GNOME around the world

Around the world, GNOME users and developers gather together in their own communities to spread the word about our project. Here is a quick look at some of their activities from 2008.

Spain

Grouped under the GNOME Hispano umbrella, Spanish users and developers have had a great year of activities and were recognized for their efforts. We began the year with the 5th GUADEC-ES (the Spanish version of GUADEC) which was held in Fuenlabrada at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos on July 3-4. Sixty users and developers were present to discuss topics from innovation to developing with GNOME libraries.

Later on, the Polinux user group from Valencia invited GNOME Hispano, for the second time, to collaborate on the organization of GUADEMY (a joint conference for Spanish GNOME and KDE developers). The conference attendees included hackers from outside Spain and is shaping up to be a big event for project coordination and collaboration.

During its many years of existence, the group has been recognized and awarded for their many achievements. This year they received a bunch more: the Navegantes de Hoy award given by spanish internet users and the Iniciativa Focus' Awards to Conocimiento Libre.

As you might know, in 2009 GNOME Hispano will be, for the third time, supporting the GUADEC organization since the next yearly GNOME meeting will be held in Gran Canaria, Spain together with the annual KDE conference, Akademy.

Brazil

Being the biggest country in Latin America, the work of GNOME Brazil is not easy.

In April, GNOME Brazil was present in FISL - the biggest free software conference in Latin America. As always, the GNOME booth was raided by people wanting to join the community by helping or learning more about the project.

During the year, Jorge Pereira and Jonh Wendell, among others, travelled throughout Brazil giving talks and workshops on GNOME topics. Vicente Aguiar presented an interesting article about the GNOME Project for the 13th National Association of Research in Administration Meeting.

To close the year of activities, hackers and contributors from Brazil and some others from Latin America met in Foz do Iguaçu for the Fifth Fórum GNOME held in Latinoware 2008. It was one of the stops in the GNOME Latin America Tour. GNOME Brazil's hero Izabel Valverde was crucial for coordinating with Latinoware to bring more GNOME contributors from around the continent to the conference.

This year the Brazilian translation team saw improvements in their workforce and workflow thanks to new volunteers and new tools. And to top all, there are a bunch of proud Brazilians that just joined the Foundation: Vladimir Melo, Licio Fonseca, Fábio Nogueira and Leonardo Fontenelle.

Chile

During 2008, GNOME Chile grew as a community. People who attended GNOME events were not only attendants; they felt part of the community. This growth speaks well of the health of our community.

The number of FLOSS-related conferences has grown in the last year in Chile. GNOME Chile was represented at almost all of them with speakers and/or a booth.

In March, a group of Chilean contributors were kindly invited as speakers to the event Involucrate+, which was held in Lima, Peru. It was a great opportunity to spread the word about the GNOME project, share experiences, and meet developers and enthusiasts from different places and projects.

In April, GNOME Chile participated in the Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (Santiago, Curicó, and Concepción) with talks about the project and how to get involved in both Free Software development and the GNOME Community.

In September, contributors from different cities across the country gave talks about GNOME during Freedom Software Day.

In October, GNOME Chile had a booth at the main Linux Conference in Chile (9º Encuentro Linux), and also gave several talks about GNOME as preamble of the Día de GNOME (GNOME Day).

In 2008, the GNOME Day --part of Latin American Tour-- was held in the beautiful city of Concepción. It was a great event, with the happiness in the air. It was not only a chance to meet new people, sharing experience, knowledge, and motivation, but also to discover new gems in the community and, last but not least, the beginning of new contributors of the Spanish translation team.

It was a progressive conference, starting with talks about community and getting involved in different projects (art, translation, bugsquad, development), but also with small talks given by newcomers in GNOME Chile and finishing with more technical and specific topics.

At the end of October, a couple of Chilean contributors traveled to Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, to give talks in the Fórum do GNOME which was en event part of Latinoware and Latin American Tour.

Perú

Trying to foster the involvement of new contributors to free software projects, the team of Involucrate.org asked the Foundation for the chance to have a meeting of GNOME hackers and contributors in early March at Lima.

The event gathered a good number of volunteers, attendees, and local hackers from other projects and was a great place to meet and discuss different projects and ideas.

Later on during the year, two new GNOME contributors, Sergio Infante and Juan Rojas, started to meet to work together in bug triaging, translations and patching. Still on the first stages of formation, they are already planning to have frequent meetings to hack together and help others join the community.

GNOME Latin America Tour

Planned since the beginning of the year, hackers from Perú, Chile, and Brazil crafted a project to spread the word about GNOME around the continent in all the big conferences they could find. This year they arranged big meetings during October: Encuentro Linux and Día GNOME in Chile, and Latinoware and Fórum GNOME in Brazil.

Thanks to the Foundation's support and local communities' coordination with the organizers of Encuentro Linux and Latinoware, we were able to travel contributors to meet, plan and... party :-).

Because there is no better way to get closer to each other than trying to survive in foreign countries or new cities, lots of new friendships and planning took place, from which we hope will bear fruit soon.

China

Hosting the first ever GNOME.Asia summit, the Chinese GNOME community started its activity on the right foot. Ranked as one of the top three FOSS conferences in China by its government for 2008, the summit has already created a lot of expectancy for its next edition which will be held in India.

The Beijing group, known as the BeijingGUG, meet every month to chat about their favorite desktop. They train each other to get involved in GNOME with an internal mentor-student program where Accessibility related projects are getting a special focus.

Belgium/France/Switzerland

The GNOME-FR community was active in various events during the year, with booths at Solutions Linux in January (Paris), at the RMLL in July (Mont de Marsan), and the JDLL in October (Lyon), among others. Due to popular demand, some stickers were printed for Solutions Linux and given away, and of course some t-shirts were available for people.

Many talks were also delivered during these conferences: Dave Neary explained what accessibility is and how GNOME is working on this topic during the RMLL and the JDLL; Frederic Peters organized a workshop during the JDLL to introduce people to the GNOME development process; Dodji Seketeli presented the Nemiver debugger at the JDLL; and Vincent Untz gave an in-depth review of the release management in GNOME to RMLL attendees.

GNOME-FR also applied for the Lutèce d'Or award, which is organized as part of Paris Capitale du Libre. The application was specifically about the "GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility" initiative, explaining the various issues related to accessibility and why accessibility should get more visibility. The organizers recognized this effort from GNOME and rewarded the project with the award for the best community-driven effort.

While not a French-speaking event, FOSDEM (Brussels, in February) has a special place in the heart of many GNOME-FR members. That is why the GNOME presence there was mainly prepared by GNOME-FR. The event itself was handled by the whole community, with people from many different countries manning the GNOME booth. With a widely acclaimed t-shirt introducing the GNOME equation, the booth attracted many people. Also, available were some small white and black GNOME badges. The devroom had a full schedule of talks, which were well-received by the audience. Also this FOSDEM was the first one to see a GNOME Beer Event organized on Saturday evening: all the GNOME community that was in Brussels went there to discuss a wide range of topics, and was joined by many other FOSDEM attendees.

India

The Indian community had a special year for l10n, taking the Kannada language from 8% to 75% and Marathi to 97%. GNOME was present with talks and a workout project (Profiling GNOME with DTrace) at FOSS.IN, India's biggest Free Software conference. Also a Beagle hackfest was held at FOSSKriti, together with some talks and general GNOME presence.

Looking forward to 2009, the Indian team is preparing translation sprints for Indic languages to increase GNOME outreach. Additionally, during 2009 they will be hosting GNOME.Asia summit.

Turkey

Putting together a big number of volunteers and ideas, GNOME Turkey held the annual GNOME meeting, GUADEC, in the beautiful city of Istanbul. GUADEC 2008 was really cool, as every year, and the GUADEC team made sure everyone had a great time. Thanks to all the people that helped the organization, GUADEC 2008 was a huge success!

Germany/Italy/United Kingdom/Netherlands

This year, Berlin was the scenario for the GTK+ hackfest where hackers from all around Europe and the world got together to discuss the future of GTK+ and other technologies. Among the biggest results was the draft of the GTK+ 3.0 roadmap, which is now slowly materializing into something concrete.

Some Italian hackers and people from all around the world met and got the opportunity to work together at the SpeckHackFest prior to the South Tyrolean Free Software Conference. The topic of the hackfest was Cairo, while the SFSCon closed the week with general public talks, concentrating on promotion and spreading the word about free software. The hackfest was kindly put together by Daniel Siegel, the maintainer of Cheese.

In the old and charming city of London, GNOME users and developers held a good number of meetings to get to know each other and discuss their favourite desktop. While you can't just live from having beers with your fellow GNOMErs, they took care of the GNOME booth at Linux Live Expo in London, which ran for 3 days, spreading the word and -even better- the cool feeling of being part of the GNOME community.

The GNOME-NL team had a lot of translation work done this year, having two Dutch vertaalspurt (translation sprint). The result of this work is a very healthy Dutch translation of your favorite desktop.