GUADEC 2026

Jul 16, 2026, 10:00 AM → Jul 21, 2026, 5:00 PM Europe/Madrid

Kristi Progri

Welcome to GUADEC 2026

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

Timetable:

July 16-17-18  Talk Days

July 19-20: BoFs and Workshops

July 21: Day Trip (Self-organized) 

 

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About GNOME

GNOME is a free and open-source software environment project supported by a non-profit foundation. Together, the community of contributors and the Foundation create a computing platform and software ecosystem, composed entirely of free software, that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use.

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2026GUADEC-Sponsorship.pdf

Thu, July 16

10:00 AM → 10:10 AM Conference Welcome

10:10 AM → 10:35 AM Becoming a GNOME Ambassador: Growing Local GNOME Communities

Open Source communities grow when passionate individuals step forward to represent and advocate for them. Becoming a GNOME ambassador is one of the most effective ways to introduce new people to Free and Open Source Software and build sustainable local communities.

In this talk, I will share my journey of acting as a GNOME ambassador and the efforts to build and grow new and existing GNOME local communities. Through this experience, I learned practical strategies for outreach, advocacy, and community development that help transform individual enthusiasm into collective impact.

The session will focus on how contributors can represent GNOME in their local ecosystems, organize activities, and inspire new contributors. By sharing real examples, lessons learned, and actionable steps, the talk aims to empower participants

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10:10 AM → 10:35 AM Symbolic Achievements -- Future of UI Icons

Symbolic UI icons are essential to the GNOME desktop, but the icon theme model, relying on all-encompassing semantic naming and complex fallback logic for lookup, has become a bottleneck. This talk outlines a pivot away from the system-wide theme spec toward a model where icons are treated as modern app assets. Topics the talk covers includes:

• Direct Embedding: Treating icons as local app resources rather than external system dependencies to ensure reliability.

• Descriptive Metadata: Moving from rigid semantic filenames to a system of descriptive keywords and tags for better discoverability.

• GtkSvg & Animation: Leveraging the present capabilities of GtkSvg to move beyond static paths toward interpolated transitions and SVG animation.

• Tooling: Stateful Smart icons require specific tooling. Talk discuses the current status quo and paints a picture of a possible future.

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10:35 AM → 10:40 AM Short Break for Setup

10:40 AM → 11:05 AM A new stack for GNOME system components

We will explore a possible future in which critical features that GLib, Gio and similar libraries provide to system components have been be moved into small, socket-activated Varlink services written in Rust.

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10:40 AM → 11:05 AM From Community Need to Solution: The Story of Open Forms

Open Forms is a GTK4 + libadwaita-based application designed to provide a native, accessible, and offline-first form.
In many educational institutions, events, and organisations,form-based workflows depend heavily on proprietary web platforms. These tools often lack offline capabilities, security, accessibility in remote areas, and proper desktop integration.

The origin of Open Forms can be traced back to the Ubuntu booth at GUADEC 2025, and hence, it is only appropriate to bring it to the stage at the same time.

Open Forms:

1. Support offline-first data collection
2. Integrate cleanly with the GNOME platform
3. Serve community events, LoCos, and FOSS conferences
4. Run natively on Linux mobiles without needing WiFi

In this talk, we will cover:

1. Why GTK4 + libadwaita were chosen
2. Lessons learned from building the app
3. Real stories of how it is helping Ubuntu booths run smoothly
4. How conferences like GUADEC foster cross-project collaboration

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11:05 AM → 11:25 AM Coffee break

11:25 AM → 12:05 PM Building GNOME Communities Beyond Borders: Lessons from Nepal and South Asia

GNOME Nepal has grown from an idea into an active community that trains students, organizes events, and connects South Asia to the wider GNOME project. This talk presents a practical blueprint for building sustainable GNOME communities in underrepresented regions such as Nepal and neighboring countries.

The session will cover how GNOME Nepal:

1. Reached 1000+students across more than 10 colleges through workshops on GNOME, Linux, and contribution pathways

2. Helped co‑host UbuCon Asia 2025 as a regional hub for GNOME and Ubuntu communities

3. Built local infrastructure including meetups, mentorship, and early localization work

Attendees will learn strategies around language inclusion, low‑budget organizing, partnerships with universities and NGOs, and creating contributor pipelines from students to long‑term community members. The goal is to give community organizers and GNOME contributors a reusable framework they can adapt to their own regions while strengthening GNOME’s global and diverse contributor base.

SaileshSingh_GUADEC2026.pdf

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11:25 AM → 12:05 PM SVG in GNOME

SVG is a versatile image format and it is well-supported in web browsers
and the inkscape image editor. We use it for many things in GNOME, from icons to design mockups. Recently, GTK has started to support it natively.

In this talk, I will take a deeper look at the SVG format and the tools we have for it, with their strengths and weaknesses.

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12:05 PM → 12:10 PM Short Break for Setup

12:10 PM → 12:35 PM Failure as an Entry Point: My Journey in Open Source Communities

Contribution is often perceived as something that requires deep technical knowledge or familiarity with the codebase. Many people use the GNOME tools every day through distributions and desktops, but never cross the line into contributing. This session explores a different entry point. Many of the insights in this talk come from real experiences of breaking my own system many times. The goal wasn’t to unveil everything immediately, but simply to make sense of what was happening step by step. When I got stuck, I didn’t solve everything alone. I asked others, learned from people with more experience, and started engaging with GNOME and open source communities. Over time, that turned into organizing and contributing back.

Drawing from experiences across open source communities, events such as Software Freedom Day and UbuCon Asia 2025, this talk highlights how documentation-driven contributions can lower barriers, strengthen community knowledge, and expand the GNOME contributor base.

KripaKhanal-Community Track.pdf

12:10 PM → 12:35 PM JavaScript in GNOME 2026, Types Types and More Types

It’s now mid-2026 and who doesn’t want to use types to make their medium-large JavaScript codebase easier to statically analyze? We’ll talk about some of the efforts to make it easier to write GNOME apps in TypeScript. And perhaps some exciting new debugging capabilities! Besides that, there’ll be a sneak peek of what to expect from the annual JS engine upgrade, and as usual some juicy project ideas if YOU want to get involved.

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12:35 PM → 1:35 PM Lunch

1:35 PM → 2:00 PM AI code and Open Source: How to GNOME adapt to changing times

Artificial Intelligence tools like Claude Code, Google Gemini and OpenAI Codex are quickly evolving and their capabilities are taking great steps forward on a Monthly basis. Already high profile maintainers are looking of making use of AI for their development and maintainer role while others are pushing back. The GNOME community can not be caught flatfooted in this changing environment, but find ways to embrace AI where it can help us accelerate without dissolving our community glue. We also need to find ways to co-exist amicably in a community where people will want to take different personal decisions about AI adoption for the projects they maintain.

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1:35 PM → 2:00 PM Papers: new features and future projects

This is the first GUADEC since Papers became a core app and this talk is an opportunity to describe the state of Papers.

First, we are going to present features that were added since last year, including document signing support implemented by Malika during her internship. This comprises both initial support for manual signatures (drawing or inserting a handwritten signature image) and improvement of digital signatures. We'll walk through the design decisions, the challenges of integrating signatures into the existing Papers architecture, and what still lies ahead.

Then, we are going to try to lure new contributors into Papers development with a few interesting projects that will be fun to develop! They would also be very useful for users: auto-cropping pages, a new rendering cache, built-in translations…

2:00 PM → 2:05 PM Short Break for Setup

2:05 PM → 2:45 PM Remote GNOME

The transition from building our desktop using X11 to Wayland not only affected regular graphical applications, but also had a significant impact on how to construct systems where the desktop is accessed remotely. In this talk I'll go through how things worked in an X11-centric world, and the building blocks for how we let users access GNOME remotely now.

2:06 PM → 2:45 PM Towards a Local-First Desktop

In this talk we'll introduce the newly formed Modal Collective, and the ongoing effort to bring local-first sync to the GNOME ecosystem. So far, this has mostly been focused around Reflection, a local-first collaborative notes app, easier APIs for third party apps, and GObject bindings for p2panda. This year we're expanding this with a prototype for a system sync service, which any app can use to easily get peer-to-peer connectivity.

We'll explain all the moving parts required to build an app with local-first collaboration, how it can be done today, what needs further work, and how you can get involved!

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2:45 PM → 3:05 PM Coffee Break

3:05 PM → 3:45 PM Lessons from the field: Experience migrating a large commercial application from Win32 to GTK 4

For the last few years, I’ve been a part of a small team working on an ambitious project: migrating a large and complex commercial application from Windows to desktop Linux using GTK 4. The application was originally developed over several decades using Win32 and MFC, and its architecture was deeply tied to the Windows message loop, windowing model, and platform APIs. It implemented multiple complex custom controls, its own layout system based on constraints, and embedded a custom scripting engine.

The port to GTK 4 has been successfully completed, and the product shipped. Today, this is one of the largest and most complex GTK applications ever written.

In this talk, I'll share the practical lessons from this project, the challenges we faced and how we worked around them, which parts of GTK worked well for this project, and what improvements could be made on the GTK side.

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3:05 PM → 3:45 PM State of GNOME OS

Similar to other areas of GNOME, the GNOME OS developers would like to present the progress made during the past year and the exciting plans for the future.

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3:45 PM → 3:50 PM Short Break for Setup

3:50 PM → 4:50 PM Community Update

Come and hear quick updates from GNOME's many community teams, including engagement, internships, code of conduct, platform and bindings teams, and more. This will be a great opportunity to find out about the wide range of activities that are happening in the project, and how to get involved

Fri, July 17

10:00 AM → 10:40 AM A brief history of Graphs - an unplanned journey into GNOME Circle

In this talk, I will share how I went from developing personal scripts as a physicist, to building full applications within the GNOME ecosystem. What started as a personal need to plot scientific data eventually became Graphs, a data visualization application now part of GNOME Circle, available in 25+ languages with over 50,000 downloads on Flathub.

Starting from simple scripts in Matlab and Python, I'll go through the journey of discovering the GNOME stack, publishing on Flathub, and the experience of joining GNOME Circle. Including UX feedback, community collaboration, and lessons learned along the way.

In this talk I'll show how building and publishing a polished GNOME application as a newcomer is not as scary as it may seems, even without any formal software development experience. Whether you're a hobbyist or simply someone with an itch to scratch, the only thing stopping you from getting into development is getting started.

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10:00 AM → 10:40 AM Modernizing evolution-data-server

Evolution-data-server is one of GNOME's old pieces of infrastructure that has been chugging along in the basement thanks to the efforts of a few people. This talk is about updating e-d-s's build infrastructure and exploring its relationship to Flatpak apps.

We'll also have some nostalgia, as the speaker is one of the original authors of e-d-s's calendar component. Nostalgia and furry mammals.

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10:40 AM → 10:45 AM Short Break for Setup

10:45 AM → 11:10 AM Peachy: Write Linux Applications faster with GTK and React

Peachy is a new framework for building Linux applications easier and faster.

It supports many features that improves the developer experience of writing a GNOME application, including CSS imports, automatic resources bundling, Hot Module Reload and more.

The framework is built on top of existing technologies like GTK, React, GJS and more, which brings in a solid base for your application.

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10:45 AM → 11:10 AM Some more governance

Turns out that governance of a large project like GNOME is not something you can improvise in an afternoon. You get to roll it out and then figure out what works and what doesn't. As the GNOME governance is loosey-goosey already, we start with the application development platform, by describing the Platform Team, as the group that governs the various components of the GNOME software development platform, used to build GNOME itself, as well as the various projects that target GNOME.

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11:10 AM → 11:30 AM Coffee Break

11:30 AM → 12:30 PM From Swords to Plowshares (Keynote)

Everyone knows of the activist origins of Free and OpenSource Software (FOSS). But is FOSS today still fundamentally an activist attack on commercial software? Who are the maintainers building and maintaining FOSS? What is the place of FOSS in society? And if that changed, are our discourse and models of FOSS maintainers and how to help them have the most positive impact on society still useful? We will try to explore this together and maybe even offer some answers, supported by real empirical data.

Speaker: Thomas Depierre

12:30 PM → 1:45 PM Lunch Break

1:45 PM → 2:10 PM Passwordless authentication mechanisms from the GUI (GDM)

The world is moving toward more modern and secure authentication methods. This transition is driven by a global push for Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), which many organizations are adopting as a security mandate.

As a result, GDM has received several improvements to enhance the authentication experience. Two new mechanisms have been added: passkeys and external IdP (web login). Users can now choose among the supported authentication mechanisms, and the PAM conversation has been extended to support this new scenario with multiple authentication options.

In this talk, we’ll cover what the GDM authentication architecture looks like and how it handles PAM conversations. We will discuss the new PAM extension that uses JSON messages to support these mechanisms, the changes made in GDM to allow selecting different authentication methods, upcoming enhancements, and provide a demonstration of the current implementation.

eidp demo.mp4

passkey demo.mp4

Passwordless GDM slides.pdf

1:45 PM → 2:10 PM When Porting Isn't Enough: Rewriting a Python GTK2 Application for GTK4

In 2010 I built Jollpi, a lightweight text editor in Python 2 with GTK2 and GtkSourceView2. When I returned in 2025, my goal was to port it to GTK4. That assumption lasted only a few hours.

GTK4 is not a newer API layer — it's a different paradigm. Concepts like UIManager-based menus no longer exist. Adapting the old code would only preserve outdated assumptions. The project was rewritten from scratch.

The session covers practical differences encountered, including: transitioning to Gtk.Application, using Gio.FileMonitor for external file changes, search with GtkSourceView.SearchContext, inline interfaces with Gtk.Revealer, and GTK's CSS system.

Beyond API changes, the talk focuses on a real concurrency problem: keeping the editor responsive while multiple large files load and search runs in other tabs — solved by setting GLib.PRIORITY_LOW for background loading while managing search state through a single shared widget.

Aimed at Python-GTK developers maintaining older GTK2 or GTK3 projects.

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jollpi3_new_demo.mp4

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2:10 PM → 2:15 PM Short Break for Setup

2:15 PM → 2:55 PM GNOME Internationalization: accessibility for all over the world!

Internationalization (i18n) has long been one of GNOME’s strengths, enabling our desktop and applications to reach users across cultures, languages, and writing systems. Yet the expectations of a global audience continue to evolve.

In this talk, we will revisit the fundamentals of GNOME’s internationalization process, clarify the responsibilities shared between developers and translators, and highlight the linguistic and technical challenges of supporting more than 180 locales—from plural rules and grammatical variation to complex writing systems and RTL layouts.

We will also review the current state of our translation platform, Damned Lies, and discuss opportunities to modernize its workflow and tooling. Finally, the session will open the door to future work, including one of the most significant emerging topics in UI text design: gender‑neutral and inclusive writing across languages.

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2:15 PM → 2:55 PM Using Mutter as an application test framework

Mutter is a compositor, a library, and a remote desktop endpoint, all at once. It also sports its own test suite, including "reftests" and functional tests.

In the other side of the balance, GNOME has an ever growing ecosystem of applications, all sharing the hardnesses of full UI testing, the and few existing methods are usually run by third parties and require long roundtrips before finding bugs.

This talk will explore the possibility of using Mutter as a test harness for UI testing in applications' CI, in order to increase their testing coverage in a much tighter loop.

2:55 PM → 3:15 PM Coffee Break

3:15 PM → 3:55 PM Introduction to Cambalache 1.0

After more than 5 years of development Cambalache 1.0 is here!
In this talk I will show you how to use it to create a simple Gtk 4 application showcasing new features and recommended workflow.
We will start with some Python code and create the whole UI in Cambalache step by step using custom Gtk templates.

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3:15 PM → 3:55 PM Session Save/Restore

GNOME 51 is on track to introduce a platform-wide session save and restore framework. This is a long-requested feature that allows session and app state to be saved when the user logs out, and restored when they log back in.

This talk will take a deep dive through the what, why, and how of this feature

3:55 PM → 4:00 PM Short Break for Setup

4:00 PM → 4:20 PM The Future of Boxes

This talk provides an update on my latest progress on GNOME Boxes, the challenges of evolving the codebase, and how far we have come so far. We will discuss how these changes improve the user experience and outline specific ways the community can contribute to the project's growth moving forward.

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4:20 PM → 5:00 PM Intern Lightning Talks

Sat, July 18

10:30 AM → 11:30 AM Annual General Meeting

What happened since GUADEC 2024, update post Foundation elections and what is the Foundation plan, both from a development and financial perspective, for 2025-2026

11:30 AM → 11:50 AM Coffee Break

11:50 AM → 12:50 PM Annual General Meeting: Annual General Meeting - Part 2

What happened since GUADEC 2024, update post Foundation elections and what is the Foundation plan, both from a development and financial perspective, for 2025-2026

12:50 PM → 2:05 PM Lunch Break

2:05 PM → 3:05 PM State of the Shell

Another year, another Guadec update from your fellow Mutter and GNOME Shell developers. Come and celebrate the many features achieved, and the peek into the future plans to come.

3:05 PM → 3:30 PM Beyond #RRGGBB: cross-application color palettes the slightly hard way

This session examines how colors and sets of colors are exposed to desktop users and why it's frustratingly difficult getting identical results between LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, GTK themes, and other FOSS software, from graphing libraries to debugging tools. We'll explore the competing implementations for storing and sharing color information across documents, describe what users can do to get reproducible results today, and consider how cross-application color could be made slightly more convenient.

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3:05 PM → 3:30 PM One Daemon to Rule Them All: Cross-Desktop Credential Management with OO7

OO7 is a Rust implementation of the freedesktop Secret Service that provides unified credential management across GNOME and KDE Plasma. The project includes a client library, D-Bus daemon, portal backend, and CLI tools. Offering a complete, memory-safe replacement for gnome-keyring-daemon and kwallet while supporting both major Linux desktop environments through a single codebase.

3:30 PM → 3:50 PM Coffee Break

3:50 PM → 4:30 PM Building the Fundraising Engine - Revamping how we communicate

This talk will focus on the means and mechanisms we will use to build a better fundraising engine. Today, GNOME will rely heavily on recurring donors to fund initiatives like the developer fund, travel to conferences, and infrastructure.

The key to funding them is to build a fundraising engine that effectively creates content that tells stories on social media and in person. This talk will talk about what we've been working on for the last 6 months and how the GNOME project can help with our efforts structurally.

3:50 PM → 4:30 PM Performance profiling Mutter, GNOME Shell & apps with Tracy

During the 2024 GNOME STF grant, I used the Tracy profiler to investigate performance in Mutter and GNOME Shell, finding several real issues, many now fixed. In this talk, I’ll use some of those investigations to show you what Tracy can do: timeline view, statistics, plots, call stacks, memory profiling, and even profiling over LAN. I’ll show how you can integrate Tracy to your app or library written in C, C++ or Rust, so you can diagnose performance problems and get a better understanding of where your code spends time and memory.

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4:31 PM → 4:51 PM GNOME Infrastructure State of the Union

Andrea Veri

4:51 PM → 5:51 PM Intern Lightning Talks: Community Lightning talks

5:51 PM → 6:01 PM Conference Closing

Sun, July 19

10:00 AM → 12:00 PM GNOME Settings BoF

A meeting for the GNOME Settings community to discuss the project roadmap.

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10:00 AM → 11:00 AM What is a good localisation coordinator?

A lot of our localization teams have coordinators, but what is it to be a coordinator? What is the role and responsibility toward new and long-time contributors. This issue has raised as a lot of people asked to become team coordinators while we have no standardized process to accept them in this role, nor any process to follow when you are a team coordinator.

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11:00 AM → 12:00 PM Pango, text, and language-handling

A BoF session about all things Pango and text-handling–related. Anyone interested in fonts, displaying text elements in GNOME applications, or processing language-specific data is welcome, regardless of whether your interest is visual text widgets in GTK, emoji, or translation and localization.

Host: Nathan Willis

12:00 PM → 1:29 PM Lunch Break

1:30 PM → 3:30 PM GNOME on Mobile

Discuss projects and next steps to make GNOME more usable in mobile: GNOME OS in FP5 , gnome-shell, libadwaita / GTK+ improvements, onboarding more contributors, etc.

Hosts: Javier Jardon, Tobias Bernard

1:30 PM → 3:30 PM Let's build an app for the modern GNOME platform using C++

The modern GNOME platform provides a rich set of building blocks and tools for creating apps. In this workshop, we'll build an application using GTK 4, libadwaita, Blueprint, and other cool GNOME technologies. For implementing the application logic, we'll make use of peel, the new GObject bindings for C++, which will also enable us to make use of external C++ libraries. I will go over build system set-up, various best practices, and packaging our application as a ready-to-install Flatpak.

The goal of this session is to demonstrate how the various building blocks of the modern GNOME platform fit together, but also to show that making a neat app for GNOME can be easy, fun, and accessible even to someone who doesn't have a lot of background in GNOME development.

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3:30 PM → 3:45 PM Break

3:45 PM → 4:45 PM GNOME Internship Committee Meetup

Meet with the GNOME Internship Committee to discuss the future of the internship efforts in the GNOME community.

Speakers: Allan Day (Red Hat), Mr Aryan Kaushik, Felipe Borges (Red Hat), Kristi Progri, Matthias Clasen, Pedro Sader Azevedo, Sriram Ramkrishna

3:45 PM → 5:45 PM Local-First Sync and Collaboration

The Reflection team will briefly present the progress on their local-first text editor app and the tech stack used (p2panda and Loro CRDT), which will hopefully be a good basis for discussions around local-first sync in GNOME apps more generally, and initial planning for a system-level sync service.

Anyone with an interest in local-first is welcome, especially app developers interested in adding sync to their own app.

Speakers: Andreas Dzialocha, Julian Sparber, Tobias Bernard

Mon, July 20

10:00 AM → 12:00 PM Design

A slot for design team and other design-adjacent contributors to come together and discuss ongoing work, plans for future work, and improvements to our structures and processes. Depending on who's coming to GUADEC we might want to allow remote attendance, but not clear yet.

Hosts: Tobias Bernard, Jakub Steiner

10:00 AM → 12:00 PM GNOME OS BoF

Annual GNOME OS BoF

12:00 PM → 1:29 PM Lunch Break

1:30 PM → 3:30 PM Engagement Team

This session will be dedicated to the presentation of the Engagement Team, Onboarding of new members and brainstorming for campaigns, new areas, etc.

Host: Maria Majadas and other members from engagement team

1:30 PM → 3:30 PM GTK local-first workshop

There are now GObject bindings for p2panda wrapping the high-level API, which makes it easy to add peer2peer network to any GTK APP.
In this workshop we will build a simple App from scratch or if you have an existing app we will help you experiment with integrating p2panda.

Hosts: Julian Sparber, Tobias Bernard