to learn all those dependencies that I always whined about that I couldn’t learn. Hopefully I get to participate more in the development process than I have.

Well, that’s it for me. I’ll post something mildly amusing on Friday.

Oh yeah, contact information.. mail me at sriram DOT ramkrishna DOT gmail DOT com if you are interested in helping writing articles. Free picture of me for the first person to respond!