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GUADEC

GUADEC is the largest annual conference for GNOME developers and users which is held annually in cities around Europe. In 2012, GUADEC was held in the city of A Coruña (Galicia, Spain) from July 26 to 1st August.

This conference had a very enthusiastic atmosphere and was very successful. There were close to 300 attendees from all around the world and a blend of old and new contributors. The project has been gaining a creative momentum, not only because what we have accomplished thus far with GNOME 3, but also for what we must still do to deliver the best free and open desktop. A complete program with more than forty presentations took part in the first core days. GSoC and OPW students participated actively in the conference, including a scavenger hunt type of contest designed to help the participants get to know the GNOME Community better, along with a series of lightning talks where they could present their work. The conference also included fun leisure activities that help the attendees get together and discover A Coruña and try culinary specialities from the region.

[Note: for this next paragraph, could we include the pictures of each of the speakers with the sentence of text next to them? We could use the ones from here: http://2012.guadec.org/program]

The keynotes were given by an interesting group of personalities that enriched the conference with several topics. Jacob Appelbaum, developer of the Tor Project, talked about privacy issues in computers. This talk was the seed of a new track of development in GNOME to protect users rights and subsequently a Friends of GNOME campaign was started in order to fundraise the development in this direction. Adam Dingle and Jim Nelson from Yorba gave a detailed analysis about how free and open applications can use crowdfunding. Alex "Skud" Bayley talked about ways of making contributing to free and open source projects more inclusive. Finally, because this year GNOME turned 15 years old, an special keynote about the early days of GNOME was given by three pioneers of the project, Federico Mena Quintero, Jonathan Blandford and Dave Mason.

A highlight of the conference was a congratulations from the Galician government on the 15th year anniversary of GNOME. The regional government is using GNOME in the Abalar Project, set to reach 44,000 students and in the CEMIT Network, the galician Network for the Modernization and Inclusion Technology, which has over 14,000 users. Adrian Lence, director of the Infrastructure and Telecommunications Amtega "is a superb example of the virtues of free software".

The final days of the conference were very productive with several BoFs and Hackfests. GNOME Hispano also offered a Spanish speaking track in order to lower the language barrier for local people interested in GNOME.

The organization was led by the local associations GPUL and GHANDALF. The organizing team was fantastic. They had everything planned down to the smallest detail, including a rock solid network infrastructure. Facilities and infrastructure were provided by the University of A Coruña, which was actively collaborating with the organization of the meeting. The Faculty of Computer Science hosted the event and GNOME users and developers were kindly gifted by a excellent organization and resources to share experiences and new ideas about the future of GNOME Desktop.

The regional government of Galicia, Xunta de Galicia, supported this event in order to promote free software in the region. Thanks also to Canonical, Collabora, Google, Igalia, Red Hat, openshine, Open Invention Network, Mozilla, The Linux Foundation and Codethink for sponsoring this great event.

2024-10-23 11:05