At GUADEC 2013 I presented a talk about designing the future canvas API inside GTK+, and how we could learn from the lessons of Clutter as well as from other platforms like the Web.

After a year spent implementing that design, I will explain what I did, what I had to learn, and what I had to change of that original vision, as well as showing what the future of the GNOME core tool kit will look like.

Unlike the talks from previous years, this talk will not feature: memes, ponies, or rainbows. it will feature data structures for 3D math, layers, and the occasional topical reference to the pop culture fad of this summer. there will be screen shots, and possibly live demos.

Emmanuele Bassi

Emmanuele has been working on the core of the GNOME platform for years; he also maintains Clutter, a tool kit that he is now trying desperately to replace with GTK+ without having to regress UIs to 2003.

GNOME has always been a controversial project due to the decisions they make, the positions they hold, and thus our relationship with FOSS community at times in conflict.

Outreach both internal and external is about defending our story and not allowing others to write it for us. Let’s talk about how we can better present ourselves to the public in the age of social media and reduce the conflict that we have while continuing to pursue our goal of being a competitive desktop based on Free Software and our mission to spread Free Software.

Sri Ramkrishna

Sri Ramkrishna joined the GNOME project in 1997, and has held various positions from irc water cooler guy, GNOME Journal, and other things. From 2011, Sri has been primarily been interested in engagement with the FOSS community and also runs the GNOME QA team. He’s currently a GNOME Foundation Board member.

The three years Karen spent as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation were a crash course in all things GNOME. Karen will share her thoughts on the GNOME community, the challenges we’ve faced and thoughts on where we should be going.

Karen M. Sandler

Karen M. Sandler is Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. She was previously the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. In partnership with the GNOME Foundation, Karen co-organizes the award winning Outreach Program for Women. Prior to taking up this position, Karen was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). She continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC, the GNOME Foundation and QuestionCopyright.Org. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of an O’Reilly Open Source Award and also co-host of the “Free as in Freedom” podcast.

We seldom know exactly why one release of GNOME is faster or slower than the last. We have various tests we can run to measure performance, but comparing results for one release with results from a previous release provides less clarity than one might hope. Even if hardware is exactly the same, there are many elements in the software stack – from the kernel, to the graphics drivers, to the toolkits, to the application itself, that can produce performance changes. From one release of GNOME to the next, each of these layers sees hundreds or thousands of changes.

It is much more useful if we can get performance numbers continuously as changes go into the codebase. We will then have a better chance of identifying a change that slows down GNOME or verifying whether if a change that was supposed to improve performance actually did. We already have a system that does continuous builds of GNOME and runs basic tests on them: GNOME Continuous. The tests that GNOME Continuous runs are, however, run on virtual machines, which poses multiple challenges for performance testing – in particular, lack of accelerated graphics, and interference from other use of the same system.

This talk will describe the new GNOME Hardware Testing initiative, which has a goal to take the builds of GNOME and base system software that GNOME Continuous creates, measure the performance on a range of performance tests, record the results, and make charts and graphs of that data available to developers. The talk will discuss technology used: how ostree is used to distribute software to the testing systems, and how upgrading, rebooting, and testing is automated to eliminate any need for manual intervention, while still allowing stock commodity hardware to be tested. It will also cover the selection of appropriate tests to reflect the performance of GNOME in a comprehensible way.

Owen Taylor

Owen Taylor has been active in the development of GNOME technologies since before GNOME existed. He maintained GTK+ and related libraries, created Pango, which enables GNOME to handle the languages of virtually all of the world’s users, and more recently led the development of GNOME Shell prior to the release of GNOME 3. His current interests relate to display technologies and the full-stack performance of GNOME. Owen is Architect for the Emerging Platform team at Red Hat, which includes the desktop and other related areas.

In this talk, I will look at the recommendations of the GNOME HIG for dialogs and explore how they can be realized with the current GTK+ and glade. While the main focus will be on dialogs, I may also try to cover a few topics that have traditionally been handled by dialogs, for which other approaches are now recommended, such as Search.

This talk will be aimed at application developers, no deep experience with GTK+ is required.

Matthias Clasen

Matthias Clasen has been working on GTK+ for more than 10 years. He is a manager in the desktop team at Red Hat.

Much has happened in the documentation realm since GUADEC 2013. The team has worked with the translation team, worked on the 3.12 release (the best documented release to date), thought about ways to improve the documentation tracking infrastructure and how to automate screenshots, taken on two interns, completed the guide to GNOME for system administrators, reviewed the state of the developer documentation, worked with some great maintainers and much more…

Ekaterina Gerasimova

Kat inherited the title of the documentation team fearless leader/benevolent dictator in 2014 from Shaun, having done an internship with the team in 2011 and become addicted to contributing ever since.

When we think about the user experience that GNOME provides, we usually focus on implementation and design. It is these factors that are thought to affect the quality of the experience that we provide. However, social factors also play a major role in determining the quality of our software: modules need a sufficient number of contributors, and they need to be organised so that modules can move forward and keep on top of bugs.

In this talk, I’m going to discuss how the social dimension of the GNOME project affects the quality of our software. I will outline some issues with the current situation, and will propose some ideas and initiatives that can help us address them. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that we need to work on the social as well as the technical aspect of GNOME if we want to improve the quality of our user experience.

Allan Day

I have been contributing to GNOME for 4 or 5 years. I spend most of my time on design, and am a member of the design team, but I also contribute to the Engagement Team. I’ve been working as a part of the Red Hat Desktop Team for almost 3 years.

Discover how the Libreoffice project is working on making it easier to integrate Libreoffice into your application. We will have a close look at how liblibreoffice and tiled rendering help making Libreoffice available for document rendering and format conversion. Also we will see how the new The Document Foundation project the “Document Liberation Project” helps bring importers for proprietary formats into the FOSS world. Last but not least enjoy enjoy news about many new features in the upcoming Libreoffice.

Markus Mohrhard

Markus is a Libreoffice hacker working mostly on Calc and charts. When he is not hacking calc he is implementing new, crazy testing ideas for the Libreoffice project. He currently serves at the Libreoffice Engineering Steering Committee. Apart from his work on Libreoffice he maintains the Libreoffice cppunit version and is a co-maintainer of orcus, ixion and mdds.

This presentation will look at how hardware is integrated in GNOME in general, and in Linux in particular, with an eye on the infrastructure changes that occurred to implement the level of integration expected in a modern desktop environment.

Bastien Nocera

Bastien chooses his hardware like a kid writing his Christmas letter to Santa. But he also likes that hardware to work to its full potential. Thankfully, Red Hat, his employer, supports that goal, even providing hardware when necessary.

GNOME and the free software community are making progress in increasing participation by women, but this progress has only shown the potential for a much larger change. The more people work towards it, the faster we’ll get there. In this talk, I will explain factors that hold women back in technology and discuss the motivation for initiatives for women, whether they are dedicated internships, scholarships, awards, or events. Having a good understanding of why these are needed will help you become an effective advocate. I will share what you can do, even beyond being a mentor and a promoter of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, to encourage more women to join the communities, local groups, conferences, and companies you are involved with.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya

Marina Zhurakhinskaya works on community outreach and engagement at Red Hat and serves on the boards of the GNOME Foundation and the Ada Initiative. She is passionate about new contributor outreach, working on GNOME’s newcomers and interns initiatives. She organizes the GNOME Foundation’s Outreach Program for Women. About 170 women have so far participated in the program’s remote internships with 31 free software organizations. Prior to her community engagement role, Marina developed software for GNOME.