GNOME Foundation
Providing a Free Desktop for the World
April, May, June 2011
GNOME Foundation
Providing a Free Desktop for the World
April, May, June 2011
From April to June, 7333 reports (bugs + feature requests) were opened and 6451 were closed.
Top bug closers were Akhil Laddha (467 reports), Fabio Durán Verdugo (329), Sebastian Dröge (262), Cosimo Cecchi (246) and Matthias Clasen (230).
Top bug reporters were Guillaume Desmottes (69 reports), Colin Walters (69), Joanmarie Diggs (67), Cosimo Cecchi (60) and Jean-François Fortin Tam (56).
Several products have been closed for new bug entry and have been moved to the "Deprecated" classification, such as at-poke, fast-user-switch-applet, resapplet and Sawfish.
The April release of GNOME 3.0 included months of work by the documentation team on the new topic-oriented Desktop Help. Even after the release, the team continued improving and refining the help in response to reviews and user feedback.
In June, six members of the documentation team attended the Open Help Conference to meet with documentation and support people from other prominent open source projects. After the conference, the GNOME and Mozilla teams each held a three-day sprint. This helped GNOME bring new contributors up to speed, including two interns from the Outreach Program for Women.
The documentation team drafted content outlines for many GNOME application help documents. Building on that work, more than half of our application help is now in Mallard.
The previous quarter ended with several members of the release team gathering in Bangalore for GNOME.Asia and a release hackfest. Those were long days, with many last-minute fixes to check for integration, but it all paid off and on April 6th Vincent Untz sent the "GNOME 3.0 Released" email, while party balloons were flooding Planet GNOME.
Later on Vincent Untz announced changes in the release team, Karsten Bräckelmann, Frédéric Crozat, Lucas Rocha and himslef were retiring, and Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias, Javier Jardón and Colin Walters were joining, with Luca Ferretti becoming a full fledged member and Frederic Peters taking the release manager hat.
A schedule for 3.1 was published, a noteworthy change is that it was decided to identify desktop wide features planned for 3.2, instead of focusing on individual modules, and such features were discussed on desktop devel list, and edited on the wiki. The process is still not finalized but it should help on giving a global direction for the project.
Mundane tasks continued to happen, with new team members getting their training on new stable and development releases (Javier on 3.0.2, and Alejandro on 3.1.2).
For more details on all the above, see Allan Day's blog posts: Presenting GNOME Contacts and News from GNOME Shell land.
Other work this quarter included further Nautilus design enhancements, prototyping designs for a system settings panel for graphics tablets, and investigating alternatives to traditional menu bars, and work on a printable GNOME 3 "cheat sheet".
During Q2 2011 The GNOME membership and elections committee received 10 applications for a new foundation membership and 47 applications for renewals of a membership. Out of those, 57 were processed. During the same period, 21 members did not renew their membership and thus dropped out. We ended up with 348 members.
We ended up with 8 new members:The GNOME membership and elections committee also held the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors elections. A lively discussion enabled the 13 candidates to present themselves. The 7 seats in the board were given to¹: Shaun McCance, Emmanuele Bassi, Stormy Peters, Bastien Nocera, Brian Cameron, Germán Póo-Caamaño, Ryan Lortie.
¹ http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2011-June/msg00002.html
A 2011 GNOME 3 Launch Party was organized by the GNOME Users Groups of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Beijing. The Users Groups used video streaming so that five cities (Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung) were able to celebrate the GNOME 3 Launch Party at the same time. The groups created a how-to instructional video on justin.tv showing how to do this for other teams. The live stream picture is gnome3tw.jpg. For more pictures about GNOME-TW, you can click here. The Taiwan and Beijing Groups created a step-by-step guide on how to write a gnome-shell extension. The Users groups used Convore to chat in real time.
Workshop for GTK+ Programing
A Vala workshop for GTK+ with OSSF was scheduled. This will be the the third training course for users who wants to learn more about the GTK+ project.
Slides from the previous two workshops are available at:The Gugmasters-list (mailing list) had been very active in Q2 2011 and the list was widely used to promote the GNOME.Asia Summit 2011, GNOME 3.0 Release Party campaign, Best GNOME 3 Photo Competition, build new GNOME users group world wide, and call for bids for GUADEC 2012.
We also received emails from many communities showing interest to establish their local GNOME communities including:It is great to have so many new users group established in Q2, we will follow up with them accordingly.
In May, members from the GNOME Accessibility Team joined other accessibility developers for a five-day ATK/AT-SPI hackfest at Igalia in A Coruña. Unlike the more traditional hackfests, the primary work done was not coding; instead, the group conducted an intensive analysis on the current state of ATK and began the design of what will become ATK 3. Thanks to G.P.U.L, Xunta de Galicia, Mozilla, Igalia, and the GNOME Foundation for making this event possible!
Towards GNOME 3.2 The team continued to address accessibility issues in GNOME 3. In addition to ongoing bug fixing in all of the team's modules:The team is quite pleased to have its first intern from the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, Aline Bessa from Brazil. Aline's background in computer science, her interest in accessibility, and her seemingly limitless enthusiasm have proven extremely valuable. She has already contributed a completely new, topic-based documentation for Accerciser and has since progressed to fixing bugs and working on enhancements for this tool. Aline is also making much-needed improvements and additions to the libatspi documentation. Thanks Aline for all your dedication and hard work, and thanks to the Outreach Program organizers and supporters for making it all possible!
Plans for the Third QuarterIn addition to continuing its work towards GNOME 3.2, the team plans to begin implementation of the agreed-upon improvements to ATK and work towards more performant desktop accessibility.
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 that are taking 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!
The GNOME Foundation has approved funding for two more rounds of the Outreach Program for Women internships with at least three participants each. The next round will take place between December 2011 and March 2012. The application deadline for this round will be in the end of October 2011. We will soon update the information on the wiki about the internships and will open the application period.
The Desktop Summit is the big event for the GNOME community in the next quarter. It will be taking place August 6-12 in Berlin, Germany. Eleven Outreach Program for Women interns from the past two rounds of the program will be attending the event. They will do lightning talks about their work during the GNOME and KDE Interns Showcase session. First round's intern Chandni Verma will do a talk Knock Knock! What is new? about her experience with the program and contributions to Empathy. Encouraged by the last year's great GNOME women's dinner experience, we will gather for another one this year, making it an annual tradition. There will also be a Women's Networking BoF that will allow GNOME and KDE women to meet e ach other and talk about the work they are doing, how they started contributing, and the women outreach efforts in both projects.
During Q2 2011 GNOME localization teams continued their work on adding and updating translations for the modules that are hosted at GNOME and make use of the GNOME i18n infrastructure.
Claude Paroz worked with Shaun ?McCance on a new help build system which is based on ITS Tool and is supposed to replace the currently used xml2po utility in the near future.
Furthermore, with the necessary support from the GNOME Documentation Project, GNOME translators started their work on translating the new GNOME User Documentation that was written in Mallard and is using the new help build system.
Also in this quarter, as part of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships, Priscilla Mahlangu began her work on the Zulu localization of the GNOME Desktop with Friedel Wolff as her mentor.
We had a very successful GNOME 3.0 release. Our program to support release parties by sending goodies paid off, resulting in over 100 release parties being held all over the world. We had some excellent press coverage both on the web and in print media, and the release attracted a lot of attention of social media sites.
Marketing played a role in the launch of the new www.gnome.org website (though this was mostly thanks to a long running effort by Vinicius Depizzol and Andreas Nilsson). The site is a great improvement and has had very positive feedback.
In conjunction with the release of GNOME 3.0, we organised a release party photo competition. There were many excellent entries for that, and the winning images were great.
We continued to develop our social media presence in Q2. Our social channels have been further integrated with one another, and our Facebook page received a number of improvements. The number of people following our social media feeds has seen major increases in the recent period, and we were pleased to break the 10,000 follower barrier on Twitter in May.
There have also been general improvements to our processes and documentation. Marketing information on the GNOME wiki has been improved, and processes for utilising the web site to make announcements have been created.
This last quarter has been a relatively slow one for the GNOME Sysadmin Team, but any good admin knows that is just the way it should be! For the most part everything has been running very smoothly. The infrastructure is doing what it was meant to!
We are in the process of expanding and improving our hardware base. We have two new servers racked and networked, we're just waiting on some entitlements from Red Hat and we'll push forward.
I'm sure we'll have much more to report in the upcoming quarter. Look forward to a number of service improvements, improved stability, faster and newer hardware and more.
The web team have been quite busy during Q2. We launched our new gnome.org website at the same time as GNOME 3.0 This is a new design and a huge content cleanup for our main face to the world. This work would not have been possible without the help of the marketing team that helped us with amazing content and the sysadmin team that provided a close to seamless deployment of the site. The new site is based on WordPress making editing of the website easy and straight forward. Something that's coming down the pipeline for 3.2 is is the new translation infrastructure that Vinicius Depizzol is working on as part of his Google Summer of Code project. This makes use of the existing GNOME translation system and made quite some progress during Q2.
At the same time as we launched gnome.org we also launched our new GNOME Developer Website at developer.gnome.org. This site is the result of the work done at the GNOME Development Documentation Hackfest last December in Berlin. The new site features video tutorials for getting started with GNOME development, an overview of our platform and documentation for all you need to create a GNOME app.
Last, but no least, Alberto Ruiz, also gave Planet GNOME a well deserved face lift.
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