Conferences

GNOME.Asia

GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 was held from May 7-9 in Depok, Indonesia. The conference attracted more than 320 attendees from all over the world.

There were three keynotes: Aidil Chendramata spoke about the inherent security and benefit of using free software, Mohammad Anwari shared how he uses GNOME as a basis for creating a distribution targeted to the Indonesian market, and Tobias Mueller gave an overview of the past, current, and future of the GNOME project. In addition, 48 speakers presented talks with topics including promotion to new users, usage of free software in various industries, and audio input and output in GNOME.

Four workshops were open to attendees and showed them how to contribute to the GNOME project. Over 50 people took part and successfully completed these workshops.

GUADEC

GUADEC is where many GNOME contributors meet annually to catch up on what has happened and plan for the future. This year, the conference took place in Gothenburg, Sweden from August 7-9 and had 157 attendees. Twelve attendees self-identified as women and two attendees self-identified as genderqueer, comprising 8% and 1% of attendees respectively. There were two women speaking, or 8% of the speakers.

Keynote speakers were Matthias Kirschner, Christian Hergert, and Pamela Chestek. Matthias talked about the fight against restrictions placed on computers. Christian discussed Builder—an IDE focused on simplicity and design. Pam showed off the power of community and how it was wielded with rousing success in the battle against Groupon. All three keynote presentations were well received by attentive audiences. In addition, a special Defender of GNOME award handcrafted by Federico Mena-Quintero was presented to Pam for her work on our behalf.

The talks at GUADEC covered varying topics including xdg-apps [1], map rendering, fonts, application design, translation tools, how the release videos are made, and community building. The lightning talks and intern lightning talks gave the audience a window into numerous projects and gave the presenters an appreciative audience to present their achievements.

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) gave a forum for the many GNOME teams to present to the membership all they have accomplished in the past year. The Board of Directors were introduced and answered questions from the audience. The highlight of the AGM was the presentation of the GNOME Pants award. This year, the award went to Emily Chen for her tireless efforts towards the GNOME.Asia conference and her work on the travel committee. We are very grateful to have Emily as a member of the GNOME community.

Beyond the conference hall, social events at GUADEC included a walking tour of Gothenburg, a picnic at the park, the annual football match, and the sixth annual women's dinner.

The conference continued after the cored days with BoF sessions and hackfests. Fourteen different topics were discussed, including localization/internationalization/documentation, Builder, Wayland, PulseAudio, and engagement.

GNOME Peru Fest

Aimed at stirring interest and welcoming new contributors, GNOME Peru Fest invited interested parties to learn about GNOME and our internship opportunities. The 2015 GNOME Peru Fest took place on March 13, 2015 in Centro Cultural PetroPeru.

Using videoconferencing technologies, speakers from around the world were able to address the audience. Federico Mena-Quintero introduced the GNOME project, Laura Castro talked about the GNOME community, Marina Zhurakhinskaya explained the internship possibilities with Outreachy and Google Summer of Code, and a number of prior interns in these programs discussed what they worked on and how much they had gotten out of the experience.

Boston Summit

The Boston Summit took place on October 11-13, 2014 on the MIT campus. About twenty GNOME contributors gathered to make progress on technologies such as GTK+, GNOME Builder, application runtime and bundling, Wayland, webkit2, and kdbus. Christian Hergert did a demo of GNOME Builder. Richard Stallman came by and spent an hour with the group, discussing the history of Free Software and current challenges. Breakfasts and pool at Flap Top Johnny's were generously sponsored by Red Hat and Codethink.

Other Conferences

GNOME had a presence at other conferences as well. GNOME staffed booths at FOSDEM (Brussels, Belgium) and JDLL (Lyon, France). Five GNOME members gave talks at FSCONS (Gothenburg, Sweden).

[1] "xdg-apps" were renamed "Flatpak apps" after the presentations at GUADEC.

Images

Comments

Should we replace "xdg-apps" with "Flatpak apps"? - Nuritzi

It should have been "xdg-app" (fixed that). I think we need to use the name that it had at the time, but it's helpful to provide the current name too, so I added "(later renamed to Flatpak)". - Marina

Do the stats on women who spoke at GUADEC include lightning or intern talks? If so, then the number should be higher. Pam and I spoke, and I could have sworn that at least one other woman spoke during the core conference days... - Nuritzi

For speakers, I looked at the core days schedule and only found Nuritzi and Pam there. The total number of speakers, 26, also only represents full-session speakers. This is what I have been reporting for GUADEC in prior years too.

So this doesn't count team reports speakers or lightning talk speakers. If you wanted to, we could report that separately, but it might be hard to track down who were the team report speakers. For intern lightning talks, we have the information on speakers - there were 2 women among 16 speakers. I don't know where the information on the other lightning talks is - you could probably find out from the papers committee who was in charge of that. - Marina

Reviewer(s) notes

Reviewed by Nuritzi Sanchez on May 31, 2016 Edited down by Nuritzi Sanchez on June 18th, 2016