GNOME Foundation
Providing a Free Desktop for the World
January, February, March 2011
GNOME Foundation
Providing a Free Desktop for the World
January, February, March 2011
The release team had all its eyes on the preparation of GNOME 3.0, in preparation of the release climax. From March, with many freezes then in place we got to review/accept/decline lots of requests (Olav had a post about this on his blog ). And the quarter ended with three members of the team, Andre, Vincent, and Frederic (P.) flying to Bangalore for GNOME.Asia and the release hackfest.
All about the final push towards GNOME 3.0 this quarter. The art and usability teams have been involved in:
From January to March, 7877 reports (bugs + feature requests) were opened and 8584 were closed. Top bug closers were Akhil Laddha (1065 reports), Fabio Durán Verdugo (827), Matthias Clasen (379), Bastien Nocera (359) and Milan Crha (249).
Top bug reporters were William Jon ?McCann (129 reports), Matthias Clasen (112), Bastien Nocera (112), Cosimo Cecchi (106) and Guillaume Desmottes (80).
Apart from business as usual there has been no other activity.
In January, the Board interviewed candidates for the marketing contract position and chose Allan Day and Sumana Harihareswara. Allan and Sumana started in February. Allan's status updates: week 1, week 2, week 3, March 23rd, March 30th. Sumana's status updates: March 8th, March 28th, end of March.
Allan, Sumana, and volunteers organized two User Days.
Pockey Lam started encouraging and organizing launch parties for GNOME 3, and was able to sign up more than a hundred.
Jason Clinton worked on making videos.
Sumana put press contacts into GNOME's CiviCRM contacts database.
Allan drafted GNOME 3.0 release notes.
Andreas Nilsson worked with Allan and several other volunteers on the new gnome3.org and gnome.org websites.
With help from Sri Ramkrishna and other volunteers, Sumana wrote the press release.
With help from volunteers, a bilingual edition of GNOME Journal came out in March, and Sumana and volunteers worked towards the GNOME 3 edition that came out in April.
During this quarter, the GNOME Foundation kickstarted the GTK+/MeeGo integration project, which allowed a team of developers from Igalia to work improving the mobile story for GTK+. Through the course of this project, special effort was devoted to getting the most interesting features from the Maemo/GTK+ and Hildon projects in upstream GTK+ -- achieving the integration of a few and a good progress in others -- and the improvement of the GTK+ input method for MeeGo.
The Web Team worked hard on the new Wordpress-based website for GNOME during this first quarter of 2011. The new website has been successfully released together with GNOME 3 thanks to the contributions from several members of the design and marketing teams. Special thanks to Vinicius Depizzol, who got the Wordpress implementation done and produced most of the new website design. Next step is to make the new website translatable via a Wordpress plugin that integrates with GNOME's translation infrastructure.
The documentation team worked hard to produce new topic-oriented help for GNOME 3. The new help is built on the Mallard-based application help work done since 2.28. In March 2011, members of the documentation team met up for a documentation sprint in Toronto. The team produced over 200 pages of user help for the GNOME desktop, and updated the developer tutorials and platform overview.
As announced on foundation-list, the requirements to join the foundation have changed: Applicants now need two vouchers for their application to be processed and eventually accepted. Also, wiki and web pages have been modified and cleared up.
Staff has changed, too. We'd like to thank Susana Pereira for her work as she left and welcome Christer Edwards to join the Membership and Elections Committee.
The application page has been updated (it now asks less but more specific questions to grab all the details we really need to process an application succesfully) together with having quite all the Wiki pages under the MembershipCommittee area renewed and updated. Now everything should be ordered in a correct and good way. (easy to read, browse, search through)
During Q1 2011 The GNOME membership and elections committee received 12 applications for a new foundation membership and 28 applications for renewals of a membership. Out of those, 46 were processed. During the same period, 15 members did not renew their membership and thus dropped out. We ended up with 348 members.
We ended up with 13 new members:
Strong of now 3 years experience, GNOME.Asia Summit ran stronger than ever its forth edition in Bangalore, India. Planned as a "dream event" at the end of the 2010 edition in Taipei, the GNOME.Asia committee scheduled one extra week hackfest prior to the summit itself in coordination with the GNOME release and marketing teams, just before the 3.0 release date. Fifteen GNOME contributors including 3 board directors spent a very productive week planning and ironing out the final touch that went into the successful GNOME 3.0 launch. Each team worked around the clock between Intel offices, DSI University and the service apartments housing them. Among some of the major achievements of the week one could cite a much improved fallback mode for people with graphic adaptors not supporting 3D acceleration, the new GNOME website, a successful GNOME release parties campaign, GNOME Users days where users could join either online or on site to ask questions, find answers and get their machines installed with GNOME 3.
In parallel free GNOME training was provided to 260 university students of Bangalore, business models around free software were explained to local businesses and academics by members of Oracle, Lanedo or EDF (the world biggest energy provider) and collaboration plans between GNOME and free software projects using GNOME technologies were heavily discussed.
The summit itself benefited from having all those GNOME contributors on site and inspiring an audience of over one thousand people. All previous records related to the number of GNOME talks, the various extra activities organized, the number of GNOME user groups created after the summit in India alone (4) or the financial performance have been either broken or equalled. It was probably the most GNOME technology focused event with over 90% of the talks covering GNOME related topics. The fact that a lot of GNOME development happens in India is probably not a coincidence in that number which is a 20% increase over the Beijing edition (2008). The ambiance was electric, the opening Indian traditional dance in the luxurious main hall spectacular and the food just plain delicious!
This would of course not have been possible without the support of a now very diverse organization committee, a strong local team and their volunteers, the GNOME Foundation, the GNOME release and marketing teams and a stronger commitment from our sponsors Google, Oracle, Mozilla, Novell, Lemote, Lanedo, EDF, Candis Group, Intel, Joomlart, DSI University and Linux Pilot.
The GNOME 3.0 release had far more contributions by women than any previous release in GNOME history. This is largely thanks to the hard work of the eight participants of the first round of the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships, who participated in the program from December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011. All of them had their work included in the main branches of their projects and therefore included in GNOME 3.0.
The interns also participated in GNOME events and continued on with their involvement in GNOME after the end of the internships. Tiffany Antopolski and Natalia Ruz participated in the User Help Hackfest in Toronto in March. Chandni Verma participated in the GNOME 3.0 Hackfest and delivered a well-received talk about her work on Empathy at the GNOME.Asia Summit in Bangalore in April. Luciana Fujii Pontello became the maintainer of the Cheese project.
Thanks to generous sponsors, Collabora, Google, Mozilla and the GNOME Foundation, GNOME was able to accept eight strong participants for the new round of internships to take place between May 23 and August 22, 2011. Setting the same application dates for this round of OPW internships as the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application dates proved to be a successful strategy for encouraging more women to apply for GSoC in GNOME. In addition to the eight OPW interns, there are seven female interns among the 27 GSoC interns in GNOME. This is an unprecedented number of female GSoC participants in GNOME, as it had at most one female participant in some of the previous years. All women who applied for GSoC in 2011 found mentors and project ideas, made a first contribution, and navigated the application process with the help of the resources available through the OPW.
The OPW interns, as well as their location, project, and mentor(s), are:The press release and the program details page have more information about the program. The list of GNOME projects that participate in the program has grown to 13, and more projects are encouraged to join in!
In the next quarter, we look forward to the start of the internships of the program’s participants, their frequent blog updates, and their participation in GNOME events.
GNOME Store Launched In Beijing
The Beijing GNOME Users Group launched a GNOME store on March 1st, 2011. The GNOME store is on Taobao, and here is the link: http://gnome.taobao.com/
You will find GNOME 3 merchandise for sale, like GNOME 3 T-shirts, banners, stickers, GNOME Balloons， GNOME 3 DVDs. All funds received will be used to benefit local (Asian/Chinese/Beijing) GNOME community projects.This store is run by the GNOME Beijing User's Group with permission from The GNOME Foundation.The sales report will be published quarterly. Click GNOME-Store-Report.pdf to read the Beijing GNOME store sales report.
New Users Group
The Gugmasters-list (mailing list) had been very active in Q1 2011, we widely used this list to promote the GNOME 3.0 Release Party campaign. It created a quite some traffic. We have 72 members in total subscribed in this mailing list.
We also received emails from different communities showing interest to establish their local GNOME communities including:
We will follow up with them accordingly. Besides, we expect to have more GNOME User Groups establishing in the 2nd quarter due to the launch of GNOME 3.0 and GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 in April. Stay tuned!
During this quarter, GNOME translation teams worked on delivering localization support for GNOME 3, which was released on April 4 with more than 50 fully supported languages. In comparison to previous development cycles, the road to the GNOME 3.0.0 release was marked with many string freeze breaks that occurred very late in the cycle so that translation teams had to put extra effort into delivering high quality GNOME translations.
GNOME translators also worked on localization support for additional marketing resources related to GNOME 3, including the gnome3.org website.
In preparation for the 3.0.0 release, there was a module set reorganization done in Damned Lies’ GNOME 3.0 release set in order to better match the gnome-3.0 module set as maintained in JHBuild. Possible ways on how to further improve the GNOME modules representation in Damned Lies were discussed in the gnome-i18n mailing list.
Also, a new functionality was introduced to Damned Lies in that the service now offers translators the so called reduced PO files; these files do not include strings that are rarely visible to (end) users, such as “gschema.xml.in” strings, making it easier for translation teams with limited manpower to translate the GNOME modules.
Several significant improvements were made in the area of GNOME Shell accessibility: GNOME Shell is mostly keyboard navigable, and is recognized as an application by the accessibility framework. The work required to make GNOME Shell fully accessible to screen readers is ongoing. However, because Assistive Technologies now have more of the information they need to provide access to this environment, it was possible to begin implementing support for GNOME Shell within Orca.
GNOME Shell Magnifier's functionality was expanded to include support for brightness, contrast, and inverse video. The incorporation of these proposed features into GNOME Shell, along with some corresponding additions to the Universal Access control panel, should make GNOME 3 much more accessible to users with low vision.
Many new improvements were made to WebKitGtk accessibility, which in turn made it possible for the Orca team to greatly enhance its support for both Yelp 3 and Epiphany. We are quite pleased with the progress thus far towards making content viewed in GNOME's web browser compellingly accessible, and are looking forward to making it even better in the months to come. Thanks to the Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos for their support in this area!
AT-SPI2 was greatly stabilized after the refactor done in the previous quarter. Various memory leaks, crashes, non-working functions, and other miscellaneous problems have since been fixed. While there are additional issues to resolve, AT-SPI2 is now generally usable and performs comparable to AT-SPI1. Furthermore, AT-SPI2 makes it possible to implement accessibility support in Qt. The work being done by Frederik Gladhorn in this area will lead to GNOME users having even more accessible applications available to them. Thanks to Nokia for supporting Frederik in this effort!
Community OutreachThe orca-es-list, an official GNOME list for Spanish-speaking users of the Orca screen reader, was created in January. Providing ways for non-English speakers to get more involved in the Orca community has been a long-time goal of the Orca team -- and up until recently, an unachievable one. Now, thanks to the continued involvement of developers from Emergya, the willingness of existing Spanish-speaking community members to contribute their time and knowledge, and the GNOME infrastructure through which to host it, the team is able to support such as list. For more information, please see: https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-es-list.
In February, several team members participated in the first Accessibility Devroom at FOSDEM. In addition to giving and attending sessions, we had the opportunity to connect with several XFCE developers who stopped by. As a result, our team has since begun collaborating with theirs so that they can achieve the accessibility goals they have on their roadmap for their 4.10 release.
GNOME Accessibility was proudly represented by five members from our team at CSUN - The 26th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference in San Diego, California this March. Along with developers from Mozilla, we were the FOSS ambassadors in a mostly proprietary technology market. Our booth and presentations gave us the opportunity to demonstrate unique alternatives to a variety of mainstream and assistive technologies, including providing demonstrations of GNOME 3.
Plans for the Second QuarterThe team plans to focus on refining GNOME 3 Accessibility support, fixing what they can for 3.0.2 and aiming towards much-improved access for the 3.2 release. In addition, developers working on accessibility for the free desktop will be coming together for the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest which will take place at Igalia in A Coruña, Spain in May.
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