Hong Kong is well known for being one of the largest cities in Asia, with a thriving cultural scene, solid infrastructure, and robust public transportation system. Many countries have a visa-free period for travel with Hong Kong and the city has well integrated international connections. We believe that hosting the event in Hong
Kong will bring the spotlight on GNOME and make an impact locally, regionally and internationally in terms of business and community building. Aside from being a business capital, Hong Kong is also well known as a tourist destination that is famous for its food, shopping and many attractions.

Potential sites for the conference are the Breakthrough Youth Village Campsite and City University of Hong Kong, and reasonable rates for accommodations have been arranged.

We would like to thank everyone who participated in the GNOME.Asia 2012 bidding process, especially the great work from Team GNOME Hong Kong and Team GNOME Indonesia. We look forward to working with you more in the future!

The GTK+ hackfest will begin on Friday, 2/17 and will combine presentations and working sessions. The event will be a chance to plan GTK+ development, and will include discussions of Clutter integration, accessibility support and how to meet user experience goals. Visit the GNOME wiki for more details and a list of attendees from the GNOME community.

The Doc Sprint will also begin on Friday, 2/17. It will be an intensive work session for the GNOME Documentation Project, with the goal of updating and creating current documentation for the release of GNOME 3.4. This group will be updating GNOME help and GNOME application tutorials, improving GObject overview, and more. See the GNOME wiki for details and a list of attendees.

Both hackfests are being hosted by Red Hat, as a part of its 2012 Developer Conference which is occurring February 17-21. The Developer Conference is open to all Linux and JBoss developers, admins and users. Entrance is free and registration is not required. There will be breakfasts, snacks and a party catered by Red Hat on Friday evening.

They are:

1. Sergio Villar Senín (WebKitGtk+, libsoup and Epiphany)
2. Christy Eller (GNOME’s OPW internship, GNOME Marketing and gnome.org’s development)
3. Julita Inca Chiroque (GNOME Documentation, GNOME’s OPW internship)
4. Aurimas Černius (Gnote’s maintainer, Lithuanian translations for GNOME)
5. Martin Pitt (Debian / Ubuntu packaging for GNOME, PyGObject, Bug triaging and fixing)
6. Neil Roberts (Cogl’s maintainer, Clutter’s contributions, GNOME’s esperanto translator)
7. Jasper St. Pierre (Many contributions on mutter / gnome-shell, author of the extensions.gnome.org website)
8. Shaswat Nimesh (Speaker at Gnome Asia Summit 2011, GUADEC Committee member, Founder and coordinator of Chennai GNOME User Group and GNOME’s advocacy in India)
9. Michal Hruby (Zeitgeist and Synapse developer)
10. Vibha Yadav (Evolution and related modules, GNOME.Asia 2011 as a speaker)

Congratulations to our new members!

If you contribute to GNOME, you too can become a member of the Foundation. See the membership page for details.

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The hackfest was very productive, some of the highlights included:

• It was agreed to remove key events emission from GTK+ as soon as an alternative implementation is provided. Several approaches for this implementation where discussed.
• Accessibility support for WebKitGtk+ has been further improved with a big refactoring of the code, as well as exposing WebKit2Gtk+ accessibility hierarchies to ATK/AT-SPI.
• Ideas for a more efficient and effective AT-SPI2 cache policy were discussed, with the goal of keeping DBus messages traffic to a minimum.
• There was an important discussion about global vs per-object events. The aim here is to make sure that only the relevant events are sent to accessibility clients. In the short term, the current goblal-events hook-based implementation will be maintained, but we will be exploring alternatives.
• It was concluded that in order to enable accessibility support by default, we shouldn’t use ATK-bridge as a module, but integrate it in the core platform. Several possible approaches were discussed, and we set the aim of having a concrete plan decided by the time GNOME 3.4 is released.
• These and other accessibility underpinnings were worked on, which will effectively improve the experience of GNOME users who need accessibility features.

There are many challenges in the near future of accessibility and GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!.

The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

GNOME will have a booth at FOSDEM this year, with T-Shirts for sale, stickers and more. GNOME developers will be available to answer questions and will be demonstrating the latest GNOME technologies. GNOME community members will also be attending FOSDEM including Karen Sandler, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, as well as members of the GNOME Release Team.

There are going to be many talks about GNOME, covering topics ranging from new technologies, community organization and design. Most of these talks will be held in the Cross-Desktop Devroom (H 1308). Here are some of them:

As usual, there will be a GNOME Beer Party on Saturday night. Held at “La Bécasse” (rue de Tabora 11 (2 minutes from the Grand Place) from 20:00-00:30 in the city center (NOT “La Bécasse” by ULB/FOSDEM!)

If you are a GNOME contributor, let us know if you will be attending FOSDEM at: https://live.gnome.org/Brussels2012/Attendees.

Linux Journal reports that “GNOME 3 represents a drastic change in the way we compute on the desktop“, and says the readers have proven “that change isn’t always a bad thing, and GNOME 3 wins!”.

The hackfest will be focusing on two key GNOME accessibility technologies – ATK and AT-SPI. These facilities allow GNOME applications to be used through accessibilty technologies, such as screen readers.

The hackfest is being hosted by Igalia who, alongside the GNOME Foundation, are sponsoring the hackfest. See the hackfest wiki page for more details.

GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing accessibility efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!

GNOME has held accessibility amongst its core values from the project’s inception. Because of this commitment, along with the efforts of many dedicated developers, GNOME 2 became an award winning accessible free desktop environment.

“For me, GNU/Linux and GNOME equal freedom, and without all of the hard work which has been put into all of this wonderful software, I would truly be at a loss. This is why further development and maintenance of accessible software is so important to me.” –Read the rest of Robert Cole’s story.

With the advent of GNOME 3, GNOME has started down an exciting new path in terms of usability, which will include users of all ages and abilities. This drive is not only necessary for those with disabilities but is also increasingly needed for our devices work for any user. The GNOME accessibility team is working hard, but its resources are more limited than in the past.

With your help we can tackle the accessibility team’s many goals, making GNOME the best and most accessible desktop available today. Please help us make 2012 the Year of Accessibility at GNOME! Donate $25 or more today and ask your friends to donate too.

Due to its excellent facilities, strong local organizational team and affodable local accommodations, A Coruña, Spain, was chosen out of the several excellent locations proposed for the 2012 event. The conference will be held at the University of A Coruña’s Faculty of Computer Science, which has shown a longstanding commitment to free and open source software.

Alberto Valderruten, Dean of the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A Coruña said, “This year we are celebrating our 25th aniversary of the Faculty of Computer Science, and are really proud to host GUADEC, one of the most important events for the Free Software Community. The organization of GUADEC 2012 in Coruña will support an increase in our students’ involvement in the Free Software culture.”

The core organizing team for GUADEC 2012 will consists of members from GHANDALF, a nonprofit association that promotes and spreads Free Software in Spain, GNOME HISPANO, an organization dedicated to GNOME for Spanish speakers, GPUL, a GNU/Linux Users and Developers Group, Igalia and the University of A Coruña. All of the core team members are dedicated to free and open source software, and are active in a number of free software organizations in Spain.

“We are really happy to invite one of the most awesome communities of free software developers to Coruña!” said Francisco Javier Tsao Santín of GPUL, and a member of the GUADEC 2012 local team

“We expect that the organization of GUADEC in Coruña will help to boost the development of the GNOME project with new ideas and contributions.” added José María Casanova of Igalia, and also a member of the GUADEC 2012 local team

GUADEC 2012 follows a successful 2011 Desktop Summit held in Berlin, a joint conference by the GNOME and KDE communities. As planned at GUADEC 2010, the 2012 conference will return its specific focus to GNOME, though future joint events may be planned again.

Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said, “The Desktop Summit in Berlin was a great conference. Both the GNOME and KDE Communities reported successful meetings and are focused for the year. 2012 will be my first GUADEC as Executive Director and will also be the first GUADEC since the release of GNOME 3. I think it is well-timed to be a productive gathering in beautiful A Coruña.”

A call for GUADEC 2012 conference papers will be issued early in 2012. Other announcements will also be made at that time with details about the CFP and session tracks.

Find more information

For more information about GUADEC please visit the event website: www.guadec.org
Follow our updates via identi.ca / Twitter at: @guadec

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. In the 15 years since then, the project has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, GNOME is a popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized by a large number of popular mobile device manufacturers.

The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. It is comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies. The Foundation is a member directed 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project. The GNOME Foundation supports the pursuit of software freedom through the innovative, accessible and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. Find out more about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation through their websites: www.gnome.org / foundation.gnome.org

Become a Friend of GNOME today! Visit this link: http://www.gnome.org/friends/

Media Enquiries

Karen Sandler
GNOME Foundation Executive Director
email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
phone: +1-617-206-3947

The hackfest was extremely productive, and highlights of the work accomplished there include:

• new design and other improvements for Epiphany, including a rewrite of the Ad Blocker extension and fixed security status
• a consolidated WebKit2 API (for better browser stability)
• work to improve accelerated compositing issues and support
• discussion about HTML5, with a focus on improved video support, notifications and history
• better accessibility support as well as accessibility bug fixing work for WebkitGTK+
• improvements to JavaScriptCore
• a replacement plugin for Flash videos

The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

Photos of the event are available here and here.