Newcomers Workshop

During the Newcomers Workshop, established GNOME contributors will help you try out GNOME and learn how to contribute.

Prerequisites: bring your GNU/Linux, Windows, or Mac laptop
Non-prerequisites: familiarity with GNOME, programming experience

Upcoming Workshops

Who should attend

You should consider attending the workshop if any of the following applies to you:

• You have never used the GNU/Linux desktop, and would like to learn what it's like
• You would like to learn more about the latest GNOME version
• You would like to know how the GNOME community is structured
• You would like to learn the process and the tools for contributing to GNOME
• You would like to know how to approach contributing to any Free and Open Source Software project
• You would like to start fixing simple bugs without spending time on building your own development environment

What happens during the workshop

During the workshop we will:

• Demonstrate the latest GNOME system

• Give an overview of the GNOME community structure, collaboration practices, and ways to start contributing (slides)

• Help people who don't have a recent GNOME system or are interested in a pre-installed development environment, install a GNOME system in a virtual machine

• Help people work their way through the newcomers tutorial that teaches the process and the tools for downloading the code for a GNOME module, testing the module locally, submitting a bug report, and providing a fix for a bug

• Discuss your interests in contributing to GNOME or any other Free and Open Source Software project and next steps
• Help you fix your first GNOME bug
• Answer any questions you might have

Tools you will learn

The following tools are used by the GNOME community for development and collaboration. During the workshop, you will learn and practice using many of them.

• IRC for communicating with each other

• Git for storing and contributing to the code, documentation, and translations

• Bugzilla for bug tracking

• diff, patch, and Git-specific commands for making patches with your changes

• JHBuild for building a development version of GNOME on your system

• Wiki and Planet GNOME for knowledge sharing

• GNOME Love and Developer Center for information on how to start contributing

Past Workshops

• Newcomers Workshop at Flock, Prague, Czech Republic, August 9, 2014

• Newcomers Workshop at GUADEC, Strasbourg, France, Saturday, July 26, 2014

• Newcomers Workshop during GNU 30th anniversary celebration and hackathons, Cambridge, MA, September 28-29, 2013

• Newcomers Workshop organized by Google Developer Group - Kyiv and Google Developer Group Women - Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine, August 17, 2013

• Newcomers Workshop at GUADEC, Brno, Czech Republic, August 1, 2013

• Newcomers Workshop at Boston Summit, Cambridge, MA, October 5, 2012