Work in Progress
GUADEC 2008
by Davyd Madeley
In 2008 the 9th GUADEC, GNOME's annual get together for developers and interested users, was held in Istanbul, Turkey at Bahçeşehir University between the 7th and 12th of July.
The weather was warm and the atmosphere electric. Everyone who is involved with GNOME gets excited about GUADEC, and this year was no exception. It's a good chance to catch up with the friends you never see, talk shop, and pay someone back that well deserved drink. The University facilities were modern and Istanbul is an exciting city with ancient buildings and many places to chill out with other GNOMEies (such as the popular cushion bars that were found near the hotels).
As in previous years, the conference had warm-up days (with BOFs and meetings), core days (with talks and keynotes) and a wind-down (more talks and BOFs).
GNOME Mobile was a popular topic this year, with BOFs on maemo & Nokia, GNOME Mobile and OpenMoko as well as talks by developers from ACCESS, Opened Hand, Imendio and Collabora. Integrating GNOME and the web also received some talk-time with presentations on the online desktop, rich desktop applications, Moonlight, online GConf and the HTTP-enabled desktop. Plus keynotes on both Mozilla and Webkit.
The big focus of the keynotes was User Experience (a focus which continued through to this year's Boston Summit). Industry experts Leisa Reichelt and Matt Webb talked about design in the abstract. GNOME founder, Federico Mena-Quintero later spoke about his future visions for a document-centric GNOME.
The GTK+ Developer's Meeting and "State of the Union" laid out the timeline for the end of GTK+ 2.0 and their roadmap for GTK+ 3.0. On the final full day, the GNOME Release Team presented their timeline for GNOME 3.0.
Of course GUADEC is not just about technical presentations, or team meetings; equally important is the down time. The social events this year were outstanding, the sponsors and organisers really pulled out the stops. There was the welcoming party, the FreeFA football (soccer) tournament, cocktails on the University roof, the Google closing party, and the event was many people's highlight of the whole conference, the boat party on the Bosphorus strait.
I'd like to do a bit at the end with people's comments on GUADEC in little speech bubbles with their hackergotchi next to it -- need to collect some comments |
|| Some nice photos I found on flickrs:
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Other people have made panoramas too. Would be nice to choose a good one. |
