GNOME.Asia

GNOME.Asia is the largest annual GNOME focused conference held annually in host cities around Asia. In 2010 it was held in Taipei, Taiwan in conjucntion with the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters (COSCUP) on August 14th and 15th. COSCUP is the largest annual FLOSS conference organized and promoted by local communities in Taiwan, and so it made sense to hold them concurrently in order to allow more people to attend both. As a result GNOME.Asia 2010 had an attendance of over 1000 people, with another 700+ participating online through video, text and audio broadcasts.

There were several main tracks for the conference including HTML 5, “Open Web” FLOSS licensing and of course GNOME. Brian Cameron gave a talk on the “Road to GNOME 3” which started with an overview of the history of the GNOME Project, which was begun in 1997 by Miguel de Icaza & Federico Mena in order to develop a truly free and open source desktop environment. He went on to describe how the work on GNOME 2.x led to GNOME 3, and the many new technologies being included in GNOME 3 for the first time, including GNOME-Shell, Clutter and Dconf/Gsettings among others.

Dozens of other sessions at GNOME.Asia/COSCUP 2010 were also focused on GNOME and related technologies including those on Gstreamer, Bugzilla, the GNOME Bug Squad, and WebKitGTK+. Accessibility was also a major topic throughout the conference.

In 2011 GNOME.Asia was held in Bangalore India at Dayananda Sagar Institutions on April 2nd & 3rd. Numerous talks were given, mostly focused on GNOME 3 development and design. Allan Day discussed the design of GNOME 3, including the how's and why's of its design which have been controversial in the community. Brian Cameron once again talked about the future of GNOME and where we go from here. Discussions regarding the GNOME user experience and accessibility were also a major theme for the conference.