GNOME ED Update – March
It’s time for another update on what the GNOME Foundation has been up to in March.
We attended a couple of events this month. Firstly, we were at SCaLEx17, which took place in Pasadena, California from 7th -10th March. It was a busy conference with a large number of attendees. We had a booth, and warm reception from visitors where we sold a large number of t-shirts and received donations on the booth. Talks were given by Matthias Classen on Containerized Desktops for Fun & Profit and Christian Hergert on Modernizing Desktop Linux Application Development.
After this, we were at the Free Software Foundation‘s event, LibrePlanet. As always, it’s a really community driven conference with a load of great talks. Given our historical association with the FSF and the GNU project, we received a really warm welcome with multiple people saying it was great to see us attend in person!
Another notable development is around our own conference, GUADEC. Our sponsorship brochure has now been published and we’re seeking sponsors! If you or someone you know is interested, then please get in touch :) I’ve heard that the Call for Papers will be opening really soon now, so it’s time to start thinking about giving a presentation at the event, if you’re not already. After unfortunately having to miss last year, I’m really looking forward to attending and meeting GNOME contributors and users – I’ll be attending are you?
I’m actually writing this from FOSS North, where we also have a stand. We’re also going to be attending Linux Fest North West later this month, where Sriram Ramkrishna will be joined by our new Development Coordinator.
That’s right, we’ve managed to find an excellent candidate to take on the role of Development Coordinator for the Foundation, making sure we can sustainably support the number of staff we now have, and they have accepted the role. Expect an email to foundation-announce in the next couple of weeks, introducing them.
We’ve made some really good progress on the Foundation’s Annual report, and we’re in the design phase. This means that it won’t be long until we get this finished, and this time well before GUADEC :)
Finally, we’re trialling the use of a Discourse instance as a new way of communicating. The gtk-devel list has moved over, and gnome-builder is also keen to use it rather than the mailing list. While rolling it out, it’s been really interesting to see people who wouldn’t usually talk to us use the platform. I know that sometimes email works well with people’s workflows, and fortunately you can interact with discourse just via email, if you so chose. We’ll see how it goes before I suggest other people move off mailman, but so far results are very positive.
That’s all for now, I’ll write again next month.