GNOME – Sri Ramkrishna

Linux App Summit 2026 Social Media Retrospective

This is my personal retrospective post – there will likely be some version of this that will go out to various stakeholders.

I want to start off by giving huge praise to our organizing team that worked really hard this year in putting this event together. Couldn’t ask for a better team to work with. Our organizing team is a mix of KDE and GNOME people.

This post will focus on the outreach, fundraising, and social media campaign since that was the bulk of the work I did for LAS this year.

Linux App Summit (LAS) for those who don’t know is a conference organized around the goal of encouraging developing apps on the Linux platform. With
the advent of technologies like Flatpak, we had the technology to be able to ship apps directly to users instead of through the distros. Opening
an opportunity for a bi-directional relationship between app developers and the users of their apps.

This year marks the 10th year I’ve been involved in organizing LAS and its previous incarnation, LAS GNOME. LAS is organized jointly by GNOME and KDE who help fund and promote the conference jointly. It is a showcase of how we can unite and do impactful things.

I was not able to attend this year due to other commitments. I hope other who did attend will weigh in and let us know how it was in-person.

Let’s get to it!

Challenging Myself

I wanted to challenge myself this year and really bring in the kind of engagement that I could be proud of. I’ve not really had the kind of time I wanted to work on this and it was time to really focus and see what could be done with a proper plan. The goal I wanted to take myself is driving awareness and growing attendance on what our app ecosystem is doing.

What does that entail?

Improving our social media game

The underlying problem I have identified is that Linux and apps was not getting into the headspace of developers. It still felt that this conference was unknown even in our own spaces. We need to break out of Mastodon and start exploring different platforms and content.

In previous years, we were using Buffer since it was free but it was really difficult and unwieldy. We could only schedule 3 days in advance and at times the posts would just drop. We needed to first change the tools we used to really improve our engagement with the world.

With help from the sysadmins at the GNOME Foundation (thank you, GF and Andrea Veri and Bart!), we were able to install Mixpost a self-host social media platform. The two great things about Mixpost is 1) analytics of the posts and social media platforms we were active on and not so active on 2) have a workspace around all our social media accounts and have a team of people working in it with an editorial flow and content calendar. This allowed us to share the workload of posting among many members. For instance, when I wasn’t around, Aryan Kaushik was able to take it over and post. Mixpost is now also being used for various GNOME’s accounts as well. The software continues to improve and hopefully they’ll get around to single-signon support.

With the ability to actually have metrics, the next step is to actually take goals for each of the social media accounts we had and see if we could meet them. Below is a table of the targets I took and the results from February 2026 – May 2026. Instagram was actually started in the beginning of May.

Social Media	Start Count	Target Count	Result
Mastodon	596	796	926 👍🏼
LinkedIn	534	700	619 👍🏼
BlueSky	0	100	39
YouTube	1420	N/A	1610
Instagram	0	N/A	42

Overall, I think we did ok! The high count for Mastodon was because of the great work of the GNOME and KDE accounts on mastodon boosting our posts and helping promoting them before, during, and after LAS. I noticed doing things like polls on mastodon got a lot of attention without needing boosts from the other accounts.

We had decent engagement on LinkedIn. Certainly better than in the past. The trick though is that LinkedIn requires a different lens when you post. Since it is mostly focus on B2B and B2C type of messaging you need to write them differently. I didn’t do it this time because writing social media posts is hard and takes a lot of time and thought.

I didn’t take any goals for YouTube since we did not conceive that we would create content targeted for YouTube. In a spur of the moment, I did a ‘podcast style’ conversation between Matthias Clasen and myself talking about LAS. That gave us about 354 views. Which was encouraging and gives us some idea how organic content on YouTube would be received.

Bluesky was a new account for us. So we started with zero. We gained 39 followers. That might not seem like a lot given the time frame but BlueSky is an interesting platform when it comes to engagement. You can get quite a bit of engagement even if the follower count is low. I think given more time on the platform we’ll be able to make that 100+ if we keep posting content. I think hashtags matter here and playing with the right kind of hashtag and content matters. Bluesky is also was a great experiment when you didn’t have big accounts like GNOME and KDE boosting you.

The media partners we had 9to5Linux, Tuxdigital, It’s FOSS, and Linux Magazine all helped in this regard by using their accounts boost our posts in these other platforms and give us visibility. Thank you to our media partners for helping out and we hope we can work with them closer next year. I’ll like to engage with them further to see how we can help each other out including contributing content. Another idea is to reach out to the speakers of these talks and get them to write some articles that could be contributed based on their talks.

Finally, Instagram. This is an untapped gold mine. I was skimming through the platform looking for GNOME/KDE/Linux desktop type posts to see how well content did. Saw one young lady, who showed off her GNOME desktop with some caption and it gave her 130k views. It was about 10 seconds long. That was impressive. I posted a short video talking about Linux App Summit, and while I got about 130 views – the analytics said most stopped watching after 9 seconds of the 4 minute video I posted. That hurt my pride. I resolved to do better and get better engagement with a 10-15 second video that packed more information and visually more stimulating. As of now the LAS account is still gaining followers despite not posting for 2 weeks. Once again, the media partners helped by liking my posts while the other accounts lay idle.

Working with YouTube Influencers

One other aspects of my plan on boosting the visibility of LAS was to start working with influencers on various platforms. I made a few attempts with a few I knew but was only able to get on one podcast – Tux Digital. Michael Tunnell was kind enough to invite Aleix Pol and myself on his show. For an hour and half, we answered questions and did some bantering. We even went in some organic directions that was fun! I know I had fun, I hope Aleix did too. The exposure was pretty good with approximately 8k+ views for that episode that was 90 minutes. The feedback to the video was very positive with many resolving to attend the conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t set up utm links so that I know where people came from.

Through social media and influencers, we hoped to break out of our media ecosystem and branch out to platforms that developers and Linux enthusiasts hang out and consume content. Meeting where developers are needs to be something we will need to focus on going forward.

Results

The in-person conference was a success, we had 110 people at the conference, the venue capacity was 100. We had 156 people who registered for the conference, this is about a 71% conversion rate. The industry average for free in-person events is 50%. For LAS, this is unprecedented because we usually had a much worse turnover rate historically. At one point, a few years ago I had started looking into doing registration fees to give people some reason to go and not ghost the conference.

For online this year, we had about 50 online registrations but it’s hard to gauge anything about online participation since we freely published the YouTube link on social media.

The results for the conference for online had the following results on YouTube:

	2025	2026
Day 1 Views	922	1.7k
Day 2 Views	485	1.5k

The above numbers show views within the 24 hour period of each day. These are really good numbers where we’ve more than doubled our viewership on one of the two days compared to last year. Ostensibly, it shows that our social media did build awareness.

Here is the (still increasing) numbers as of now on Youtube:

First Day: 2k views
Second day: 2.7k views

The videos are currently being broken up into individual talks. But the individual talks as of now are averaging about 300 views or so with the top one being 900+ views for Lennart’s keynote.

The aggregate views for all the 13 individual talk videos posted so far is 4.9k. If we combined that with the combined 2k and 2.7k views, we can simplistically (mathematically speaking) would be 9.6k. Interestingly enough, that is not a big difference from the 8k views of Tux Digital podcast that Aleix and I were on. 😀

In regards, to the people who attended Linux App Summit, 16 people filled out the surveys and by in-large most of the people who attended heard about LAS through word of mouth and not so much through social media. So, that’s an interesting data point. I expect that is because of people like Lorenz Wildberg (thank you!) who did on the ground outreach.

Interestingly, enough our online views were quite good compared to say SCALE which peaked at 7.1k views for one talk but in general the average views was less than the average views than at LAS. Our subject matter is increasingly important.

Also to be clear, views do not translate to people.

Looking towards 2027, we’ll want to increase our in-person attendance while doubling our online views. Something we will be focusing on when we organize for next year.

Next Steps

Our organizing team will be posting relevant individual talks on social media once all the individual videos have been posted. I hope you all share those with everyone.

Secondly, we would love to add more people to our organizing team. Specifically, in order to really build out our outreach we need a lot more people to help network and reach out to developers from different communities and different platforms. This way we can start building relationships with other desktop projects, app developers, game developers, designers not just from Linux but from other platforms as well. For that we need a small army of advocates.

Thanks

I wanted to add the social media work is a team effort and that I would like to thank Aryan Kaushik and Aniqa Khokar for helping write posts and editing them. As well, I would like to thank Caroline Henriksen for doing all the images and themes on social media!

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.