GNOME-Related Events

Community events are incredibly important to the growth and vitality of GNOME. When people get to know each other in-person it helps create trust, empathy, and bonds that carry over into the online world in which we mainly collaborate.

This page has been created to help you organize events by providing you with event ideas, resources for organizing, SWAG, and reimbursement opportunities.

Whether you've been part of GNOME for years, or are brand new to the community, we encourage you to organize an event near you. Just make sure that your event follows the GNOME Code of Conduct for Events in order to qualify as an official GNOME event.

Event Ideas

Having a desire to organize a GNOME-related event is the first step. Below are ideas for events you can run, and resources for each type of event.

If you have another event idea, consider adding it here so that others can replicate it in other parts of the world.

Newcomers Workshop: Code Contributions

Intended to get started in GNOME code contribution.

• Aim to have 1 organizer per 4 to 8 participants.
• Suggested event length: 4 to 8 hours.

• Read the Newcomers guide and help the newcomers to follow it.

  • In case they want to contribute to system components that cannot be built with Flatpak, make sure you have prepared a virtual machine image with a recent jhbuild checkout prepared before the event happens. Building the GNOME stack can require around 5 hours, which is very painful and gives a bad impression if not prepared beforehand.

• A successful event would have some people with their first patch in GitLab.

• Create a blog post with the results of the workshop, preferably with links to the code/bugs the newcomers contributed.

GNOME User Outreach

Intended to show what GNOME platform is from a user point of view, with possibility of installation.

• Aim to have 1 organizer per 8 to 10 participants.
• Suggested event length: 2 to 4 hours.
• Have a distro that has the latest stable release of GNOME and as close to vanilla GNOME as possible. Latest Fedora is always a good option.
• Talk about the Core Apps, the GNOME Shell experience and our focus on design and simplicity for a wide target audience while preserving a powerful platform for developers.
• If the audience are developers, talk about GNOME Builder.
• A successful event would have some people interested in GNOME, asking questions or similar. Ideally some will want to follow up after the event.
• Create a blog post with photos, insights, and attendance.

GNOME Platform Outreach

Intended for people to get started on Linux and Gtk+ development of apps.

• Aim to have 1 organizer per 2 to 5 participants.
• Suggested event length: 4 to 6 hours.

• Choose a language and follow a tutorial. Python is recommended, with tutorial for creating a web browser in varios steps at https://github.com/csoriano89/gtklesson. TODO: where to put this and how to handle a guided tutorial.

• If the audience is too diverse on languages, redirect them to https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-getting-started.html TODO: we cannot say to do this until those tutorials are not easily buildable.

• Use GNOME Builder if possible, together with the option of creating a new project.

• Use the HIG https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/

• A successful event would have some people with the exaples built and ideally small modifications to the example provided.
• Create a blog post with the results of those who managed to create some changes in the example.

Translation Race

Intended to teach and make people get involved with GNOME translation.

• Aim to have 1 organizer per 3 to 7 participants.
• Suggested event length: 1 to 3 hours.

• Follow translation team guide and ask/instruct the newcomers to follow that guide.

• Once they create the translation, explain/remind the process with the coordinator and that it will take time. Review their patches.
• A successful event would have some people with around 100 string translated.
• Create a blog post with a small statistics of the event, how many strings were translated, how many modules, etc. You can use a before/after pattern with the dammed lies statistics.

Bug Squash Hunt

Intended to teach and make people get involved with GNOME triaging.

• Aim to have 1 organizer per 3 to 7 participants.
• Suggested event length: 2 to 4 hours.

• Follow Bugsquad triage guide and ask/instruct the newcomers to follow that guide.

• In case people need to test an app, you can use a VM with GNOME master from Continuous at http://build.gnome.org/#/ or Flatpak for some applications.

• Once they create the translation, explain/remind the process with the coordinator and that it will take time. Review their patches.
• A successful event would have some people with around 10 bugs triaged.
• Create a blog post with a small statistics of the event, how many bugs were triged, what modules and what were the difficulties.

Hackfest Social Event

If you're organizing or participating in a hackfest, it may be nice to have a social activity that includes local GNOME community members who are not participating in the hackfest.

• Aim to have 1 organizer per 8 to 10 participants.
• Suggested event length: 2 to 4 hours.
• Email and local GNOME groups in the area:
• Add the social event details to the hackfest page you or the hackfest organizers have created
• Promote your event. Make sure hackfest attendees know about the social event well enough in advance and ask them to invite friends in the area. Use your collective social media accounts to promote the event to the wider GNOME community or other local groups, and ask the Engagement team for help if needed.

  • Consider sending an email to foundation-list@gnome.org to promote the event

• Ideas for social events at hackfests:
  • pizza party: buy a few pizzas and drinks
  • bar night: order some snacks and have people order their own drinks, or buy a few jugs of beer if it's cheap enough
• Create a blog post with pictures from the event and post to your social media before, during, and after the event.

Release Parties

The whole community works hard to release a new version of GNOME every six months, in March and in September. Help us celebrate that great effort and tell people in your area about what's new at GNOME.

• Aim to have 1 organizer per 10 to 15 participants.
• Suggested event length: 2 to 4 hours.

• Post the details of your event on the relevant release party wiki page and follow the instructions there to find out how to further organize your event.

Important Tips

• Create a hashtag for your event to help promote it

• Submit your best photos to GNOME so that we can use them to encourage others to hold events like yours or become part of the GNOME community

Resources

Whether you want to organize one of the events listed above, or organize a new kind of event, we have some resources to help you.

Organizing

You can use the free/libre GetTogether.Community to plan and promote your event. It's like Meetup.com only free to use and built on free software.

If there is not already a team for your city, you can create a new one and invite people in your community to join it. When creating a new team, use a name like "GNOME <city>" or "<city> GNOME Community".

Be sure to add photos to your event page to highlight the people and activity there, this will help motivate people to attend your future events!

Budget

The GNOME Foundation has set aside a limited amount of funding for small events like the ones listed above. Organizers can request financial assistance for events to go towards things like food or activity costs.

How do I request funds?

Please see the Engagement Funding Policy for information on how to request funds and how to get reimbursed.

SWAG

SWAG stands for "Stuff We All Get" and includes things like stickers and promotional items. You can learn more about what's available and how to get it on our get SWAG page.

We also have flyers and brochures that you can use at your event to make it more official and to help participants know how to get more involved in GNOME.

Marketing

If you need help promoting your event, please reach out to the Engagement team. It helps if you have ideas around social media messages you'd like to them to post and photos or artwork to use for the event promotion.

One thing that plays an important role in events is the GNOME brand. Please follow our brand guidelines if you create your own artwork.

Contact

If you have any questions, please reach out to the Engagement team at engagement-list@gnome.org or at #engagement on IRC for help.