Conferences

GNOME.Asia

The GNOME.Asia Summit for 2016 was held April 21-23 in Delhi, India. The first day was a workshop followed by two days of conference.

Three workshops were held on the first day. Ekaterina Gerasimova started things off with a workshop on making your first contribution. Next up was David King, who led a workshop on writing a GNOME application for newcomers. In the afternoon, Nirbheek Chauhan and Arun Raghavan finished things off with a workshop on Gstreamer and multimedia hacking.

GNOME.Asia had three keynotes by Cosimo Cecchi, Pravin Satpute and Ekaterina Gerasimova. Cosimo Cecchi talked about the next billion GNOME users and how they will effect the GNOME Project in the future. Pravin discussed the state of Indian languages in GNOME.3.20 and Ekatarina Gerasimova talked about contributing to GNOME.

Speakers at GNOME.Asia 2016 represented more than seven countries, and presented on subjects from privacy and security to automotive platforms, bug reporting, marketing and many others. The conference continues to be a success for GNOME’s users and developers around the world, helping to solidify GNOME’s presence as a global project.

GUADEC

GUADEC is where many GNOME contributors meet annually to catch up on what has happened over the past year and plan for the future. In 2016 GUADEC took place in Karlsruhe, Germany, August 11-17. There wee 158 attendees of which 16 self-identified as female and 4 as other, comprising 10% and 3% of attendees respectively. [Have these percentages shifted over the last year or two?]

The first day was dedicated to workshops where attendees could choose to learn about building applications on Linux, building applications with GObject, contributing to an open source project, or making a first contribution to GNOME.

Keynote speakers were Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Conservancy and Werner Koch from GnuPG. Bradley discussed the GNOME project and its ability to deliver software freedom to everyone, while Werner discussed the move towards centralization on the internet and why a decentralized internet may be best for everyone.

Talks at GUADEC covered topics including flatpak, WebKit, the newcomers initiative, community building, builder, privacy, documentation, and animation. Lightning talks and intern lightning talks rounded off each day with quick peaks into other projects, including one on the creation of last year's annual report.

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) introduced the new Board of Directors, and gave Foundation members a summary of various GNOME teams during the previous year. The annual GNOME Pants were awarded to Alexander Larsson for his work on flatpak and everything else he has done for GNOME past and present.

LAS GNOME

The LAS GNOME conference took place in Portland, Oregon, September 19-23, 2016. LAS GNOME was geared towards encouraging attendees to explore the GNU/Linux application ecosystem and the tools necessary to contribute and help GNOME grow in the market.

Headlining the conference were Alexander Larsson, Matthew Garret and Matt Dalio. Alexander Larsson presented flatpak and how it will help to revolutionize the packaging and shipping of Linux applications, while Matthew Garrett explained the importance of user safety and security, and Matt Dalio discussed the challenges and opportunities that come with making computing accessible to the next billion people around the world.

Other topics covered during the conference included 3D graphics, usability, marketing, and the consumer electronics market.

The last day of LAS GNOME had a number of BoFs and workshops covering licensing, GTK+, Builder, and FlatHub.

Boston Summit

The Boston Summit took place October 10th to 12th, 2015 on the MIT campus. Around a dozen contributors attended. Discussions on ostree, Wayland, gnome-builder, and other topics were covered and many bugs were fixed during the unconference.

HACK CAMP 2016 FEDORA + GNOME

Hack Camp was a cosponsored event with Fedora, from March 4th to 6th in Peru. Thirty participants took part, where they learned how to install GNOME using jhbuild, find a project to work on, and how to submit a contribution back to the project.

Other Conferences

GNOME had a presence at other conferences as well, staffing a booth at Fosdem in Brussels, Belgium; presentation at CONEISC 2016 in Peru; presentations and a hackfest at Linuxconf Northwest.

Reviewer Notes

Comments by Nuritzi on June 20, 2017

• The Boston Summit summary belongs in the next 2016 - 2017 Annual Report since this one is only supposed to cover events up until the end of September 2016 [Does this perhaps relate to the previous Boston Summit in 2015? - EmilyGonyer]

  • I added the 2015 to it. The 2016 one was in Montreal -RY

• The events page says that we were at LinuxFest Northwest in April 2016, but there isn't any more information beyond that. I suppose Sri went to that, so maybe ask him?

  • Found it in my email and added. -RY

• Where did you get the stats for attendees at GUADEC 2016? It seems like the total number of participants was 160 instead of 158 (source: https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/HowTo/EstimateAttendees)

  • From the news story on https://2016.guadec.org/ That's a great page for other stats if we need more for the infographics page. -RY