Communication Hacks: Strategies for fostering collaboration and dealing with conflict in open source communities (Community Building and Diversity)

• Nuritzi Sanchez (GitLab, Inc.)

Do you struggle with giving or receiving feedback? Have you found it difficult to work with team members you only talk to online, or who belong to a different culture than you do? Do you wish you had more charisma? After reading many self-help books, watching various TED Talks, and listening to a ton of podcasts, I've condensed my learnings to help you improve your communications skills, deal with conflict, and collaborate better than ever in open source communities (and everywhere else).

Building community metrics for GNOME and everyone (Community Building and Diversity)

• Georg Link (Bitergia and CHAOSS)
• Sriram Ramkrishna

Metrics is a topic that we've often talk about in GNOME and we have them. But our metrics do not drive decisions, they are generally "scoreboard" metrics. But what if we could create metrics that can drive real decisions in the project, to better utilize the resources that are available. The apps community (GNOME and KDE) in cooperation with Bitergia and Gitlab have created a working group with CHAOSS project - not only build a common set of metrics in our communities, but to present them to the rest of the open source community. This talk will talk about the progress we've made in this endeavor, to elicit feedback, and to help grow awareness of GNOME, the apps community to the rest of the open source community out there through our metrics.

How To Build An Open Community (Community Building and Diversity)

• Regina Nkemchor Adejo

I started my career in an information technology working with students and lecturers from diverse backgrounds and abilities. While I was at the institution, I created and worked with different groups, and over time I developed my skills around community building and mentorship. In my experience in NIIT Port Harcourt center, Nigeria, the female to male student ratio was approximately 1:5. In some years, only one woman would graduate from the software engineering program or none. Seeing this as an issue, I formed a group of women in IT, mentoring them in their studies. I will use this as a case study to look at ways to build communities centered around mentorship. In my talk I will like to share my experiences around the following topics: - Taking the first steps in becoming a community builder - Creating a diverse and inclusive community in a Nigerian educational institution - The role of mentorship in making IT accessible - The common and unique problems faced by the women I worked with, including learning specialized language and breaking into closed communities

Archaelogy of accessibility (Application Development and Deployment)

• Emmanuele Bassi (GNOME Foundation)

Twenty years ago, the GNOME desktop received the gift of accessibility from the engineers at Sun. This was a major milestone in the free and open source software world, and contributed to the adoption of GNOME and its underlying technologies. Sadly, the Sun accessibility team was disbanded right around the time GNOME was transitioning between major versions; a lot of historical knowledge was lost in the process, and major stakeholders moved on, leaving the state of accessibility diminished in the platform. In the meantime, the underlying technologies moved on in very different directions than the ones we had at the turn of the millennium: a new graphics stack to replace X11; sandboxed applications; new IPC mechanisms. Accessibility must adapt to the brave new world. In this presentation I will outline my work on the accessibility implementation provided by GTK, and the changes introduced by the next major API version of the toolkit, 4.0; how these changes impact application developers, and developers of assistive technologies.

Introducing Principles of Digital Autonomy (Use of GNOME by Users)

• Molly de Blanc (GNOME Foundation)
• Karen Sandler

We have become more reliant than ever on technology that we intertwine into every aspect of our lives and yet we are less in control of that technology than ever before. Karen Sandler and Molly de Blanc have been working on iterating principles by which we can measure whether our technology protects and empowers the people who use it. These principles provide a framework to evaluate important aspects the design and function of the technology, including who benefits from the use of the technology, what data is being collected, does the technology protect its user's privacy, and are users provided the appropriate information and opportunity to properly consent (or withhold consent) to the full use of that technology? We as a technology using public must demand technology that respects its users and provides digital autonomy. In this talk, Karen and Molly will introduce their draft principles and evaluate GNOME (in addition to one or two other technologies ) as an example of how this analysis can be brought into practice.

Flooding the desktop with learning tools (Application Development and Deployment)

• Martín Abente Lahaye

Sugar is a unique visual environment and a set of applications for Linux. Since its original release, dozens of educators and developers have created hundreds of learning tools, most of which are only available for this platform. Today, thanks to Flatpak, developers can build applications once and reach all Linux distributions. This creates a great opportunity to share these tools and reach new audiences across the world. In this talk I will summarize my work on bringing Sugar applications to the Linux desktop with Flatpak and Flathub. I will share my experiences through the first twenty applications, with hopes of encouraging more developers to do the same. And of course, I will present twenty new learning tools for the general Linux desktop!

GNOME and University Outreach (Community Building and Diversity)

• Gaurav Agrawal (skuad.io, Foundation Member)
• Saloni Garg

We discuss the role of Students in Open Source, their importance in any Open Source Project and how GNOME is helping students get Onboard with us through the University Outreach program. University Outreach program is a new initiative that aims to create a bond between educational institutions and the GNOME community. We will focus on reaching out to universities to help them adopt GNOME technologies and start to contribute to the project, benefiting students, institutions, faculties, and free software communities. In this talk, we wish to introduce this initiative through GUADEC platform and will have a healthy discussion and feedback from the wider community present at the talk.

Freelancing with Free Software (Use of GNOME by Users)

• Ryan Gorley (Freehive)

There are plenty of reasons to *not* freelance, but access to creative software is *not* one of them. Ryan Gorley, Founder and Creative Director at [Freehive][1], shares a practical framework for starting a freelance creative career with only free and open-source software. In addition to a survey of creative tools and resources available, topics will range from bootstrapping a workstation to billing for work. No Linux experience is required and anyone contemplating selling professional services is welcome. [1]: https://freehive.com

Making GNOME Release Videos: Leveraging GNOME's modern UX in production. (Use of GNOME by Users)

• Christopher Rogers

Career designer C.Rogers of Freehive explains the process of creating GNOME release videos, leveraging the clean and intuitive GNOME DE as a modern production environment. Essentially a giant thank-you to all the developers and contributors of GNOME, and a chance for everyone to see GNOME used in production to create video content for the project. A presentation interspersed with humour and lively visuals all created in GNOME, for the GNOME project.

How can I make my project more environmentally friendly? (Application Development and Deployment)

• Philip Withnall (Endless)

The use and development of GNOME has an environmental impact, and we all have some responsibility to measure and reduce that. This talk will give you some quick and easy steps for how to measure the environmental impact of your project, your development practices, or the wider GNOME desktop — and that’s the first step towards reducing that impact. For many apps, this will be as simple as finding and fixing some low-hanging performance issues. For many development situations, the biggest change you might make is to ensure your hosting provider uses renewable energy. For the wider desktop, ensuring we have appropriate default settings for power management, and collecting data about how GNOME machines are used will help.

A Year of Strategic Initiatives at GNOME (Project Organisation and Governance)

• Melissa Wu (GNOME Foundation)
• Molly de Blanc (GNOME Foundation)

In this session, we will go over a summary of partnership and sponsorship activities over the past year. This includes the Community Engagement Challenge, updates on the Advisory Board, grants activities, sponsorships, fundraising campaigns, and other partnership activities. You should come to this session if you'd like to know more about the nuts and bolts of how the GNOME Foundation keeps itself (and the community) going strong, what we did with other organizations over the past year, and what we're excited to be working on now. This session will involve charts and graphs made in LibreOffice.

Meet the Debian Community Team (Project Organisation and Governance)

• Jean-Philippe Mengual (Debian)

The Debian Community Team serves as a resource for the Debian community on issues like Code of Conduct adherence, inappropriate communications, and incident response. In this session, we'll cover what the Debian Community team does, how we do it, and why we do it. We'll provide anonymized examples of things that have happened and how they were handled. We hope to use this time as an opportunity to share what we've learned and open a communication channel between the Debian and GNOME communities on best practices.

GNOME and Buildstream, two (three?) years later (Application Development and Deployment)

• Abderrahim Kitouni

It all started three years ago, when Tristan van Berkom demoed Buildstream as a potential replacement for JHBuild, GNOME Continuous and flatpak manifests. A few months later, in early 2018, the release team started using it for releases. And in the same year Michael Catanzaro concluded that it wasn't ready for developers. Fast forward to today, we have successfully replaced GNOME Continuous, but developers are still using flatpak (for apps) and JHBuild (for desktop components) to build GNOME. This talk will go about giving another chance to Buildstream as a developer tool. I'll present suggested workflows for both app and desktop components developments, and the remaining pain points. I'll also touch a bit on the upcoming release of Buildstream 2.0.

Almond: An Open, Programmable Virtual Assistant (Application Development and Deployment)

• Giovanni Campagna (Stanford University)

Virtual assistants are fast becoming a proprietary platform duopoly that controls access to the web and has access to private information in all accounts and IoTs. This talk will present Almond, a FOSS, crowdsourced, privacy-preserving virtual assistant. Almond uses the crowdsourced Thingpedia skill library, currently containing over 100 services, that is open to all virtual assistants. Almond is built using Genie, a state-of-the-art tool that enables developers to bootstrap deep-learning natural language understanding models in new domains quickly. I will discuss Genie's approach and compare it to commonly used intent classifiers. I will present how to run Almond in the GNOME desktop, and how to leverage integration with the GNOME to add voice control to the desktop. Additionally, Almond is unique in supporting event-driven commands that connect multiple skills. I will show how to leverage this to enable automation and end-user programming of common desktop tasks. Finally, I will discuss potential use cases and ideas for deeper voice integration. As Almond has better technology than proprietary systems, it offers a unique opportunity to showcase the free desktops, with the help of the community.

A better extensions experience -extensions rebooted (Project Organisation and Governance)

• Sriram Ramkrishna

This is a talk on an initiative to improve our extensions experience by having an automated Q&A CI pipeline that can test extensions. Through this process we can remove extensions that no longer work, does not adhere to community standards, or are no longer supported. The project aims to address community perception that extensions are a 3rd class citizen by providing a better process and creating a self sustaining community by centralization of extensions development. This talk will talk about where we are, where we need to go and what we need to make it successful going forward. In addition, we would appreciate feedback on how to improve on the work done so far.

Being a GNOME maintainer: best practices and known traps (Project Organisation and Governance)

• Emmanuele Bassi (GNOME Foundation)

GNOME is made of three things: - people - processes - software All of these are important, and while we correctly celebrate the people who maintain projects, and the software they maintain, we often leave processes aside, and rely on wiki pages that haven't been updated in a decade, or oral histories of how to maintain a project. In this presentation, I will outline what a maintainer does; shed some light on the process of maintaining a GNOME project; describe the best practices accrued over more than 20 years, as well as the known traps lying in wait. I will also try to establish how to improve those practices for the modern free and open source software development tools and infrastructure.

Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism (Project Organisation and Governance)

• Deb Nicholson (Software Freedom Conservancy)

We want to provide useful, intuitive, non-invasive software that all people can use, whether they personally have money for fancy customizations or not. But the software that is the easiest to build -- the software that is the easiest to fund the development of -- tends to serve those who are already extremely well-served. A technology community that primarily serves privileged people, while leaving all other users behind is not one we should expect people to spend their unpaid or volunteer time on. And for certain reprehensible functions, no one should be building the software at all, under any license. So, how do we bridge the gap between what society needs and what many people with money want to fund? This talk will cover: * Non-profits, fundraising and community-building * Small businesses, co-ops and other niches * Possible changes to the broader landscape If we want to build a better world, we will have to move beyond quick fixes and silver bullets. Free and open source software platforms can get us part of the way there, but without some big changes, it won't be enough. We need to build ethical structures for the creation of ethical software.

How to use GitLab to enable diverse and cross-functional teams (Community Building and Diversity)

• Nuritzi Sanchez (GitLab, Inc.)

In this talk, you'll learn how to use GitLab to foster and optimize collaboration across a diverse, cross-functional, remote team. You'll see tangible examples of how non-engineering teams use GitLab to coordinate work, get tips on how to set up workflows, and learn about policies you may want to adopt in order to help your community thrive. You'll also learn more about the newly revamped GitLab for Open Source program, new features that benefit Open Source projects, and ways that you can help us improve GitLab for the needs of Open Source organizations like GNOME.

Epiphany BoF [See the details and register for this event.](https://events.gnome.org/event/13/)

Diversity and Inclusion BoF [See the details and register for this event.](https://events.gnome.org/event/20/)

Engagement BoF [See the details and register for this event.](https://events.gnome.org/event/18/)

Fixing the Shortcomings of the Translation Management Platform [See the details and register for this event.](https://events.gnome.org/event/19/)