Board and Executive Director
By: Karen Sandler
The fourth quarter of 2011 was an exciting one for me as Executive Director. I keynoted the LATA event in Riga where I discussed GNOME 3 and software freedom and heard about GNU/Linux in Latvia. I also attended UDS, along with a number of other GNOME developers. The best part of this quarter, however, was getting more up to speed with the GNOME community - I'm so inspired by all of the amazing work that our volunteers do, from coding to marketing to documentation to outreach efforts to handling our sys admin needs to serving as board members. We are an amazing community, truly working together to make the world a better place.
The Board and the Foundation were very active this quarter. Some of the notable things that happened are:
At the end of the quarter, we launched a Friends of GNOME program to raise money for GNOME's accessibility effort, declaring the upcoming 2012 as the Year of Accessibility for GNOME.
Following on the GNOME 3.2 release, a new GNOME initiative called Every Detail Matters was announced, aiming to help to take GNOME’s software to the next level by coordinating work to make it more polished and refined.
The GNOME Foundation helped organize the Montreal Summit, which was moved to Montreal from its previous Boston location. The Summit was very productive, with a lot of discussion about the state of GNOME and its path going forward.
We announced the dates of GUADEC this year, which will be held in A Coruña, Spain from July 26 to 29, 2012, with hackfests and other meetings to be held on July 30 through August 1. The GUADEC organizing committee started meeting and planning the conference in this quarter.
We started participating in Google's Code-in, which gives pre-university students aged 13-17 the opportunity to participate in a variety of FOSS projects. GNOME volunteers posted tasks for students to work on and agreed to serve as mentors and administrators for the program.
We selected twelve women from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia to participate in a new round of our Outreach Program for Women. The interns started working this quarter on GNOME technology, documentation, marketing and localization, thanks to generous sponsors, Collabora, Google, Mozilla, Red Hat and the GNOME Foundation.
As always, please email the GNOME Foundation's board of directors at board-list@gnome.org if there is anything The GNOME Foundation can do to help or if there are any opportunities that you think The GNOME Foundation should know about.
Please also consider becoming a Friend of GNOME. Your donations really do help the GNOME Foundation continue provide support and services which help the success of the GNOME project.
Bugsquad
by: André Klapper
From October to December, 6370 reports (bugs + feature requests) were opened and 5984 were closed.
Top bug closers were Akhil Laddha (776 reports), Heinrich Müller (238), André Klapper (235), Matthias Clasen (231) and Cosimo Cecchi (144).
Top bug reporters were Robert Ancell (90 reports), William Jon McCann (80), Pedro Villavicencio (70), Matthias Clasen (69) and Jasper St. Pierre (67).
Release Team
by: FredericPeters
This quarter went with two updates to 3.2.x as well as the start of the 3.3 cycle, with three development releases. With the start of a new cycle we also went discussing our different freezes, and got a simplified process with a new combined freeze (feature freeze, ui freeze and string change announcement period), then our unchanged string freeze and hard code freeze.
Another important thing at the beginning of a cycle is the discussion of new features, it went on during October and November, and ended with a nice set of features targetting 3.4.
Membership and Elections Committee
by: Tobias Mueller
During Q4 2011 The GNOME membership and elections committee received 13 applications for a new foundation membership and 18 applications for renewals of a membership. Out of those, 31 were processed. During the same period, 21 members did not renew their membership and thus dropped out. We ended up with 349 members.
We ended up with 12 new members:
Maciej Piechotka 2011-10-05
Antoine Jacoutot 2011-10-05
Michael Hill 2011-10-19
Jim Campbell 2011-11-10
David Nielsen 2011-11-10
Karen Sandler 2011-11-10
Nilamdyuti Goswami 2011-11-10
Zhang Weiwu 2011-11-16
Patricia Santana Cruz 2011-11-18
Tong Hui 2011-11-18
Vibha Yadav 2011-12-03
Michal Hruby 2011-12-23
GNOME User Groups
Chennai GNOME Users Group
by: Shaswat Nimesh
Journey of Chennai Gnome User Group started after Gnome Asia Summit 2011. Chennai GUG consists of lot of enthusiastic members and it is supported by SRM Linux user group as well. CGUG organised several Foss events and talk sessions, we explored and celebrated Gnome release, Software Freedom day along with other GUG's across the globe. As CGUG mainly consists of University students so, it's fun to share and learn different open source technology with them. They are really creative folks and CGUG is expecting more members to contribute to GNOME community in Gsoc 2012 and Gnome OPW 2012. CGUG is looking forward to organize a Gnome Hackfest asap! :)
Beijing GNOME Users Group in 2011
by: Yu Liansu, Qingjie Bai
We keep organizing the activities every month in 2011, which attracted many students and enthusiasts to participate in.
In the beginning of 2011, we organized GNOME 3.0 Launch Party in Chinese Academy of Sciences, nearly 200 students participated in our activities.During the activities, we communicate with Taiwan GNOME Users Group and Hong Kong Users Group via video and also we invited Flamenco Dancers organization to join us with performances. In order to attract more user, we publicly organized the “Afternoon Tea” forum to show how to use the free software in Beijing Open Party. In Sep. 2011, we celebrate the Software Freedom Day with Beijing Jiaotong University Free Software Association in Beijing Jiaotong University. During the celebration, we introduce people how to join in the Free Software community, and encourage them to be involved actively. You can view the photo gallery of Beijing GNOME Users Group from here.
Yu Liansu, one member of our group, has been selected as intern in the 2011 Outreach Program for Women, also Zhang Weiwu and Tong Hui became a new member of the GNOME Foundation.
Accessibility Team
by: Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias and Joanmarie Diggs
The Accessibility Team actively worked on a number of fronts during the fourth quarter:
Development for GNOME 3.4
Work continued with the UI design team to improve the user interface for magnifier user preferences.
Algorithms were researched in order to provide compelling support for inverse video and brightness/contrast.
Performance improvements were made in Orca, ATK, and AT-SPI2.
Orca's support for WebKitGtk content has been further enhanced.
Friends of GNOME Campaign
The Marketing team, in partnership with our team, planned A Friends of GNOME campaign.
The campaign launched in December with a goal to raise US $20,000 and hopefully make 2012 the "Year of Accessibility" for GNOME.
Events
Two members of our team attended the WebKitGtk hackfest where they focused on continued improvements in the area of Orca's support for content viewed in Epiphany.
The next Accessibility hackfest is being planned: Many team members will return to Igalia in January to continue their collaboration on augmented and more consistently-implemented accessibility support.
Several team members submitted talks for FOSDEM.
Montréal Summit 2011
by: Emily Gonyer
In 2011 the annual 'Boston' Summit was moved to Montréal, Canada. Held at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in the Pavillons Lassonde, October 8-10th. Since the summit occurred just after the release of GNOME 3.2, talks focused on upcoming features in GNOME 3.3/3.4, dovetailing with discussions on the mailing lists. Presentations included those on Baserock by Lars Wirzenius & jhbuild by Colin Walters, as well as others on strategy, the application menu, Google Summer of Code & how to maximize GNOME's participation in it.
Outreach Program for Women
by: Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Three OPW interns from previous rounds - Tiffany Antopolski, Nohemi Fernandez, and Meg Ford - attended the Montreal Summit in Canada on October 8-10. Marina Zhurakhinskaya ran a session about outreach initiatives in GNOME there in which all three of the interns and many other community members participated.
Marina and André Klapper represented GNOME at the Google Summer of Code mentors summit in Mountain View, California on October 21-23. Marina and Pat Tressel from the Sahana Project co-hosted two well-attended sessions on women outreach. Marina presented on the GNOME community's positive experience with women outreach and encouraged other organizations to create lists of mentors with whom newcomers can connect to ask for help.
An application process for the new OPW internships round completed on October 31 and we announced 12 accepted participants in the press release on November 16. The internships have officially started on December 12 and we hosted the first ever IRC meeting for the OPW interns and mentors on December 15, based on the suggestion from Nohemi during the outreach session in Montreal.
The list of mentors for OPW was moved to the GNOME Love mentors page to be a start of a GNOME-wide list of mentors, whom newcomers can contact to get help with their first contribution. It’s great to be able to take the resources and knowledge we developed with OPW and use them to make the experience of any GNOME newcomer better. We are looking forward to getting many new contributors involved in the next quarter with the next round of the OPW internships and Google Summer of Code.
Localization
by: Petr Kovar
During Q4 2011, GNOME language teams worked on translating GNOME apps and docs into tens of supported languages in the stable GNOME 3.2.x and the development GNOME 3.3.x branches.
Several GNOME language teams participated in the Google Code-in 2011 program. This program is for 13-17 year old high school students working on a number of tasks related to localization, documentation, development, and other areas of interest. The program ran from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012.
Two GNOME language teams took part in the 2011 GNOME Women Outreach Program, the Belarus team with Kasia Bondarava (kasia) as the intern and Ihar Hrachyshka as her mentor, and the Xhosa team with Andiswa Mvanyashe (andiswa) as the intern and Friedel Wolff as her mentor. The Outreach Program runs from September 16, 2011 to March 12, 2012.
Web
by: Andreas Nilsson and Vinicius Depizzol
Andrea Veri and Vinicius Depizzol started working on migrating the Foundation part of the website to wordpress. The implementation can be seen on foundation.gnome.org
Allan Day, Christy Eller and Sri Ramkrishna started to work on a new News section for the website with the intent of creating a centralized source of news material rather than the current effort that is spread across news.gnome.org, gnome.org/news and gnomejournal.org Wiki page: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/NewsRedesign and live implementation news-test.gnome.org
Planning of various websites that needs to be migrated to the new design.