Cross posted from the GNOME Foundation blog where you can find previous updates.
Spent the week at the Desktop Summit/GUADEC in Gran Canaria.
Met with a ton of people. Putting lots of faces to names. (Some
people need new hackergotchis, identi.ca and twitter icons. Me
included.) Managed to see a couple of talks too.
I have to admit I was most interested in the questions and discussions
that the presentations generated. I was very excited that many people
reported interesting KDE/GNOME conversations.
Realized that while this year I don’t have several hundred GNOME
people to meet for the first time, I suddenly have several hundred KDE
people to meet … I met quite a few at the Nokia party as I was one of
the first (if not the first) GNOME person to show up.
Igalia sponsored the GNOME party and didn’t forget our traditions:
ice cream death match and jam session. It was a great time! (The
whiskey thing happened another night. I decided it was wisest not to
attend that party.)
The board of advisors meeting went well. We had a round table in the
morning followed by a finance update and a call for help with
hackfests. (Almost all the sponsors would very much like to see us do
more hackfests we just have to figure out how to get the funding.) We
also got some great commitments to help with Friends of GNOME, GNOME
customer success stories and hackfests. After an excellent lunch in a
Persian restaurant that Rosanna, Owen and Blizzard found, we returned
for a discussion with the GNOME 3.0 projects. (All those projects
involved in GNOME 3.0.)
I had breakfast with some local government and university officials.
I sat next to Jose Miguel Santos Espino, the director of the computer
science department, and I happened to tell him about the GNOME and KDE
folks in Nigeria that couldn’t get visas to come. A couple of days
later he contacted me with an excellent proposal. He suggested that we
work with their International Cooperations Department to find ways to
bring free software to countries in Africa as well as Latin America and
Asia. We had a good conversation with Josefa de la Rosa Cantos and we
will work with them during their next conference of Spanish and African
universities.
I also got a chance to talk to Antonio Jose Saenz Albanes who is
working a project to deploy 2 million laptops to students in Andalucia.
His main problem is accessibility so I introduced him to the GNOME
accessibility team.
The GNOME Mobile BOF started out the same way that so many GNOME
Mobile BOFs do trying to define what is GNOME mobile but we actually
progressed during this one which was awesome. GNOME Mobile is a place
for people using GNOME Mobile technologies to collaborate. However,
we’ll build on the GNOME brand, not the GNOME Mobile brand. We also
brainstormed quite a few ideas, like inviting the maintainers for key
GNOME technologies to join the GNOME Mobile mailing list.
AGM – the GNOME Foundation annual meeting. The AGM went really well even though we competed with many
other attractions. All the teams gave an update. We’ll be posting
minutes and slides but in the meantime you can check out the GNOME
identi.ca feed where the AGM was broadcast live.
The marketing BOF was late Thursday afternoon in a really hot room but people had some great ideas. (We were hot!) We discussed things like marketing campaigns, audiences (existing GNOME
users, not developers), having regional presence on the to-be-formed
press team. and we decided we’d put together 4 case studies (GNOME
success stories) by the end of the month. Anne Ostergaard suggested the
Andalusian school project. Guy Lunardi provided a Novell customer
story. I took notes and we’ be publishing soon.
Survey. If you are part of the GNOME community and you haven’t already filled out the survey, please take the co-locating survey.
We’ll be deciding next week whether we are co-locating again or not
next year. One thing I’ve noticed about the respondents so far is that
of the people that collaborated with a KDE person, 95+% think the
co-located Desktop Summit was a success. Among those that didn’t
collaborate with a KDE person, only 35% think the Desktop Summit was a
success.
Starting the 20+ hour trip home tomorrow at 4am. Looking forward to seeing the family!