GNOME.Asia
The GNOME.Asia conference for 2017 occurred in October this year and will be covered in the next Annual Report.
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 Manchester, England from July 28 through August 2 and was hosted at the Manchester Metropolitan University. There were 204 attendees of which 19 self-identified as female and 3 as other, comprising 9.3% and 1.5% of attendees respectively.
The Keynote speaker this year was Karen Sandler, currently the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy and previously Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Her talk, “The Battle Over Our Technology”, discussed the role of ethics in technology, and how everyone involved with GNOME needs to consider ethics as technology becomes more and more entrenched in society.
The talks at GUADEC covered various topics including updates on Builder, Flatpak, and LibreOffice and introductions to the new Newcomer intiative, GNOME Recipes, and Rust in GNOME. In anticipation of the twentieth anniversary there were three talks that combined discussed the past, present, and future of the GNOME project. Jonathan Blandford’s “The History of GNOME” presented a journey through the 20 years of GNOME including some amusing anecdotes. Allan Day’s talk “The GNOME Way” took that history to explain how and why we as a project plan and execute certain things today. Neil McGovern’s “GNOME to 2020 and Beyond” discussed some challenges the GNOME project faces at the moment and the path the project may take in the future.
The lightning talks and intern lightning talks rounded off the days with quick peaks into other projects. Lightning talks covered a variety of topics and included presentations on hardware testing, documentation, invitations to other conferences, and community engagement. The intern lightning talks were presented by our Google Summer of Code and Outreachy interns summarizing the project they had done for their internship. Projects presented included file integration improvements with the cloud, support for resizing disks, and plugin systems in Pitivi.
The Annual General Meeting (AGM) gave a forum for the many GNOME teams to present to Foundation members all they have accomplished in the past year. The Board of Directors were introduced and answered any questions the membership wanted to ask.
The highlight of the AGM was the presentation of the GNOME Pants award. Given annually at GUADEC, this award is given to someone who has gone above and beyond during the past year. This year, the award went to Bastian Ilsø for his tireless efforts towards the GNOME newcomers initiative, the very popular GNOME release videos, and his many contributions to the engagement team. We are very grateful to have Bastian as a member of the GNOME community.
Following the core days, there were three days of workshops and BoF sessions. The workshops helped newcomers make their first code contribution to GNOME, distribute an app with Flatpak, or contribute to GNOME documentation and localization. BoF sessions covered Flatpak and Flathub, productivity apps, GTK+, fonts, engagement, Rust, builder, tiling, and Meson.
Among the social events at GUADEC were the preregistration party, newcomer’s lunch, city tour, annual football match, women’s dinner, curry mile dinners, and outdoor games. The highlight of the social events was the GNOME 20th anniversary party. Held at the Manchester Museum of Science, there was trivia, dinner, dancing, and cake for all the attendees.
Other Conferences
GNOME had a presence at other conferences as well. GNOME volunteers staffed booths at Fosdem (Brussels, Belgium), SCaLE (Pasadena, California), and SeaGL (Seattle, Washington). Members of the GNOME community presented talks at SCaLE, FOSS North (Göthenberg, Sweden), and keynoted at International Congress of Free Software (Zacatecas City, Mexico). In addition, community members represented GNOME at LibrePlanet (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Libre Graphics Meeting (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Linuxfest Northwest (Bellingham, Washington), OpenSUSE conference (Nuremberg, Germany), and Open Source Summit (Los Angeles, California).