Tag: gnome

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GNOME Foundation Board Elections 2022

My involvement with GNOME started in my teens and has continued over the years where it influenced my studies, career, and even the place I chose to live. One of my desires in my journey has been to help the GNOME project achieve its goals and fulfill its vision of building an open source desktop environment that is accessible and easy to use to a general audience. Sitting on the Board has enabled me to contribute to these efforts more directly and has also taught me plenty about community governance and nonprofit sustainability.

My Board term is ending now and will not run for reelection for a few reasons: firstly, I believe that a rotation of board members can help increase community engagement and transparency. The current model our Board has of renewing parts of its members every year IMO does a great job at ensuring continuity of board programs while allowing for new voices and perspectives to onboard and maximize the impact.

Another reason why I will not be running for reelection is that I am convinced I can be more beneficial to the GNOME project by contributing to more operational tasks and running some of our programs, instead of the position of governance and oversight expected of the Board members. I would like for my seat on the Board to be filled by someone with skills and enthusiasm for reaching out to broader audiences beyond GNOME, someone capable of bridging our plans and vision with opportunities that can bring funding, diversity, and sustainability to the Foundation.

I am not going anywhere. You will still see me around the chat channels, forums, and conferences. I want to focus on improving our Newcomers onboarding experience as well as increase our conversion rate of Outreachy/GSoC interns that become long-term contributors. This also involves helping application developers monetize their work and making sure volunteers are given employment opportunities that allow them to continue working on open source software. I also want to refocus on my coding contributions, while learning new things and keeping up with modern technologies.

All in all, I am looking forward to meeting my fellow GNOME friends in GUADEC this year after such a long time with no travel. o/

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GSoC 2022: GNOME Foundation has been accepted as a mentor organization!

Google Summer of Code logo

We are happy to announce that GNOME has been accepted as a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2022!

New contributors will be reaching out in our communication channels for information about the program and to discuss project ideas, please point them to gsoc.gnome.org.

If you have any questions/doubts you can open a topic in our Discourse community, send an email to soc-admins@gnome.org, or reach out in our GSoC Matrix chat room.

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Call for project ideas and mentors for Google Summer of Code 2022

Google Summer of Code Logo

It is that time of the year again when we start gathering ideas and mentors for Google Summer Code .

Google Summer of Code 2022 will bring some changes. Our main highlights are:

Please, submit your project ideas as issues in our gitlab repository by March 1st. Make sure you answer all the questions in the issue template (Project-Proposal template).

The GNOME Foundation recognizes that mentoring is a time consuming effort, and for this reason, we will be giving accepted mentors an option to receive the $500 USD stipend that Google pays the organization for each contributor. Mentors can choose to revert the fund into a donation to the GNOME Foundation. Some payment restrictions may apply (please contact us for questions).

Proposals will be reviewed by the GNOME GSoC Admins and posted in our Project Ideas page.

If you have any doubts, please don’t hesitate to contact the GNOME GSoC Admins on this very same forum or on Matrix in the channel #soc:gnome.org

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GNOME LATAM 2021 was a real blast!

This year, motivated by the success of virtual events like GNOME Asia and GNOME Onboard Africa, we decided to organize a GNOME LATAM (virtual) conference. The event was a success, with a nice mix of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking presenters. The recordings are now available and (if you understand Spanish or Portuguese) I highly encourage you to check what the Latin American GNOMies are up to. 🙂

  • Juan Pablo Ugarte, from Argentina, that most of you GNOME people know from his work on Glade, had an interesting talk showing his new project: “Cambalache UI Maker”: A modern Glade replacement for GTK4. Juan hasn’t open sourced it yet, but you’ll see it when he pops up in Planet GNOME.
  • Claudio Wunder, from Germany, that you may know from the GNOME engagement team, did a presentation about the engagement team’s work in GNOME and discussed the challenges of managing online communities with its cultural differences and all. Claudio studied in Brazil and speaks Portuguese fluently.
  • Daniel Garcia Moreno, from Spain, that you may know from Endless and Fractal, had a talk sharing his experiences mentoring in GSoC and Outreachy. This was also a good opportunity to introduce the programs to the Latin American community, which is underrepresented in FOSS.
  • me, from Brazil :D, presented a “Developing native apps with GTK talk” where I write up a simple web browser in Python, with GTK and WebKitGtk, while I comment on the app development practices we use in GNOME, and present our tooling such as DevHelp, GtkInspector, Icon Browser, GNOME Builder, Flatpak, etc…
  • Martín Abente Lahaye, from Paraguay, that you may know from GNOME, Sugar Labs, Endless, and Flatseal, had a presentation about GNOME on phones. He commented on the UX of GNOME applications and Phosh in phones, and highlighted areas where things can be improved.
  • Cesar Fabian Orccon Chipana, from Perú, former GSoC intern for GNOME, GStreamer, did an extensive demo of GStreamer pipelines, explaining GStreamer concepts and all. He had super cool live demos!
  • Rafael Fontenelle, from Brazil, is a coordinator of the pt_BR translation team for many years and translates a huge portion of GNOME himself. He did a walk-through of the GNOME translation processes, sharing tips and tricks.
  • Daniel Galleguillos + Fernanda Morales, from Chile, from the GNOME Engagement team, presented design work for the GNOME engagement team. Showing tools and patterns they use for doing event banners, swag, social media posts, and all. Daniel was also responsible for editing the event recordings. Thanks a lot, Daniel!
  • Fabio Duran Verdugo and Matías Rojas-Tapia, from Chile, a long-time GNOME member, presented Handibox. An accessibility tool they are working on at their university to help users with motor impairment use desktop computers. Inspiring!
  • Georges Basile Stavracas Neto, from Brazil, you may know from Endless and GNOME Shell, presented a very nice summary about the GNOME design philosophy and the changes in GNOME Shell 40 and their plans for the future.
  • The event was opened and closed by Julita Inca Chiroque, from Peru, a long-time GNOME Foundation member. Thanks a lot, Julita!

I hope we can make this a tradition and have a GNOME LATAM edition yearly! Thanks a lot to all attendees!

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Let’s welcome our new interns!

It is that time of the year again when we get to meet our new interns participating in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. This year the GNOME Project is proud to sponsor two Outreachy internships for the May-August season and to mentor 12 students in GSoC 2021!

Our Outreachy projects are listed here, and you can find our GSoC projects here.

Our interns have received an email with instructions for the community bonding period, and you will start seeing their blog posts appearing in Planet GNOME very soon. Make sure you say “hello” and make them feel welcome in our project. Keep in mind that beyond the project’s tasks, we want them to become long-term contributors and, later on, Foundation members. You also will have a chance to get to know about their projects during our Intern Lightning Talks at GUADEC.

If you have any doubt about our participation in these programs, feel free to contact the GNOME GSoC admins or join the #soc channel.

Happy hacking!

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Student applications for Google Summer of Code 2021 are now open!

It’s that time of the year when we see an influx of students interested in Google Summer of Code.

Some students may need some pointers to where to get started. I would like to ask GNOME contributors to be patient with the student’s questions and help them find where to get started.

Point them at https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/Students for overall information regarding the program and our project proposals. Also, help them find mentors through our communication channels.

Many of us have been Outreachy/GSoC interns and the positive experiences we had with our community were certainly an important factor making us long-term contributors.

If you have any doubts, you can ask them in the #soc channel or contact GNOME GSoC administrators.

Happy hacking!

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GSoC 2021: GNOME Foundation has been accepted as a mentor organization!

gsoc logo

 

Yay! We are participating in GSoC once again this year and our org features in the list of this year’s accepted organizations.

If you have any doubt about GSoC, feel free to contact us on #soc IRC/Matrix, email, or Discourse.

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Save the date: GNOME LATAM 2021, March 27th

I’m happy to spread the word that a GNOME event in Spanish and Portuguese is taking place this month, on the 27th of March. It will be a free virtual event with talks and panels where everybody is welcome.

You can register at https://events.gnome.org/event/82/registrations/33/

You can send talk proposals (in Portuguese and Spanish) at https://events.gnome.org/event/82/abstracts/

See you there!

 

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Let’s welcome our 2020 GSoC interns!

It is Google Summer of Code season again and this year the GNOME project is lucky to have 14 new interns working on various projects ranging from improvements in our app ecosystem to core components and infrastructure.

The first period, from May 4 to June 1, is the Community Bonding period. Interns are expected to flock into our communication channels, ask questions, and get to know our project’s culture. Please, join me in welcoming our students and making sure they feel at home in our community.

This year we will be using Discourse as our main communication channel regarding the program, therefore if you are a mentor or intern, please make sure to check https://discourse.gnome.org/c/community/outreach for announcements. Feel free to create new topics if you have any questions. The GNOME GSoC admins will be monitoring the Outreach category and answering any doubts you might have.

Here is the list of interns and their respective projects https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5428225724907520/#projects

Tips for students

First of all, congratulations! This is just the beginning of your GNOME journey. Our project is almost 23 years old and likely older than some of you, but our community gets constantly renewed with new contributors passionate about software freedom. I encourage you to take some time to watch the recordings of Jonathan Blandford’s “The History of GNOME” talk in GUADEC 2017 so you can grasp how we have grown and evolved since 1997.

The first thing you want to do after celebrating your project’s acceptance is to contact your mentor (if they haven’t contacted you first).

Second, introduce yourself on our “Say Hello” topic! Don’t forget to mention that you are in GSoC 2020, the project you will be working on, and who’s your mentor.

Third, set up a blog where you will be logging your progress and talking directly to the broader community. In case you need help with that, ask your mentors or the GSoC admins. Intern blogs get added to Planet GNOME, which is a feed aggregator of posts written by dozens of GNOME Foundation members.

Many of us read Planet GNOME daily! Besides, some of our active contributors have participated as interns in past editions of GSoC. You can dig for their blogposts and get a better sense of how these progress reports are written.

It is totally normal for you to have questions and doubts about the program, to help with that, we will be hosting a Q&A on May 12 at 17:00 UTC in our RocketChat channel. All of you will receive an invitation by email this week too. If you can’t make it, feel free to join the channel at any time and ask questions there as well.

If during your internship you have a problem with your mentor (lack of communication, or misunderstandings, or deep disagreements, or
anything else), don’t hesitate to report that to the GNOME GSoC administrators.

Last but not least, have fun!

 

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Announcing “Connections”: a modern remote desktop client for GNOME

Yes! Connections is a brand new app that I put together in the last month. It is a remote desktop client for the VNC and RDP protocols on top of the same backend code that we were already using in GNOME Boxes*: gtk-vnc and gtk-frdp.

The main motivation to write this application is to have a drop-in replacement for Vinagre** that is modern, easier to maintain and follows the HIG. Besides, we want to have a GNOME app to point users to when they ask for more/advanced remote-connection options in Boxes.

The app is at an early development stage where it can be tested and even used for simple remote connection tasks. I started filling issues in GitLab so others can pick up tasks that they might be interested in helping.

It basically has the same code base as GNOME Boxes for the protocol/display specific code, so you will likely get the same experience as with remote connections in Boxes today. Of course, the plan is for later to add more and more remote connection specifics to empower our users without cluttering our interface. That’s the GNOME Way™. 🙂

Connections can be downloaded from Flathub by clicking the button below.

Download on Flathub

For now, I would NOT encourage downstream packagers to distribute the application, since lots of it will change until our 3.38 (first stable) release. Flatpak allows for the control we need when starting the development of a brand new application, and this way we can strive for the best experience our users can have by delivering updates directly to them.

Putting GNOME Connections together wouldn’t have been easier without Flatpak, GNOME Builder, GNOME Boxes, Vala, and GTK. Our platform is becoming very accessible for native application development thanks to all these efforts. We all appreciate it! ♥

* These features will live in Boxes for some time to allow for user migration, but they will be likely removed by the time we will be releasing 3.40.

** Vinagre is now in maintenance mode and won’t be getting new features. Eventually, we will sunset it.