Thomas Wood

We’ve still got quite a few empty slots in the volunteers schedule, so if there is a morning or afternoon that interests you, please put your name down. You get a special t-shirt if you do!

Some photos of the venue for GUADEC 2007 which we took at our meeting at the beginning of June.

Looks like quite a few people are making sure they remember to sebtle their debts with the GUADEC Beer Bank too. Great stuff.

And of course, if you haven’t registered, then you really ought to do so before Sunday to make sure you get hold of one of the swag bags we’re giving away.

Just a reminder that if you are giving a lightening talk at Guadec this year, you still need to register in the normal manner. This is purely due to the nature of the lightening talk which means we can’t register people automatically.

And apparently there is some stupid ad blocking software that removed the image from my last post about the linux magazine advert. I’ve renamed the image (actually I uploaded it again – apparently the new wordpress on blogs.gnome.org can’t do a simple thing like rename). So it should all be working now. This is the second time this has happened to me because apparently any image with ‘sponsor’ in the url is also going to be an advert…

Had totally forgotton about this until yesterday, so I decided to pop along to my local newsagents today and see if it was out yet. Lo and Behold…

 

Go Go Guadec, Go!

I think this is a great idea. How many times have you said on IRC, “Thank you kind Sir for your helpfulness. I do believe I owe you a beer or beverage of your choice to allow me to express my gratitude”? Well, I know I’ve said something similar from time to time and promptly forgotten about it.

Thank goodness then, for the GUADEC BEER BANK! Now you can write a little reminder to your friends and comrades so that you won’t forget to give. Fill out your name and the intended recipients names and we can all make sure you give what is due.

A couple of late minute sponsors have been confirmed recently. Red Hat, Mandriva and AMD have all been confirmed as Silver level sponsors. Mandriva are sponsoring the Guadec USB keys which will contain lots of goodies from all the sponsors as well has having a bootable version of Mandriva installed. They will also contain the conference brochure and other useful information. With a good gigabyte or so worth of portable storage, they should be useful after the conference too.

These extra three sponsors bring the number of total sponsors to an amazing seventeen this year! Our thanks go out to all the companies who have shown their support for Guadec. Without the support of these organisations, Guadec certainly wouldn’t be possible. We look forward to seeing them all in July.

And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please remember to register before the 24th June.

Here are some interesting pages for Guadec:

• Wiki page of Arrival Times
• Beer Bank: Do you owe someone a beer?
• Volunteer Room Schedule: Put your name down if you can help steward a room
• Marketing Campaign: Promote Guadec by printing posters
• Registration: Make sure it’s done before 24th June!
• Schedule: Now updated with keynote speakers

Make sure you’ve registered before 24th June…

We have the opportunity for a GNOME stand at LugRadio Live again this year, so I’m wondering if there is anybody out there willing to volunteer to help out, or just hang around at the stand during the day. But wait there’s more… I don’t want to organise another boring exhibition stand for GNOME, I want to organise something more exciting, or nothing at all…

As GNOME stands at exhibitions go, LugRadio Live presents an even bigger problem than other exhibitions. Everybody knows what GNOME is already, and are probably not that interested in finding out about the latest features because they’ll be relying on their GNU/Linux distribution of choice for that (or none of the new features are all that interesting, take your pick).

What can we do instead of just telling people about GNOME? Can we get people involved in GNOME somehow? We need as many people as we can to keep the project alive, so the question gradually becomes:

How can we make use of exhibition space to get people engaged in the GNOME project?

One way to engage the community is to set up “Hate/Love” boards like we did at LinuxWorld that allow people to express their feelings about GNOME. One step further than this is actually collecting enough information to file bugs on behalf of people who don’t know how to do this already.

Are there other things we can be doing to make better use of the time and space available at events like LugRadio? Can we go further and help people to start contributing to the GNOME project? If so, how? Comments welcome on this blog, by e-mail or to either gnome-uk or the GNOME marketing mailing lists.

A good day for Guadec, not such a great day for me. Having not realised how long the third Pirates film is, I ended up arriving home at half past one Friday night. I then overslept and missed my train to Birmingham and had to pay full price for another ticket on the next train. Luckily arrived only half an hour late, but still not my finest hour.

However, we had a good look around the venue and it reminded me of what an excellent place it will be to have Gaudec. We also took a trip round a few local bars to get ideas for recommendations (well that was the excuse if we needed one). There are some great restaurants and pubs just around the corner from the venue, so everyone should be able to find places to go out and have fun.

Unfortunately, by the time we were getting some food, the fine weather was getting to me and I didn’t feel that great. Luckily, Birmingham also has 24h supermarkets that stock handy things like Paracetamol. So more reassurance that everything anybody could need is just minutes walking distance from the venue. I just hope we get the same nice weather during Guadec as we did this weekend.

Thanks to Paul Cooper, Bastien, Rob and Pete who came to help look round and it was great to see Stuart Langridge and Lorraine (Aiden’s other half) join us for drinks afterwards.