<p>Q4 is normally a quiet quarter - but not for GNOME! We ended the year with a lot of really productive activity. We had a record four hackfests and two summits, the Boston Summit and GNOME Asia. Lots of progress was made, plans were set for 2010 and we're all looking forward to GNOME 3.0!</p>
<p>As you can see from the following team updates, the whole community has been busy and not just at events. In this issue you'll find the first quarterly update from the GNOME Board of Directors, you'll learn what keeps the release team busy between releases, you'll see the amazing amount of work the accessibility team is doing in preparation for GNOME 3.0 and much, much more.</p>
<p>Read on to hear what GNOME teams have accomplished in Q4!</p>
<p>If you'd like to receive this report via email, please let me know at stormy@gnome.org. Please use the subject, "Subscribe to GNOME Quarterly Report via email".</p>
<p>Best wishes and happy hacking! Enjoy your GNOME desktop!</p>
<p>On a related note, the Annual GNOME Bugzilla statistics for 2009 have also been published on the corresponding mailing lists.</p>
<p>In its monthly meetings, the GNOME Bugsquad has started to define Bugsquad Goals. This is about setting small concrete goals that will help with integration and consistency. More information can be found on the according site in the GNOME Wiki.</p>
<p>Also, it has been discussed to celebrate a Bugday again for the sake of community building and introducing potential new Bugsquad members into triaging. As usually in FOSS communities more manpower is welcome.</p>
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</div>
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<h1>Marketing Team</h1>
<h2>Paul Cutler</h2>
<divclass="columns">
<p>The GNOME Marketing team was fortunate to participate in a hackfest in Chicago in the fourth quarter thanks to sponsorship by Novell and Google. Members of the marketing team met over two days and worked on a number of initiatives, including GNOME 3.0 planning, creating conference materials including brochures and materials for presenters and booth organizers and more. The majority of this work will be completed in Q1 2010.</p>
<p>In addition to the hackfest, Andreas Nilsson continued to work on a GNOME merchandise store which should launch in the near future. The System Administration team installed Piwik for web analytics and Jaap Haitsma updated a number of webpages to take advantage of Piwik. CiviCRM was also installed by the System Administration team and Stormy Peters has begun setting up CiviCRM to track Foundation members, Friends of GNOME, journalists' contact information and more.</p>
<p>In Q4 the usability team organised a hackfest to be held on 22-26 February 2010, in Canonical's London offices. Final agenda is still being worked out, but issues we're hoping to cover include:</p>
<p>So far, 12 people, including several from major GNOME distributions, have registered their interest in attending. Thanks are due to Brian Cameron from Sun for getting the hackfest off the ground, and to Canonical for their sponsorship of the event. See <ahref="http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/London2010">http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/London2010</a> for more information.</p>
<p>In a separate but related activity, Allan Caeg and others have been discussing and mocking up ideas for an open source usability testing suite, based on experiences with closed source tools such as Morae (Windows) and Silverback (Mac), and previous GNOME efforts such as Pongo. See http://live.gnome.org/action/diff/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/UsabilityTestingSuite for more information.</p>
<p>Finally, Máirín Duffy from Red Hat and Charline Poirier from Canonical have both submitted papers for the FLOSS HCI Workshop at the ACM's annual CHI conference, which will be held in Atlanta, Georgia in April 2010.</p>
<li>Partnership with Open Mobility conference. We are partnering with the Open Mobility Conference in San Francisco
as a media partner. GNOME Mobile members are entitled to a reduced price
for the conference.</li>
<li>Merge of DBus port of EDS. The DBus port of EDS finally landed in GNOME's GIT and replaced the
old Bonobo version. Ross Burton deserves the credit for this.</li>
<li>The "First ELSE" phone, which got a lot of positive attention at CES, introduced a unique new user interface called "sPlay", co-developed by Advisory Board member ACCESS and Emblaze Mobile, built on top of the clutter library and other GNOME technologies. For more information on the phone see <ahref="http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/24/emblazes-first-else-unveiled-in-london-promises-to-be-a-game-c/">http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/24/emblazes-first-else-unveiled-in-london-promises-to-be-a-game-c/</a></li></ul>
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<h1>GNOME Events</h1>
<h2>Stormy Peters (Looking for a new author!)</h2>
<divclass="columns">
<p>GNOME was really busy in the final quarter of Q4. In a quarter that is normally pretty quiet, we got a lot done.</p>
<p>We had a lot of very productive hackfests:
<ul>
<li>Zeitgeist, Bolzano, Italy, November 9-12, <ahref="http://live.gnome.org/ZeitgeistHackFest2009">http://live.gnome.org/ZeitgeistHackFest2009</a></li>
<li>Marketing, Chicago, USA, November 10-11, <ahref="http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/MarketingHackfest2009">http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/MarketingHackfest2009</a></li>
<li>Video, Barcelona, Spain, November 19-22, <ahref="http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoHackfest">http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoHackfest</a></li>
<li>WebKitGTK+, A Coruña, Spain, December 15-21, <ahref="http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk/Hackfest2009">http://live.gnome.org/WebKitGtk/Hackfest2009</a></li>
<li>Boston Summit. (Jason Clinton) The GNOME 3.0-specific sessions dominated hallway and dinner conversations; this was clearly where the excitement was at. GNOME Shell was a major factor but others were excited by other upcoming changes like GSettings or even the client-side windows work. The sense of momentum was palpable and in the ensuing two months, this energy has carried us forward. Major progress on our objectives has been made and other teams and hackfests have been positively influenced by the success of the Boston Summit 2009. <ahref="http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit">http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit</a></li>
<li>GNOME Asia. (Emily Chen) The GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 was held in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam, from November 20-22. The event attracted more than 1000 participants from 14 countries including from the US, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, France and Cambodia. 79 speakers with 34 from outside of Vietnam held 109 talks, presentations and panels. 255 students participated at the Linux course. The event was supported by 138 volunteers.<ahref="http://gnome.asia">http://gnome.asia</a></li>
<li>GNOME Forum Brazil at Latinoware. (Izabel Valverde) GNOME had a dedicated room with great talks, subjects and attendees.
The cay started with Licio Fonseca talking about GNOME Love. The second presentation was Rodrigo Flores talking about Portuguese Translation Project. Alessandro Binhara presents Mono and Mono Brazil Project followed by Izabel Valverde and Luciana Freitas talking about GNOME Women. This talk was very special since was the first time that this subject was being present in Brazil. Alexandro Silva talked about Linux Hardening. Vinicius Depizzol gave a talk about Reorganizing the GNOME user experience. And in closing Tiago Menezes presented GNOME Desktop personalization.
The GNOME booth was always crowded. Our speakers and a special invited guest Everaldo Canuto made all the difference at the Forum. We held some hack-parties, made some new friends and exchanged knowledge. Also interesting was some Paraguayan and Argentian attendees.
Thanks to Latinoware for hosting us, all the GNOME participants and most of all for GNOME Foundation that helped make this happen.</li></ul>
</p>
<p>And GNOME was represented at other events:
<ul>
<li>Willie Walker gave a keynote on GNOME and GNOME Accessibility at
Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Chile.
</li><li>Willie Walker gave a talk on GNOME and GNOME Accessibility at RPI.
</li><li>Willie Walker gave a talk on GNOME Accessibility at the Open Source
<li>Stormy Peters gave a keynote at Utah Open Source Conference 2009 (UTOSC), <ahref="http://2009.utosc.com">http://2009.utosc.com</a>.</li>
</ul>
</p>
<p>Next year expect to see GNOME at:
<ul>
<li>FOSDEM. Please join us in the GNOME Developers room. <ahref="http://archive.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/devroom/gnome"http://archive.fosdem.org/2007/schedule/devroom/gnome</a></li>
<li>Mobile World Congress. Some of our GNOME Mobile members will be there. <ahref="http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/index.htm">http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/index.htm</a></li>
<li>SCALE. We will have a GNOME booth and several GNOME contributors participating.</li>
<li>FOSS 2010 Workshop. Stormy Peters will be participating on behalf of GNOME. <ahref="http://foss2010.isr.uci.edu/">http://foss2010.isr.uci.edu/</a></li>
<li>Usability Hackfest, London, UK, February 22-26. <ahref="http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/London2010">http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/London2010</a></li>
<li>Open Mobility conference. We are partnering with the Open Mobility Conference in San Francisco
as a media partner. GNOME Mobile members are entitled to a reduced price
for the conference. <ahref="http://www.openmobilityusa.com/">http://www.openmobilityusa.com/</a></li>
<li>LibrePlanet. Several GNOME contributors will be there and GNOME is actively cooperating on the women in free software day on Sunday. <ahref="http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2010">http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2010</a></li>
<li>FOSS Nigeria 2010. GNOME is planning on sending a representative or two. <ahref="http://fossnigeria.org/">http://fossnigeria.org/</a></li>
<li>CSUN, San Diego (CA, USA), March 22-27. Not only will we have a GNOME booth there but we will also have a GNOME accessibility hackfest before the event. <ahref="http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/Hackfest2010">http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/Hackfest2010</a></li>
<li>Texas Linux Fest. GNOME will have a booth. <ahref="http://www.texaslinuxfest.org/">http://www.texaslinuxfest.org/</a></li>
<li>OSCON 2010. GNOME will be well presented at the conference. <ahref="http://en.oreilly.com/oscon">http://en.oreilly.com/oscon</a></li>
<li>GUADEC 2010. GUADEC will be held in the Hague this year. Please join us! <ahref="http://guadec.org">http://guadec.org</a></li>
<li>Boston Summit. Held every year over Columbus Day weekend at MIT.<ahref="http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit">http://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit</a></li>
<p>The final Q4 quarter of 2009 has kept the travel committee on its feet with a lot of events and hackfests lined up.
We sponsored:<ul>
<li>9 Contributors for the Zeitgeist Hackfest held in Bolzano, Italy.
</li><li>4 Contributors for the Marketing Hackfest in Chicago.
</li><li>13 contributors for the GNOME Asia Summit held in Vietnam this year.
</li><li>6+ contributors for the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest in Spain.
</li><li>1 contributor to FOSS.in held in India.</li></ul>
We have already reimbursed most of the sponsored people, and some pending ones are already in the queue. </p>
<p>At the end of Q3, the GNOME Board and the Travel Committee setup a travel policy and the duties of people who receive sponsorship. We asked all the sponsored contributors to share their experiences in blogs, so the ones who missed out could relive the fun and various sessions at the hackfests and events. We are happy to see the results.</p>
<p>For GNOME Asia, we had all the contributors jotting down their experiences and Emily Chen summed it up in her blog here --><astyle="color:#3465A4"href="http://blogs.sun.com/emily/entry/sponsor_speakers_to_gnome_asia">http://blogs.sun.com/emily/entry/sponsor_speakers_to_gnome_asia</a>
Jason has the Marketing Hackfest summed up in his journal --><astyle="color:#3465A4"href="http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/tag/marketing">http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/tag/marketing</a></p>
<p>This really helps GNOME reach out to a lot of people and we would like to build up on this practice with the Accessibility and Usability Hackfests lined up at the start of year 2010.</p>
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<h1>Membership & Elections Committee</h1>
<h2>Tobias Mueller</h2>
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<p>The GNOME membership and elections committee has processed 13
applications for a Foundation Membership and 17 applications for
renewing a previous existing membership. During the same period, 12
members did not renew their membership and thus dropped out. We ended up
with 358 members (+3 compared to the previous quarter).</p>
<p>You can see a full list of members at <ahref="http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/members.php">http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/members.php</a>.</p>
<p>If you have any further question, do not hesitate to ask us on
membership-committee@gnome.org.</p>
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<h1>Women Outreach</h1>
<h2>Marina Zhurakhinskaya</h2>
<divclass="columns">
<p>The GNOME Journal issue with all the articles written by women involved in GNOME was published in November. Sumana Harihareswara, Leslie Hawthorn, Diana Katherine Horqque, Danielle Madeley, Cathy Malmrose, Stormy Peters, Ara Pulido, Hanna Wallach, and Marina Zhurakhinskaya worked on the articles for this issue. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Paul Cutler, Sumana Harihareswara, Jim Hodapp and Stormy Peters worked on editing the articles. The articles included introductions to technical projects such as GNOME Shell, Telepathy, Empathy and Mago, tips on using Epiphany, a story about young girls having fun building Linux desktops, an interview with the Google Summer of Code organizer Leslie Hawthorn, and a follow-up with the participants of the GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program in 2006.</p>
<p>The new GNOME Outreach Program for Women has been announced in several blog posts, including ones by Peter Brown in the FSF blog and by Marina Zhurakhinskaya in her blog which is aggregated on Planet GNOME. The information about the program was picked up by other bloggers and various free software news feeds on Twitter. The list of mentors for the program already includes people working on GNOME Shell, Empathy, GNOME Games, Anjuta, documentation and marketing. More people are welcome to sign up as mentors.</p>
<p>Several women have already e-mailed women-outreach@gnome.org to express interest in the program and have been put in touch with the mentors to start learning about the projects that might interest them. One of the goals of the program is to help people find someone willing to help them get started contributing to GNOME any time during the year. Beyond that, we are encouraging students and mentors to work together before the application period for summer internships, so that the students are well familiar with the projects before they apply and the mentors have the contributions they can take into account during the selection process.</p>
<p>Máirín Duffy, Leslie Hawthorn, Stormy Peters, Hanna Wallach, and Marina Zhurakhinskaya are involved in the planning of the women in free software track at the LibrePlanet conference hosted by FSF on March 19-21. One of the goals of the conference is to highlight and increase women's participation in free software. GNOME project and GNOME Outreach Program for Women will have a strong representation at this conference.</p>
<p>The plans for the next quarter include raising funds for sponsoring the summer internships, defining the application process, and finding participants by advertising at colleges and through Google AdWords.</p>
</div>
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<h1>Art Team</h1>
<h2>Andreas Nilsson</h2>
<divclass="columns">
<p>During Q4 2010 the art team did:
<ul>
<li>Lots of work on gnome-icon-theme by Jakub Steiner and Lapo Calamandrei
</li><li>Lots of work on moblin-icon-theme by Jakub Steiner and Hylke Bons
</li><li>Discussions around monocrome icons for various places in the system: <ahref="http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-December/011143.html">http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-December/011143.html</a>
</li><li>Lots of brainstorming (on Wave) on how to improve gnome design-wise.
</li>
</ul>
</p>
</div>
</div>
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<h1>System Administration Team</h1>
<h2>Paul Cutler</h2>
<divclass="columns">
<p>The System Administration team updated a number of GNOME systems in the fourth quarter.
<ul>
<li>Piwik, an open source web analytics program was installed by Jeff Schroeder to help the Marketing team with managing the GNOME website.
</li><li>Alexandro Silva installed a Plone test instance to allow the Web team to start writing content directly in Plone for the new GNOME website.
</li><li>Owen installed Splinter, a Bugzilla extention providing integration for attachment reviews.
</li><li>Olav update the GNOME wiki (live.gnome.org) to a much newer version of MoinMoin, version 1.8.6.
</li><li>GNOME servers hosted by Red Hat moved to a different data center. Owen helped facilitate the move and communication with the Red Hat IT staff.
<p>Lastly, Andrea Veri joined the Accounts team and he has helped provide much needed support with account requests in Request Tracker. Welcome Andrea!</p>
</div>
</div>
<divclass="page">
<h1>Website</h1>
<h2>Lucas Rocha</h2>
<divclass="columns">
<p>The GNOME Web team has been gradually working on reaching alpha status
on the new GNOME website. Alexandro Silva and Carsten Senger worked on
instance of the new website will allow editors to start working on the
missing bits of the website content. The idea is to have an initial
complete version of the website together with GNOME's 2.30 release.</p>
