John Sullivan, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation which joins this year as a new sponsor, commented, “The Free Software Foundation is proud to sponsor an internship in GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women. The free software movement is about freedom for everyone, but we have a long way to go to make that a reality. This program’s past achievements in expanding the community by welcoming and retaining newcomers have moved us closer to that goal, and we can’t wait to hear this summer’s success stories.”

This is also the Conservancy’s first participation in the program. It is sponsoring its own participant for the Twisted Project. Twisted maintainer and mentor Jessica McKellar said, “Programs like this encourage free and open source communities to reflect on how to be more welcoming and supportive of people of all backgrounds. The success of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women has been tremendously inspiring; I am pleased that Twisted is joining it in tackling stereotypes in open source head-on this summer while working with our new contributors on some exciting projects.”

Previous rounds of the program have been very successful, and have helped in other mentorship and outreach efforts of the project. When GNOME started the current Outreach Program for Women two years ago, it had an initial list of nine mentors from eight projects who were eager to help with the program. Connecting newcomers with mentors who can guide them in their initial contributions proved to be the most important aspect of the outreach effort. For that reason, GNOME recently moved the list of mentors that was built up for the Outreach Program for Women to be a part of the GNOME Love initiative. There are now 37 mentors from 22 projects who any newcomer can contact any time throughout the year in this ever-growing list. The GNOME team also started a page on the Google Summer of Code wiki that contains links to such lists of mentors in many free software organizations. That page currently has 15 organizations. In addition to being a general resource to point students looking for an organization to join to, the list is also used to spread the word about Google Summer of Code and mentorship opportunities among technical women groups at many universities.

The Outreach Program for Women demonstrated that an initial contribution to the project by an applicant increases their involvement with the project, prepares them for the work during the internship period, and serves as an important selection criteria. This year, GNOME also required the students applying for Google Summer of Code in GNOME to make a contribution to the project they are applying to work on, not just to supply a link to a bug they fixed in any free software project. As a result, all successful applicants demonstrated their ability to work on the project they proposed and discussed their proposal with their potential mentor.

The GNOME community is very proud of the accomplishments of the last round’s Outreach Program for Women participants, which include the following:

• Kasia Bondarava committed Belarusian translations for 35 GNOME modules. With her help, Belarusian translation coverage went from 67% to 88%, making Belarusian a new officially supported language. She also made a comprehensive comparison of different translator tools and advocated for better translator comments.
• Christy Eller has tremendously improved the web development process in GNOME and created the new Friends of GNOME pages.
• Susanna Huhtanen created comprehensive developer documentation about writing GNOME applications in JavaScript.
• Patricia Santana Cruz added support for sharing videos and images with different online services, improved hotplug connection of camera devices, and added recorded time when making a video in the Cheese webcam application.
• Sophia Yu ported Swell Foop game from JavaScript to Vala, completely reworking its implementation, and updated several other games to use new GNOME APIs.

The detailed accomplishments of all 11 program participants can be found at https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2011/Accomplishments

Over three quarters of the women involved in the program have stayed connected to the GNOME community. Better still, Outreach Program for Women participants have a strong tradition of becoming mentors in GNOME. Luciana Fujii Pontello and Ekaterina Gerasimova mentored Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women participants in previous rounds. Tiffany Antopolski, Anita Reitere and Srishti Sethi mentored Google Code-In participants. This round, Christy Eller will co-mentor a Web Development intern and Tiffany Antopolski will mentor four Documentation interns, three of whom will be working on Developer Documentation along with Tiffany. Many former participants have also presented at free software conferences and local events to raise awareness about GNOME and their work. Many have helped with the outreach program by spreading the word about it, improving the materials available about the program, and guiding new applicants.

The Outreach Program for Women is organized by Marina Zhurakhinskaya, with help and support from Karen Sandler, Rosanna Yuen and the GNOME Board of Directors. The essential work is done by the program’s mentors in helping the applicants and eventual participants contribute to their projects. For more information about the Outreach Program for Women, visit http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/women

GNOME 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. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. GNOME’s software has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices.

The GNOME community is made up of hundreds of contributors from all over the world, many of whom are volunteers. This community is supported by the GNOME Foundation, an independent non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal assistance. The Foundation is a democratic institution that is directed by its members, who are all active GNOME contributors. GNOME and its Foundation works to promote software freedom through the creation of innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experiences.

Organizing the Outreach Program for Women helped GNOME improve the resources available for all newcomers and guidelines for the Google Summer of Code applicants. With the GNOME mentors list now available as part of the GNOME Love initiative and with each project idea on the GNOME Google Summer of Code ideas page including a potential mentor, we were able to ensure that the students connect with a potential mentor for the idea they were proposing. We also required the students to make a contribution to the project they are applying to work on. As a result, all successful applicants demonstrated their ability to work on the project they proposed and discussed their proposal with their potential mentor. The GNOME community is thrilled to have these talented and dedicated contributors have a chance to spend the whole summer working on GNOME!

The GNOME Foundation is deeply grateful to Google for its generous support of free software projects and for being included in the program for the eights year in a row! Also, a special thank you to the mentors who help guide the students!

For more information about the accepted projects please visit the GNOME project page on the Google Summer of Code website. The students will blog about their work on Planet GNOME throughout the summer.

GNOME.Asia Summit is Asia’s primier GNOME user and developer conference, spreading the knowledge of GNOME across Asia.

This year’s conference will be held in Hong Kong on June 9 and 10. The conference follows the release of GNOME 3.4, helping to bring new desktop paradigms that facilitate user interaction in the computing world. It will be a great place to celebrate and explore the many new features and enhancements to the groundbreaking GNOME 3 and help make GNOME as successful as possible.

To learn more or submit a paper, see the official GNOME.Asia 2012 website.

• Dan Vrátil (Evolution’s porting to WebKit, Bugzilla contributions)
• Stefano Candori (GNOME Activity Journal maintainer and Zeitgeist
• Andres Gomez (Organized GUADEC in the past, sponsors GNOME through Igalia (co-owner), coded various GNOME Mobile apps)
• Robert Nordan (Tomboy, Pinta)
• Antigoni Papantoni (PiTiVi, participated in GStreamer hackfest, OPW
• Javier Hernández Antúnez (Developer and member of the GNOME a11y Team, Accerciser co-maintainer, Contributor to the openSuse GNOME 3.2 live images)
• Yuri Myasoedov (Coordinator of the Russian translation team, also maintain the GNOME russian website, gnome.org.ru)
• Tim Waugh (CUPS printing system, GNOME Control Center and Gtk+ printing framework)
• Chris Lord (Contributions to some GNOME projects, as Clutter, Pinpoint, grilo, libsoup, gtkhtml2, libjana, contacts, dates)
• Susanna Huhtanen (GNOME’s OPW internship, GNOME Documentation)

They have all contributed significantly to the development of GNOME. Thank you all for your great help and welcome! You join our other amazing Foundation Members

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

The deadline for applications to both the Outreach Program for Women internships and Google’s Summer of Code is April 6th. GNOME has made available a list of Google Summer of Code project ideas that are suitable for either this outreach program or Summer of Code. Conservancy’s internship is with the Twisted project, which has also made available full details and application requirements on the internship on its wiki. The Conservancy’s internship will follow the internship rules outlined by the GNOME Foundation’s Outreach Program for
Women.

Conservancy and the GNOME Foundation urge women who aspire to get involved with free software projects this summer to act fast! The deadline for applications for all these programs is just days away!

The GNOME Release Team has announced the availability of GNOME 3.4. This latest version comes six months after the last GNOME release and includes major new features, significant updates to a host of GNOME applications, and a huge number smaller fixes and refinements. Matthias Clasen, who oversaw the completion of the release, described it as “a great leap forward for GNOME 3”, adding “we hope that our users enjoy it.”

GNOME 3.4 introduces a range of new features. A new document search facility allows quick access to content stored both on your device and online. Smooth scrolling means that moving through content is slick and graceful. New application menus, which are located on the top bar, provide a useful way to access application options and actions.

The new release includes big enhancements to GNOME’s applications. The GNOME web browser, now known as Web, has been given a beautiful new interface for 3.4, as well as significant performance improvements. Documents and Contacts also sport updated interfaces and new features. These application enhancements are the result of a major development drive which is in the process of creating a new suite of modern and stylish GNOME 3 applications.

Polishing and refining GNOME 3 has been a big focus for this release. This effort has resulted in a multitude of bug fixes and many other minor improvements. There are updated interface components, a much more polished visual theme, better hardware support, and much more. These changes add up to a major step forward in the quality of the GNOME 3 user experience.

Full details of the changes found in GNOME 3.4 can be seen in the release notes.

The new release continues GNOME’s tradition of regular and predictable releases, and incorporates an amazing 41,000 contributions made by 1275 people. Planning has already begun for the next GNOME release. If you want to be a part of our community, you can join us. You can also support us by becoming a Friend of GNOME.

Those wanting to try GNOME 3.4 are advised to wait until it is made available through distributions. More information about how to get GNOME 3 can be found on our website.

Read the press release: GNOME 3.4 Released: a Big Leap Forward

Matthias Clasen, who oversaw the completion of the release, said: “The GNOME Release Team is proud to present this latest release of GNOME 3. The GNOME project has been delivering major improvements with every release since 3.0, and our emphasis on feature-driven development is yielding excellent results. The new version includes some significant new features, as well as many smaller enhancements. In all, 3.4 is a great leap forward for GNOME 3 and we hope that our users enjoy it.”

New features being introduced in GNOME 3.4 include a new documents search facility, smooth scrolling, new application menus, video calling, and Windows Live online account integration.

GNOME’s applications have received significant updates for this release. The GNOME web browser, which is now known as Web, has a beautiful new interface for 3.4, as well as significant performance improvements. Documents and Contacts, both of which integrate with online accounts, have also received updated interfaces and new features. These application enhancements are the result of a major development drive which is in the process of creating a new suite of modern and stylish GNOME 3 applications.

3.4 takes the quality of GNOME 3 to a new level, and includes a huge number of smaller changes and refinements. There are updated interface components, a much more polished visual theme, better hardware support, a multitude of bug fixes and many other minor improvements. This all adds up to a major step forward in the quality of the GNOME 3 user experience. A new GNOME initiative, called “Every Detail Matters” has been instrumental in accelerating this enhancement drive.

You can find out more about the changes that are included in GNOME 3.4 in the release notes, which were made available today.

GNOME 3.4 has been already been greeted with enthusiasm. Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE community manager said, “openSUSE congratulates the GNOME community on another milestone in the 3.0 series. It is great to see how the innovative vision underlying GNOME 3 is showing more and more with each release. GNOME forms an important part of the openSUSE distribution and we look forward to shipping this as part of our next release!”

GNOME 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. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. GNOME’s software has been utilised in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilised in a large number of popular mobile devices.

The GNOME community is made up of hundreds of contributors from all over the world, many of whom are volunteers. This community is supported by the GNOME Foundation, an independent non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal assistance. The Foundation is a democratic institution that is directed by its members, who are all active GNOME contributors. GNOME and its Foundation works to promote software freedom through the creation of innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experiences.

Official screenshot packs of the release are available to download.

The remaining time until the GNOME 3.4 release will be devoted to testing and essential bug fixing.

Members of the press who would like details about the release should contact gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

GNOME will be participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) once again this year. GSoC gives students from around the world the chance to work on free and open source software projects. Since its inception in 2005 more than 6000 students from 100+ countries have had a chance to learn from some of the best hackers in the world. The GNOME Project has enabled more than 160 students to take part in GSoC in the past, and this will be the 7th year in a row that the project has participated.

Google Summer of Code is a great opportunity for post-secondary students to contribute to free and open source software projects during their summer vacation, for which they receive financial support. This year’s GSoC will run between May 21 – August 24.

GNOME will once again be offering exciting and interesting projects to work on. You can see our list of suggested projects on the GNOME wiki. The deadline for applications is April 6. For more information see the GNOME Summer of Code page. You can also find information on the Google Summer of Code website.

Many thanks to Google for continuing to support free and open source software through this fantastic scheme.

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.