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Reflections on GUADEC 2024

I was lucky enough to attend GNOME’s 2024 conference in Denver. I had a great time, saw many people I haven’t seen this decade, and it was also my first trip into the USA beyond the easternmost parts of the east coast.

It was a unique edition of the conference, we were about 50 people as you can see in the group photo, with another 30-40 people in Berlin. I posted a thread already on what we learned about hybrid conferences.

I have a more thoughts about this year’s event which are complex and contradictory and better discussed face to face. Sometimes you have to hold multiple conflicting thoughts in your head at once. I’ve written some of these thoughts down below.

The world is huge … like really big. Denver is a full EIGHT timezones away from Berlin, right? If you get up at 9AM in Denver then it’s already 5PM in Berlin, and it’ll be 6PM by the time you’ve brushed your teeth. How can you unite two groups of people across such a big time gap?

Having tried it, my feeling that a “federated” event split across different locations at the same time is not a replacement for a single, global in-person event. The community splits according to the geographical distribution of its members, roughly following Conway’s Law.

Travelling back from Denver to Santiago de Compostela took me about 50 hours in the end. It was supposed to be less but there was a 5 hour delay in Denver due to a shortage of air traffic controllers in Newark, which led to missing a connection to Madrid, the next day some bad weather added two more hours of delay, and then the trains from Madrid were largely full so I couldn’t get back home until early evening.

I kind of enjoy travel chaos (and my feeling is that as a society, we’ll only reduce our dependence on air travel if and when it becomes frustratingly inconvenient to use).

I feel lucky that I don’t have to do this kind of trip very frequently. I have more appreciation now for the significant effort people go through to get to events in Europe.

Multiple people in Denver told me they share the feeling I mentioned last month, that many Free Software communities are Euro-centric.

Some benefits to holding a GUADEC in the USA. Inspirational keynotes by local speakers, both Ryan Sipes’ story of Thunderbird, and Stephanie Taylor who is the force behind Google Summer of Code. Meeting contributors who don’t travel to Europe. Media coverage of the GNOME Foundation AGM, in a good way.

I think we missed an opportunity to make more of the event. Involving “the local community” in a summer event is always tricky, as during the summer holidays, “casual” attendees such as students and hobbyists are mostly on holiday. They aren’t usually looking for new software conferences they might attend. That said, GNOME would definitely would benefit from more hands focused on communication outside the project, what we often call “marketing” and “engagement”. It’s a difficult and often thankless task and we have to pay someone to do it. (With all the endless money we have, of course).

I did mention the thing about multiple conflicting ideas at once, right?

Let’s not pretend that a video conference or a hybrid BOF is the same as an in-person meetup. Once you’ve sung karaoke with someone, or explored Meow Wolf, or camped in the desert in Utah together, your relationship is richer than when you only interacted via Gitlab pull requests and BigBlueButton. You have more empathy and you can resolve conflicts better.
Evan Welsh doing a great job of herding gnomes along the river
Let’s keep exploring new ways to collaborate. Regional events and hybrid events. And accept that these will form bubbles. If you live near members of the GNOME design team and meet in-person with them, you’re going to be able to influence GNOME’s design, more easily than if you live on a continent such as Africa where (to my knowledge) you can’t meet any existing design team members without leaving your continent. If you have a friend who maintains Nautilus it’s going to be easier to get up to speed with Nautilus development yourself, compared to if you’re starting from scratch and you live in a timezone that’s 10 hours offset from Europe.

We want to rethink technical governance in GNOME, which currently somewhat resembles the 15th century Feudal system. (See also, Tobi’s less flippant explanation of how decisions are made). Let’s keep geography in mind when we discuss this. And let’s also think how we can balance out the implicit advantage you get for being based in a certain place, and how we can grow local communities in places that don’t currently have them. I suspect this effort will need to be larger than just the GNOME project, and we can’t be the only community thinking about this stuff.

The USA is just as crazy as you imagine from its TV output. I was ready for beautiful scenery, long car journeys, no pavements, icy air conditioning, unhealthy food and franchises inside of franchises inside of franchises. I was genuinely surprised how hot it gets everywhere — even during my unwanted stopover in Newark the weather was 35° humid heat. And I wasn’t ready for disposable plates, cups and cutlery at every hotel breakfast. I’ve stayed in very cheap and very expensive hotels in many places, and all of them manage to wash and reuse the plates.
Delicious snacks at Meow Wolf, Denver
I want to see the single location, in-person GUADEC continuing while it’s still possible to do it. Count how many plane tickets were bought this year to attend GNOME events, and compare it to the number of flights taken just by Elon Musk’s private jet. It’s great that we avoided a few dozen plane tickets compared to last year but I’m yet to see a noticeable impact on the airline industry; while the impact on the GNOME project of splitting the community into two physical locations was very noticeable indeed.

We should alternate in-person GUADEC with more radically decentralized events, under a different name. We need to continue developing those as well. Like it or not there are big changes coming in society as the world gets increasingly hot. Tobi outlined all this very well in 2022. Nobody knows exactly what will happen of course, but you can expect that building resilience to change will be worthwhile, to put it very mildly. The key is for this to be something positive rather than a negative. The creation of something new rather than the loss of something we fondly remember. I mean, you can’t claim “GUADEC” is a particularly great name 🙂

It’s easy to write about this stuff in a blog post of course, harder to put into practice, and actually it wasn’t even easy to write…. this has taken me three hours.

Fairphone 5

I was going to write more stuff here but it turns out I had a lot to say about GNOME this month. At FOSDEM 2024, which I could easily attend in-person because I’m European, I saw a great talk by Luca from Fairphone, and decided my next phone would be a Fairphone 5. And I just got one. More on that next month, I guess.

samthursfield.wordpress.com/20…

#gnome #guadec

I gave a talk about #spiel and #speech #tts in #linux at on #GUADEC #GUADEC2024 in Denver.

Check it out:
youtu.be/xseIsaxrlXo?feature=s…

GUADEC 2024 The Whole Spiel - A New Speech Synthesis API

Eitan Isaacson presents this GUADEC 2024 Day 3, Track 1 talk.Screen reader users have relied on speech synthesis for a long time. In recent years, speech int...

^YouTube

#GUADEC2024 photos from our Denver venue are now online! Take a look through this year's album here: flic.kr/s/aHBqjBC58f

#GUADEC #GNOME #eventphotography

So thanks to @rmader@mastodon.social we managed to get the front camera in the Pixel 3a working with a libcamera/pipewire stack 🥳 Thanks to @flamingradian for the work on the whole port!

EDIT: The driver does not properly release the camera when closing the app, so it only works once per boot. It would be lovely if anybody with the skills would like to contribute to improve it!

gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/lin…

#postmarketOS #LinuxMobile #Pixel3a #Snapshot #GNOME #GUADEC

The first Berlin Mini #GUADEC talk is now online. Watch @tbernard, @jimmac and @allanday talk about cool things happening in GNOME design.

I will upload the other Berlin #MiniGUADEC #BerlinMiniGUADEC talks will follow during the next couple of days. Ping me otherwise lol

youtube.com/watch?v=4jTgHE2kMC…

Design Team Goings On - Tobias Bernard, Allan Day, Jakub Steiner - Berlin Mini GUADEC 2024

Tobias Bernard, Allan Day and Jakub Steiner talk about what the GNOME design team has been up to for the past year.Recorded at Berlin Mini GUADEC 2024

^YouTube

We're excited to share that GUADEC 2025 will take place in Brescia, Italy! We look forward to working with the local team and we hope to see you all in Brescia next year!

#GUADEC #GUADEC2025 #GNOME

For those not at GUADEC (or not in Berlin), I've posted a recording of my talk about gobject-introspection on my YT channel:

youtu.be/wniCYMv-3Po

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024

Moving Past Quiet Introspection | GUADEC 2024

My presentation for the 2024 edition of the GNOME conference, about GObject Introspection.

^YouTube

Today at 13:55 MDT (19:55 UTC), my colleague Georges Stavracas will talk about bringing accessibility back to WebKitGTK:

events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024 #igalia #accessibility #webkit #a11y

Ryan's GUADEC keynote about Thunderbird's story of death and rebirth - and how its lessons can help your OSS project - starts in just under an hour at 21:45 UTC! Plenty of time to get a snack, find a comfy seat, and watch in person or online: youtube.com/live/jS7NzYqxH3o?f…

#Thunderbird #GUADEC #OpenSource

A new issue of #ThisWeekInGNOME is now online!

#157 GUADEC 2024
thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2024/…

#GNOME #TWIG #GUADEC

Matthias Clasen talks about the GTK development and roadmap

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024 #gtk

Watching the opening of GUADEC 2024 on the big screen

#guadec #guadec2024 #gnome

We think our project's journey from nearly dead to thriving is an awesome story with lessons for any OSS project. Watch @ryanleesipes tell that story in today's #GUADEC keynote at 21:45 UTC/ 15:45 Mountain. @gnome is streaming their talks (thank you!), and you can catch his talk here: youtube.com/live/jS7NzYqxH3o?f…

#Thunderbird #OpenSource #Community

GUADEC 2024 – Day 1, track 1

GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a w...

^YouTube

I’m talking today about parental controls and digital wellbeing, first locally in Berlin and then remotely in Denver, events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

#GUADEC #BerlinMiniGuadec

Today I will be talking at #GUADEC about Gameeky, one of my coolest projects to date 😁

events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

Watch it live here youtube.com/live/vMf3cOtcPtI

GUADEC 2024 – Day 1, track 2

GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference, bringing together hundreds of users, contributors, community members, and enthusiastic supporters for a w...

^YouTube

@reclaimed_alicma kicking off Berlin Mini GUADEC with a talk about Permacomputing 🪴✨

#gnome #berlin #guadec #berlinminiguadec

Last talk of today is Georges Stavracas's presentation on calendaring on the modern desktop, at 14:05 MDT (20:00 UTC):

events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024 #igalia

Today at 11:55 MDT (17:55 UTC), Patrick Griffis is going to be talking about developing WebKit with wkdev-sdk:

events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024 #webkit #igalia

Today at 10:15 MDT (16:15 UTC), Philip Chimento, Andy Holmes, and Evan Welsh and others will present the latest JavaScript technologies available in the GNOME stack for the crowd at GUADEC 2024

events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

#guadec #guadec2024 #gnome #igalia #gjs #javascript

#GUADEC2024 starts today! Take a look at the full schedule and plan your day: events.gnome.org/event/209/tim…

Make sure to register and check your email for the livestream and chat links: events.gnome.org/event/209/reg…

We’ll see you for the Welcome in Track 1 at 16:00 UTC!
#GUADEC #GNOME

If you are in Denver, make sure to attend the presentations from my colleagues as well!

- "Developing WebKitGTK Made Easy", by Patrick Griffis
- "Calendaring in the modern desktop", by Georges Stavracas
- "Making WebKitGTK accessible again", by Georges Stavracas
- "The Newest JavaScript Technologies in GNOME", with Philip Chimento

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024 #igalia

Today at 1600 CEST I'm going to be talking about gobject-introspection at the mini-GUADEC; the talk will also be broadcast at GUADEC in Denver tomorrow, at 13:45 MDT:

events.gnome.org/event/209/con…

Thanks to Igalia for allowing me to participate!

#gnome #guadec #guadec2024 #igalia

Don't forget to register! GUADEC starts in 2 days, but there's still time to let us know you're attending. Sign up for remote or in-person here: events.gnome.org/event/209/reg…

#GUADEC2024 #GUADEC #GNOME

We need your votes! Tell us who you think should win this year's Pants of Thanks Award at #GUADEC2024. Our winner will be announced during the AGM on July 21, starting at 16:00 UTC.
discourse.gnome.org/t/call-for…

#GUADEC #GNOME #Awards

Call for nominations for the 2024 Pants of Thanks award

On behalf of the Board, this is a call for nominations for the Pants of Thanks award. Every year, during the Foundation’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) at GUADEC, we give out the Pants of Thanks award.

^{GNOME Discourse}

#GUADEC2024 starts this weekend! Are you ready? Make sure you're registered and be sure to check your email for event updates and links. Haven't signed up yet? There's still time, let us know if you're attending in Denver or online here: events.gnome.org/event/209/

#GUADEC #GNOME

The thing I'm most hyped for at GUADEC Berlin is @jimmac live DJ set on Saturday 🧑‍🎤

#GNOME #GUADEC #Berlin