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Conferences

Description of conferences in 2014-15.

Should be 600-800 words.

Article

GNOME.Asia

GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 was hosted in Beijing, China from May 24-25. The conference attracted more than 350 passionate people from all around Asia and beyond.

Tobias Mueller, Lennart Poettering, and Richard Stallman gave the keynotes at the Summit. Tobias talked about the latest advancements and features in GNOME. Lennart spoke about systemd — the now universal service manager for GNU/Linux. Richard's talk focused on the philosophy of the Free Software movement and why a free desktop is needed.

In addition to the Keynotes, there were talks on a wide range of topics covering subjects such as documentation, extension development, translations, bug reporting and enterprise integration. Ekaterina Gerasimova, David King, and André Klapper, all active members of the GNOME Foundation, ran two successful training sessions about how to start contributing to GNOME.

West Coast Summit

Differing from our other conferences, the West Coast Summit's aim is to bring in participants from periphery projects aiming to get them more involved in the GNOME ecosystem. From April 9 through 11, participants from Intel, Red Hat, Yorba, Google, Endless, and Elementary OS met and discussed ways they can work together.

GNOME Peru Fest

On June 28, 2014, GNOME Peru Fest was held in at the IBM campus in Lima, Peru. Spearheaded by Julita Inca, this free event invited everyone to come and learn more about GNOME with talks from both longtime engineers and students who had participated in Google Summer of Code internships with GNOME. Covered favorably in the local press, the GNOME Peru Fest introduced newcomers to GNOME and invited users to look under the hood.

GUADEC

GUADEC is where many in the GNOME community meet every year to hear talks on what is up and coming, plan together on where to go next, and welcome new contributors into our lively community. The 2014 edition of GUADEC took place from July 26 through August 1 and had about 190 attendees. We were hosted by Epitech, a technology school located centrally in Strasbourg, France.

We were very fortunate to have three exciting keynotes this year from Jim Hall, Nathan Willis, and Matthew Garrett. All three keynotes were very given to packed rooms and rousing applause.

Jim Hall discussed his work on user testing various parts of GNOME. He presented his methodology and showed how it revealed various usability issues and pointed out ways GNOME could be even better.

Nathan Willis gave a fascinating talk on how free software is making inroads into the automotive industry. He gave useful tips to those who are willing to take a more hands-on approach to the computers within their own cars.

Matthew Garrett took us through the history of the desktop and showed us his vision of the future. He challenged us to continue our mission to provide a free and open desktop while keeping user privacy and security in mind.

The other talks ran the gamut between technical talks including sessions on gstreamer, Wayland, and GTK+, to community issues like copyrights and trademarks, being an ally to women in tech, and using gpg for beginners. Also of note were talks by our former Executive Director, Karen Sandler, sharing what she learned during her tenure here, and an introduction to Builder by Christian Hergert.

One of the aims of GUADEC is to encourage and invite new contributors. One of the staples of GUADEC, the intern lightning talks, gave our many interns the opportunity to present their work to the community at large. In addition, we had a newcomers' workshop which helped those who attended learn how begin contributing to GNOME.

Another staple of GUADEC, the annual GNOME Women's Dinner in its fifth year, featured lively conversation that inspired attendees who found themselves in a group of other women passionate about GNOME. There were 23 women attending GUADEC or 12% of total attendees, and 4 women speaking at GUADEC, or 11% of the speakers.

As a community, we also like to thank long-term contributors who have gone above and beyond during the past year by giving them the traditional Pants Award. This year, this award went to Alexandre Franke, who was the driving force in making sure this year's GUADEC was a success. In his spare time, he also works with the internationalization and localization teams and we cannot be more grateful to have him in our community.

The conference continued after the core days with BOFs and hackfests. A total of fourteen different topics were discussed, including internationalization, Maps, Pitivi and Gstreamer, Documents and Photos, privacy, and screenshot automation.

After such a wonderful GUADEC, the GNOME community was invigorated and went home ready to implement some of the ideas and plans they had developed.

Others Conferences

In addition to these GNOME-specific conferences, GNOME sent representatives and staffed a booth at Fosdem, JDLL, and FSCONS. We also sent representatives to SXSW, DebConf14, and FOSSASIA. We aim to increase exposure to GNOME and both hosting and attending more conferences is one way to reach that goal.

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Editor/Reviewer Notes

The conference section (page 8) in the 2013 Annual Report can serve as a source of inspiration.

Comments

See last year's annual report, page 8, for reference: https://www.gnome.org//wp-content/uploads/2014/09/GNOME-Annual-Report-2013.pdf

= Next Steps = Proofreading complete. Need to integrate photos.

2024-10-23 11:05