From "Gotong Royong" to Open Source: Empirical Insights on How FOSS Reshaped the Indonesian Contributor Mindset (Track A)

• Siska Iskandar (GNOME Indonesia)

Open source software in Indonesia is often evaluated through code contributions and infrastructure adoption. However, its most transformative impact lies in human cognition and cultural behavior. This session presents original empirical research gathered from 22 Indonesian FOSS contributors—spanning veteran sysadmins, software engineers, non-tech professionals, and community educators—exploring how open source shapes daily thinking outside of technology. Quantitative findings reveal that FOSS engagement fundamentally alters decision-making: 90.9% of respondents report prioritizing transparent evidence over institutional authority, while 77.3% adopt a strong DIY ownership mindset over vendor lock-in. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals a fascinating cultural alignment: Indonesian contributors perceive FOSS not as a foreign tech framework, but as a digital evolution of Gotong Royong (traditional mutual assistance). By highlighting real-world stories—from collaborative bug-fixing over blame culture to open knowledge sharing—this talk demonstrates how open source serves as a socio-cultural engine in Southeast Asia, turning passive software users into active, community-first thinkers.

Bus Factor: Mapping Single Points of Failure in GNOME's Maintainer Network (Track A)

• Prasis Angdembe

Every open source project relies on a few people who know how things really work. When too much knowledge is concentrated in just one or two people, it can become a real risk for the project. In this talk, I’ll look at how we can use data engineering to better understand that risk. I’ll use public GitLab data from GNOME modules, looking at things like who is contributing code, reviewing changes, and helping with merges over time. I’ll walk through a simple, fully open-source pipeline that collects and processes this data and turns it into a dashboard. The idea is to get a clearer picture of which modules have a healthy spread of contributors and which ones may depend heavily on a small number of people. This isn’t about ranking or calling out individual contributors. Instead, the goal is to give maintainers and the GNOME Foundation a practical way to spot areas where additional maintainers, mentoring, or knowledge sharing might be useful. By the end of the talk, attendees will have a reference architecture they can adapt for their own open source projects, along with some practical lessons on working with community data and focusing on useful metrics rather than numbers that simply look good.

GNOME and its Accessibility features (Track A)

• Yudhi Satrio

It's an a11y awareness campaign and shows that GNOME already has it. Accessibility isn't an extra feature you need to install on GNOME. It is already part of the desktop. GNOME provides built-in a11y features designed to support different ways people interact with their computers, including screen reading, magnification, visual adjustments, and alternative ways to use the keyboard and pointer. In this session, I’ll take a quick look at where these features live, how to activate them, and most importantly, experience how they actually work in everyday use.

From GSoC Rejection to GNOME Contributor: A Year of Showing Up (Track A)

• Divyanshu Rajput (OSS Contributor @GNOME)

In early 2026, I applied for Google Summer of Code with the GNOME Foundation - and I didn't get selected. For many students, that rejection is the end of the story. They close the laptop, move on, and never contribute to open source again. I chose a different path. Instead of waiting for a program to give me permission to contribute, I opened GNOME's GitLab, found a project that needed help - Gitg, the official GNOME Git repository browser - and started submitting merge requests on my own. That was almost a year ago. Since then, I have: - Driven the GTK3 to GTK4 migration for Gitg through dozens of focused micro-commits - Got the chance to represent the GNOME Foundation at OOSC 4.0 in IIITA, India, organized by OpenPrinting and The Linux Foundation. - Modernized over 40 UI components, replacing deprecated event handlers, container packing methods, and display APIs - Learned Vala from scratch - a language I had never written a single line of before - Built a genuine working relationship with the project maintainer - Been selected as a Linux Foundation LiFT Scholar for my open-source work This talk is not a technical deep-dive into GTK4 APIs. It is an honest, practical story about what happens when you refuse to let a rejection define your open-source journey. **What the Audience Will Learn:** - **Why GSoC rejection doesn't matter** - and why self-directed contribution is often more valuable - **How to find your first GNOME project** — navigating GitLab, reading issue trackers, and identifying where help is needed - **The micro-commit strategy** - why mass rewrites fail and small, 10-line merge requests succeed - **Building trust with maintainers** - how to go from "random outsider" to "trusted contributor" through consistency and patience - **Sustaining motivation for a full year** - how to keep contributing when there's no stipend, no deadline, and no one telling you what to do

Operationalizing GNOME Ambassadorship: Lessons from Bootstrapping Communities in Africa and Asia (Track A)

• Aaditya Singh (GNOME)

After introducing the GNOME Ambassador concept at GUADEC 2026, we formed a small dedicated team to turn high-level community advocacy into real-world, actionable local chapters. This session shares practical lessons, wins, and friction points from bootstrapping open-source communities across two continents: Africa and Asia. We will explore our real-world case studies, from the early momentum built by GNOME Nepal to cross-border efforts in reviving GNOME Africa, initiating GNOME Nigeria, and running an onboarding session for GNOME Kenya that welcomed nearly 30 new attendees. Beyond initial local recruitment, a key focus of this talk will be upstream integration: how to bridge local grassroots initiatives directly into the main GNOME project ecosystem. We will cover methods for transitioning local event attendees into active global contributors, integrating regional teams into GNOME’s translation (l10n), engagement, and development workflows, and establishing sustainable pathways toward GNOME project contributions.

Who Owns the Code That Runs Justice? A Legal Case for Free and Open-Source Software in Public Institutions (Track A)

• Shrinkhala Tiwari (Nepal Bar Council)

Free and open-source software is usually framed as a technical choice an alternative stack, a cheaper license, a community of contributors. This talk argues it should also be understood as a matter of public institutional governance, using the judiciary as the sharpest possible test case. Courts across Asia are adopting case management systems, e-filing platforms, and digital record systems, but almost none of this software is released under open licenses, and almost no public institution asks the questions the FOSS community asks by default: *Who can read this code? Who can audit it? Who can fork it if the vendor disappears? Who owns the modifications built with public money?* Drawing on Nepal's judiciary as a case study, I'll show how the absence of open licensing, public source availability, and community-style governance around judicial software creates real risks-vendor lock-in, unauditable systems handling sensitive personal data, and institutions with no legal or technical path to independence from a single contractor. I'll then turn to what FOSS communities- GNOME chief among them- already do well: transparent governance, copyleft and permissive licensing models, accessibility-first development, and contributor ecosystems that outlive any single vendor. I'll propose a legal framework, grounded in copyright, procurement, and data protection law, for how public institutions can responsibly adopt FOSS licensing and governance norms- not as ideology, but as a safeguard for democratic accountability.

Why Your Linux Desktop Doesn’t Need sudo as Much as You Think. (Track A)

• Aaditya Yadav (GNOME Nepal)

`sudo` is one of the most familiar commands in the Linux world. For many desktop users, however, it has quietly become the default solution whenever something doesn't work: installing software, managing services, changing configuration, or fixing permissions. This talk takes a practical look at Linux's user and privilege model and asks a simple question: **does this operation actually need root?** We will explore how Linux desktops already provide mechanisms that allow users and applications to accomplish many tasks without elevated privileges, including user-owned configuration, `systemd --user`, D-Bus, polkit, Flatpak, virtual environments, and rootless containers. Through practical examples, we will look at common situations where users reach for `sudo` unnecessarily, what can go wrong when they do, and how to approach permissions more deliberately. The goal isn't to argue that `sudo` is bad or that users should never become root. Instead, the talk aims to build a better mental model of Linux permissions: **use your normal user account by default, elevate privileges when the operation genuinely requires them, and understand what that elevation actually means.** The session will be accessible to Linux desktop users and developers, while still providing enough technical detail to explain what is happening underneath the commands we use every day.

Root-Level Digital Freedom: Introducing K-12 Linux Fundamentals and Localized GNOME in Schools (Track A)

• Sailesh Singh (GNOME Nepal)

True open-source independence requires shifting technical literacy from late-undergraduate computer science down to primary and lower secondary school fundamentals. This presentation details our complete operational and educational framework for transforming K-12 computer science using a localized GNOME and Ubuntu ecosystem, driven by university student-led community outreach. Key initiatives covered in this session: * **The K-12 Paradigm Shift:** Replacing proprietary, skill-locked software curricula with Linux fundamentals, terminal basics, and GNOME Shell navigation for primary and lower secondary students. * **Localization at the Grassroots:** Establishing native-language documentation and localizing GNOME UI components to eliminate language barriers for young learners. * **College-Led Outreach:** Conducting university sessions on open-source freedom to build momentum, train student mentors, and onboard school educators. * **System Deployment:** Securing school computer lab environments using `dconf` lock-downs and customized Ubuntu desktop profiles for low-resource hardware.

AI Overload in GNOME: When Faster Coding Leads to Worse Pull Requests

• Shraddha Tiwari (Gnome Nepal)

In under two years, AI coding assistants went from a productivity promise to a maintainer's headache inside GNOME itself. In December 2025, the GNOME Extensions team banned AI-generated submissions outright after reviewer Javad Rahmatzadeh reported spending hours a day wading through 15,000+ lines of AI-produced code riddled with unnecessary try-catch blocks, invented APIs, and comments written for an LLM's benefit rather than a human's. By July 2026, GNOME's security team went further, collapsing its 90-day disclosure window to 30 days specifically because AI-generated vulnerability reports had become the norm rather than the exception, and by August, reviewers were reduced to writing instructions aimed directly at the bots generating the noise. This talk uses GNOME's own paper trail as a case study for a pattern now documented across open source: AI lowers the cost of producing a contribution while leaving the cost of evaluating one untouched, and that imbalance is quietly reshaping maintainer labor. The broader evidence backs this up. A controlled study of experienced open-source developers found they were actually 19% slower when using AI tools, despite believing the opposite. Multiple studies have found that AI-generated code carries measurably more code smells, defects, and complexity than human-written code, alongside recurring security weaknesses. And even after a contribution merges, the maintenance burden doesn't disappear: one empirical study found that 83% of the follow-up work on AI-generated files still falls on human maintainers, not the agents that wrote them. The talk closes with practical takeaways for maintainers: what a defensible AI-contribution policy looks like, where automated triage genuinely helps versus where it just adds a layer of bureaucracy, and how to protect reviewer time without shutting the door on genuine new contributors.

Beyond Pinyin: Designing Chinese Input Methods for GNOME — Lessons from libcangjie (Track A)

• Wan Leung Wong (Hong Kong Linux User Group)

Chinese input is often treated as a single localisation problem, but users across Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and other Chinese-speaking communities rely on very different writing systems, phonetic conventions, input methods, and long-established typing habits. At GNOME.Asia 2012 in Hong Kong, I presented some of these challenges in Cantonese. Fourteen years later, this English talk revisits the subject and asks what has changed — and what we have learned — about Chinese input on the Linux desktop. I am the original author of libcangjie. The current Project Cangjie library was later built upon that original work and today provides the Cangjie and Quick input logic used by ibus-cangjie. Using Cangjie and Quick as a case study, I will explain why Chinese input is not one problem; how phonetic, shape-based, and stroke-based input methods differ; and why details such as candidate ordering, filtering, regional character sets, and user expectations can make or break the input experience. Finally, I will look at how Chinese input has evolved since 2012 and discuss what GNOME and the wider FOSS community can learn from it. Localisation is not simply translation: input methods sit at the intersection of language, culture, muscle memory, interface design, and software architecture.

Growing GNOME in a Vacuum: Community Building in Low-Resource Regions (Track A)

• Shraddha Tiwari (Gnome Nepal)

This paper tells the story of GNOME Nepal: how it grew from a two-person effort into a 15-strong core team, hundreds of members, without funding, institutional backing, or existing open source literacy to build on. In a country where most university curriculum have never mentioned GNOME, and open source itself remains poorly understood, growing a community is not a technical challenge, it's a cultural one. I speak from personal experience, starting as a non-technical contributor with zero exposure to open source, and gradually becoming an active technical contributor, GNOME advocate, and core team member. That journey shaped how we designed our community-building approach: workshops that spark curiosity instead of overwhelming beginners with a full software walkthrough on day one; deliberate collaboration with Fedora and Ubuntu community groups in Nepal to jointly generate interest rather than compete for a small pool of newcomers; and a repeatable growth cycle of awareness, hands-on sessions, and mentorship. I talk candidly about what didn't work, the constant risk of demotivation, the difficulty of retaining contributors after their first event, and the slow work of turning short-term curiosity into long-term contribution through small, consistent incentives. I also cover how addressing diversity, language barriers, and localization directly improved contributor communication and retention, and how mentorship turned early participants into the leaders now running the community. This talk is for organizers in similarly under-resourced, low-open-source-literacy regions trying to build community from nothing, not from an existing base of technical contributors.