GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 - Call for Participation

Hello all!

GNOME.Asia Summit is an annual conference for GNOME users and developers in Asia. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop and devices that use GNOME, and also covers applications based on technologies underlying GNOME and GNOME development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technologies and future developments.


GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 will be the fifth Asian Summit to be held in Hong Kong and aimed at opening immense business opportunities for GNOME in Asia and create more awareness about GNOME in Asian countries.

Hong Kong Skyline

No waiting! Submit a talk now and add your name to the participants list.
If you have suggestions/ideas for BOFs/Workshops you wish to handle, send them in using the same web-form along with your details and an abstract of your idea or mail the details to organizers at asia-summit-list@gnome.org.

Know more!

GNOME.Asia Summit 2012: Event planning

Hi there,

Being a member of GNOME.Asia committee and bearing a responsibility willingly chosen, I have been spending some time lately on gearing up planning for GNOME.Asia 2012 Summit which is going to happen in Hong Kong.

The event organizers working behind making things happen this year are few and relative newbies with little experience in organizing events at such huge scale but they are giving their best effort! If you are an innate manager with noteworthy leadership skills willing to take charge of things and be the power with yourself in terms of getting things organized then this post is aimed at you! If you are good at marketing and have a PGO blog, you are most welcome! There are a number of small tasks you can help out with too. You can be an artist, a Hong-Kong based GNOME user, a content writer, a translator, website manager or simply a fan of GNOME willing to help!

Despite of limited time and even though I will not be making it to the event this year, I have been helping out in the ways I can to make the event a success! We are looking for more cheerful volunteers (both onsite and offsite) who will be devoted to the success of the event and be committed to it until it ends!

Organization is fun when you have equally high-spirited people around you. Looking forward to more eager "Hi!"s on asia-summit-list mailing list. You sure are going to love being the force behind a great event!

Cheers!

Three Cheers for GNOME 3!!!

Everyone is celebrating the GNOME 3 release with over a hundred launch parties being organized in different corners of the world. At this moment of applause, I want to extend my sincere thanks to the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME.Asia Committee for choosing India as the spot for the largest GNOME.Asia event ever! Along with the student training sessions, it has definitely sparked a lot of awareness amongst students here as can be seen from post summit follow ups answering which I have spent quite some time after returning from Bangalore.

To the students I want to say a lot of things have to be learnt and this is just the beginning. Your enthusiasm is going to guide you into being successful contributor. I have seen many of you newcomers actively showing up on IRC on #gnome-love and I want to see even more numbers and even more women contributors, at least all those students with whom I had a one-to-one talk!

Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me enabling me to attend it. Huge targets were achieved in a manner which was real fun! I saved a wonderful collection of memories from Bangalore hackfest and Asia Summit 2011: 

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More of these can be found on http://www.gnome.asia/photos
For those who could not attend the summit or my talk in particular by any means, you can find my slides here.

GNOME Asia Summit 2011 - Updates

Day 1 and 2 of the Hackfest begun from the Intel's HAL Airport Road office at Bangalore (thanks to Srinivasa for getting it arranged).
I got a surprise on the first day sent to me by Empathy maintainers, Guillaume and Xavier =)

 

Thank you both for this awing surprise! That was really motivational.

The Hackfest was kick started with a round table deciding upon the tasks to be accomplished during the five day event and ended with a wrap up of the entire day's activities done by each person to analyse the effectiveness and time utilization.

I volunteered to assist with marketing and organizing besides hacking.
In this while I had been trying to get more media contacts for interviewing our delegates and covering the event. Two of them from Linux format whom I contacted about a month ago actually arrived here on April 1. We were able to arrange discounted accommodation for them in the same hotel as where we stayed and they have been doing their job well without bothering anyone during working hours. I was made the newest addition to the GNOME Asia Organizing committee and tried to give my best to the role and provided my point of views and ideas whenever necessary, about possible ways of spreading awareness of GNOME in Asia, keeping the often overlooked facts in mind.

Hats off to the release team for worked really hard and preparing GNOME 3 ready for release ahead of time (not to mention the April Fool's prank was unexpectedly adorable ;) I had been observing the extensive amount of work a release requires and sleepless nights the release team members spent busy writing release notes.

For Empathy, I was able to begin making changes on my hugest branch for persistent chats which involved studying about Webkit and Pango. I followed up with the Usability team for their useful input on the design changes required to be done in Empathy for this and also discussed it with Allan Caeg. I reported and pushed a patch for a small MUC usability patch and with Fred Muller's help, found out two file transfer bugs in Empathy<->Pidgin interaction over which I'll be working soon after this to make him happy!

Before the summit, I got a peppy GNOME 3 T-shirt and Free Software promotional stuff including stickers I decorated my laptop with-

On April 2nd, the first day of the summit, I attended keynotes by Brian Cameron and Vincent Untz and also his next talk on Building GNOME on build service and SUSE studio which contained some notable points for me. After this, I spent some time at the help desks with students new to GNOME and Linux in general and tried to ease their Linux fear clearing their basic doubts about migrating from Windows to any Linux distribution and explaining its benefits. Tried my hands over OpenSUSE for the first time on a demonstration system and learnt about it from Manu Gupta who has been supporting it since over an year now.

I'll be giving my talk on "Contributions of a newbie to the free desktop's Empathy" tomorrow! Be sure to attend it on Track 2. Will be updating more pictures soon!

GNOME Asia Summit 2011 - Adventure Begins ;)

Hi!

Today I landed Bangalore, the venue for GNOME Asia Summit, 2011. My travel was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Other than Bharath Acharya, the backbone for the event, I met Srinivasa Ragavan, Pockey Lam, Vincent Untz, Andre Klapper, Frederic Peters and Frederic Muller, Allan Day, Ryan Lortie, Josselin Monette and Andreas Nilsson today! We had lunch together, walked up to a nearby mall and talked over a lot of stuff! It was fun! Hoping to meet the other Hackers and Marketing, Design and Release team members in the coming days.

GNOME Hackfest begins tomorrow. 

The week ahead is going to be busy but full of adventure! :D With lots of registrations for the summit already made and student registrations going free, a huge audience is expected for the launch party and GNOME 3 is catching the mood!


Will be adding on more related details as I get time.

Internship updates...

Hey people,

Didn't get chance to blog about what I had been doing lately so here's a compiled mix of it all.

Good news first:

• Now Empathy multi-user chats are separated from the chat-room windows they are displayed in. i.e. users will be able to join/leave chats without closing the room [commit].
  
  I am working on the opposite i.e enabling the user to continue being connected to a chat when chat-room window has been closed (bug).
  
  
• The /part command is working for chat-rooms and private MUCs (bug [commit])
  UPDATE: There was a small fault in part message construction in telepathy-idle. It was not sticking to correct format of PART messages as per RFC 2812 sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 which was preventing the full part message from being displayed to the members. It has been fixed in this bug now.
  
  
• To prevent a user from deleting significant accounts like freenode from list of networks, a new "Reset Networks List" button was added in the IRC Network Chooser dialog (bug [commit])

New things I learnt in this phase:

• Insight into telepathy-idle
• Using Wireshark to monitor packets sent to and received from a network
• Conflict resolution after rebasing.
  To help me gain more experience with conflicts, Danni has given me two massive branches to rebase.

There were some not so cool things also like, I started my work on notification for enabling/connecting a disabled/disconnected account when trying to connect to rooms affiliated to it (bug) but it eventually turned out to be blocked by this bug. There must be some comparison workaround used by Empathy to keep things working which I am yet to discover! A particular horrible thing was my hardisk snap and not having an up-to-date backup added to it but I was happy to be able to recover my data (thanks to Danni). It was another learning experience and I'll dedicate a separate post to it.

~

Gnome.Asia Summit 2011 will be held in Bangalore, India this time. I am happy to get a chance to speak about my internship experience in my talk- Contributions made by a newbie to the free desktop's "Empathy", in front of such assorted community of developers, documenters, marketing people, GNOME users and prospective contributors. I am particularly exited about getting a chance to see the biggies of this world! :D