GNOME Foundation Achievements

GNOME is a free and open source desktop. Because GNOME is free, every contribution put into GNOME is available to everyone. GNOME is:

During 2008, the GNOME Foundation was able to help bring a free and open source desktop to the world by doing the following:

  • Participating in the Google Summer of Code program in which 30 students and mentors participated. They worked on improving the photo-management application F-Spot, improving the integrated development environment Anjuta, improving the webcam application Cheese, and adding LLMNR support to Avahi. See a complete list of projects.
  • Running an Accessibility Outreach Program that resulted in improvements in documentation, magnification, and mouse control through a webcam. In addition, several smaller tasks and bug fixes were accomplished. See a complete list of the tasks here.
  • Holding a GTK+ hackfest, which was widely seen as successful for getting the GTK+ developers together and was essential for planning the future of GTK+. We plan to build on this success by using the hackfest model for other GNOME technologies. We are currently planning hackfests around topics such as usability, desktop search, Internet and desktop integration, GNOME Mobile, accessibility, profiling, and performance.
  • Holding several worldwide developer conferences to enable developers to collaborate effectively and to educate new users and developers. In Europe, our volunteer-run conference GUADEC brought 300 GNOME developers together. This year we had the first GNOME event in Asia, GNOME.Asia, which was held October 18th and 19th in Beijing with 300 attendees.

In 2009, we could use your help to accomplish the following:

  • Produce more end-user-focused technology and features through technology-specific hackfests. Hackfests are events where a core team of project developers get together and spend a week in the same place, discussing plans and writing code. They are particularly useful for getting new projects or large features launched (like GTK+ 3.0) or getting a large amount of code written.
  • Ensure a free and secure desktop environment for everyone.
  • Continue to provide a neutral, confidential place for our sponsors to discuss their GNOME-related plans.
  • Organize a usability study focused on GNOME technologies used by all people, including children, users in developing nations, and people with accessibility needs.
  • Provide travel subsidies to bring our worldwide community of volunteer developers together. This enables them to work on existing projects, plan new projects, and work with partners and companies that use GNOME technologies.
  • Have more active dialogs between our sponsor companies and our developers through monthly advisory board meetings. This is one way to bring end user and distribution company needs to GNOME developers.
  • Hold a joint GUADEC/Akademy conference, a Free Desktop Summit, in order to encourage collaboration and common specifications.
  • Ensure that there is a free and open source stack for mobile devices by working with other mobile groups to define and produce GNOME Mobile.
  • Hire a system administrator to manage the GNOME infrastructure. The GNOME community has thousands of volunteer contributors. The infrastructure to support them, from mailing lists to bug trackers to source code repositories, is all maintained by volunteers. A contracted system administrator could provide the on-call support that would give our volunteer developers and volunteer administrators the resources they need to keep the GNOME project moving forward on its mission of a free and open source desktop for all.
  • Support local conferences such as GNOME.Asia, GUADLAC (Latin America), the Boston Summit, GNOME.conf.au (Australia), and Forum GNOME. Local conferences provide a forum for building community, sharing technology, and bringing developers, companies, and users closer together.
  • Start an internship program aimed at exposing business students to the free and open source software world and bringing their expertise to some of the marketing and business challenges we have.
  • Support the community in defining and executing a release plan for GNOME 3.0.