ED Update – Week 14

Last weekend, I was at LibrePlanet 2018, the FSF’s annual conference where I gave a talk about Free Software desktops and their continued importance. The videos are currently being uploaded, and there were some really interesting talks on a wide range of subjects. One particular highlight for me was that Karen Sandler (Software Freedom Conservancy ED, and former GNOME ED) won the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, which was very highly deserved. Additionally, the Award for Projects of Social Benefit went to Public Lab, who had a very interesting talk on attracting newcomers and building communities. They advocated the use of first-timers-only as a way to help introduce people to the project. It was good to catch up with GNOMErs and various people in the wider community.

I arrived a day early into Boston, as Deb Nicholson had kindly helped organise a SpinachCon. The idea behind these is to do some user testing and see actual people using GNOME. We were also accompanied by Dataverse and Debian. It was interesting to watch people try and accomplish some tasks (like “Set a wallpaper” and “start a screen recording”) and see what happens. This is probably worth a blog post all on its own, so I’ll write that up separately. For those who want a sneak peak, it wasn’t just usability improvements that could come out of it, but we discovered a couple of bugs as well.

Apart from that, both myself and Sriram Ramkrishna have been added as mods of reddit.com/r/gnome to help out there, and I gave a wide-ranging interview for Destination Linux!