Chema Casanova’s Blog

Last year i was travelling to Istambul because of GUADEC. Now, after a year, i’m travelling to Gran Canaria to attend the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, in 4 hours from now i’ll be landing to Gran Canaria. This island is a new destination for me although i’ve been to Canary Islands five times before.

This year we are having a join event with GNOME and KDE people, the program of the event is really exciting, and i expect that our local team isn’t exhausted after the hard work they have been doing during last months. We expect more than 1000 people in the conference so success is assured, although weather seems to be cloudy until tuesday, but this wouldn’t be a problem because temperature is around 24 degrees.

I’m try too keep you informed about how everything is goin in Gran Canaria, and the rest of Igalia crew will give a lot of reports because we are more than 24 people attending Gran Canaria Desktop Summit with several talks in GUADEC track. We are already sponsoring the conference :-).

Don’t forget attending GUADEC-ES, this year we have really good talks.

Os presento los horarios y ponencias de la VI GUADEC Hispana dentro del Gran Canaria Desktop Summit que tendrá lugar los días 8 y 9 de julio de 2009. ACTUALIZACION Ya está disponible el programa con el resumen de las charlas y la biografía de los autores.

Me gustaría destacar la calidad y variedad de las ponencias presentadas por los autores de la comunidad de GNOME HISPANO, con un programa para todos los gustos.

Querría agradecer también la presencia de Federico Mena que será el encargado de la charla inagural y toda la comunidad hispana que se ha acercado desde América para el evento.

Acaba de finalizar el proceso de revisión de ponencias para la VI edición de GUADEC-ES y aquí esta la lista de ponencias y talleres aceptados, desde GNOME HISPANO agradecemos a todos los ponentes las contribuciones enviadas.

• Introducción al Desarrollo en Escritorios Libres, Fernando Herrera, Alvaro del Castillo
• Taller de introduccion a contribuciones artisticas en el proyecto GNOME, Alberto Ruiz
• Meiga: compartiendo contenidos de forma ligera desde el escritorio, Enrique Ocaña González
• Mistelix: una aplicación de autoría de DVD y  presentación de diapositivas, Jordi Mas
• Cómo incorporarse al escuadrón de control de calidad de GNOME, Pedro Villavicencio Garrido
• Tarefas: una aplicación cliente/servidor y multi-backend de GTD para GNOME, Maemo.org y Moblin.org, Javier Jardón, Manuel Fontán, Manuel Rego, José Pousa, Beatriz Montero, José Puente, Pedro García , Alicia Sarmiento
• Minería de datos de los repositorios de Gnome, Germán Póo Caamaño
• GTK+ 3.0, paso a paso, Carlos Garnacho
• Tracker. ¿Qué he hecho yo para indexar esto?,  Ivan Frade
• Git para desarrolladores de GNOME, Alberto García
• Un vistazo a Vala, Victor Manuel Jáquez Leal

A lo largo de esta semana se publicaran los horarios en la página web oficial del evento.

Ya está disponible la petición de contribuciones de la VI GUADEC-ES que se celebrará en Gran Canaria el 8 y 9 de julio de 2009.Este año GUADEC-ES se organiza en colaboración con la organización del Gran Canaria Desktop Summit junto con la GUADEC y aKademy y nuestra hermana aKademy-ES. Desde la organización os animamos a que enviéis vuestras contribuciones antes del 10 de Junio en forma de abstract de 500 palabras describiendo el contenido de las charlas.

Las temáticas para este año son las siguientes:

• Proyecto GNOME: organización del proyecto, GNOME Foundation, GNOME y las patentes de software, el futuro del proyecto, empresas y agrupaciones involucradas, cómo colaborar, etc.
• Plataforma y tecnología GNOME: bibliotecas, principales avances, propuestas de mejora, presentaciones sobre el uso de la tecnología.
• Aplicaciones, usuarios y GNOME: GNOME como entorno de trabajo, como herramienta de trabajo en grupo, como plataforma usable y de alta productividad, etc.
• Proyectos y tecnologías basadas en GNOME: proyectos y casos de éxito en los que se utiliza GNOME como tecnología de desarrollo, usos originales de las tecnologías GNOME.
• Presentaciones formativas o tutoriales sobre tecnologías GNOME orientados a principiantes.
• Otros temas relacionados con los entornos de escritorio o que tengan relación directa con GNOME.

La idea inicial será dedicar el miercoles para sesiones de introducción y tutoriales sobre la plataforma GNOME y el jueves dedicado a la sesión de charlas y ponencias con las nuevas ideas de nuestra comunidad en GNOME. Estamos ansiosos de recibir vuestras propuestas.

Me gustaría agradecer la colaboración por parte de la organización del evento a la hora de gestionar un espacio adecuado para organizar la GUADEC-ES.

Nos vemos en Gran Canaria.

En estos últimos días en Igalia estamos de cambio. Javi que ha sido socio fundador y uno de los pilares de Igalia nos dice hasta luego por una temporada. Personalmente voy a echarte de menos ya que va a ser duro no escuchar esos paseos tuyos dando vueltas por la oficina con el teléfono a la oreja, o lanzando el balón de rugby, o degustando la leche condensada o contando tus aventuras del último fin de semana.
Aún me acuerdo cuando un día por la Facultad de Informática me comentaste la idea de unirme a un grupo de gente para formar una empresa que luego se llamaría Igalia. ¿Quien iba a decir que ibamos a estar juntos en el mismo proyecto durante los últimos 8 años? Y mira que lo hemos pasado bien este tiempo. Pero a un culo inquieto como el tuyo siempre le gusta viajar y cambiar de aires de vez en cuando, así que a pesar de que ya no comeremos todos los días juntos aún te daré la lata ya que te tengo fichado el móbil.

No te librarás tan fácil de mi ya que todavía tenemos que celebrar tu comunión.

Señor Vázquez, que te echaremos de menos. Pero espero verte pronto por aquí.

FOSDEM has already finished this afternoon. It was an interesting conference with a lot of parallel tracks and as my friend Javier Muñoz says “Everytime you go to a talk you feel like you were losing 10 interesting talks”. This year i’ve being changing from different tracks touching a bit of security, kernel, x.org and KDE. This year i’ve decided to review topics i usually don’t follow because here at FOSDEM you can have a nice general picture of the FLOSS movement.

I’ve already seen some people from our GNOME community but i couldn’t attend the GNOME beer event this year because i needed to recover from Friday Beer FOSDEM event in order to get up early to attend some interesting talks today’s morning.

This year we haven’t done so much sightseeing in Brussels, but today evening we have been looking for something really special because Mario was having a craving for 4 kilos high quality cacao mixture similar to Nutella… i hope we have no problem with the chocolates we have bought in the plane.

Tomorrow there is a kind of big storm in Galicia, so i hope our plane could land, in other case we will lost the day in Barajas in transit.

It has been a long time since i last wrote a post in my blog, my blog is included in several planets so every time i published anything it was published at Planet Igalia, Planet GNOME HISPANO , Planet GPUL and the Planet Caixanova Master on Free Software, but today if finally i finished decided to create different tags for each target of public so i can start using my weblog for a more personal use not only related to Free Software or my work in Igalia. So my family and friends can understand something
So i am publishing this as my last general post for all the planets i am aggregated

I have spent some nice days in GUADEC in Istanbul. This year i was not giving a talk but i have the emotion of the bid we presented for hosting GUADEC in 2009. After attending to a lot of interesting talks yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced that next year GUADEC will be co-located with aKademy in Gran Canaria.

I’ve never been to Gran Canaria, but a have a special relation with the Canary Islands. If you check my weblog header it is me with the Teide like background. I have been 5 times in Tenerife and visited La Palma and La Gomera. i have felt in love with these Islands, each one is different with a special charm. I have been waiting for an occasion to go to Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura so next year i have an excuse and i know that Alberto will be a really nice host in Gran Canaria.

At this point i can only say that GNOME Hispano will give all the possible support that we can provide to Alberto and the rest organizers for organizing GUADEC next year, we have had a great commitment in the organization of GUADEC in Vilanova two years ago, so we have the experience needed for helping them as an active part in the organization.

So as i told Alberto i will try to help him about any request and advise he needs. I would like that GNOME community continue wanting to come back to Spain when it is possible, so that we can convince them to come to Galicia in future editions

Now we should think about a new proposal for organizing an innovative event in Coruña next year but we should think about this in GPUL because we are celebrating our tenth anniversary.

P.D. I hope that all students of the Master on Free Software of Caixanova are working hard while i am “working” in Istanbul.

It has been my first day at GUADEC, i have met some of the fantastic volunteers that have been collaborating in Vilanova as Gil, Silvia and the organizer Baris. They continue being fantastic people with a lot of energy.

Today talks were quite interesting, I liked specially talk from Miguel about his point of view of the integration of web and desktop app development. On the other side I have been always interested on GPS and the development of Geoclue and Gypsy is going forward with the objective of providing to the Desktop the information about where the desktop is in each moment.
But GUADEC is not just the series of talks in a conference venue, is the social program and meeting people from the GNOME community. Today organization prepared a cocktail with the GNOME Band sound on the roof of the University, with a really nice view of the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn. Claudio is a great musician so I think that when he arrives to Coruña the Igalia band will be possible with the collaboration of Calvaris (classical piano), API (bass) and Andres with the battery I’ve been speaking with Ivan Frade remembering my latest PhD research regarding indexation, Information Retrieval and tracker.
Later on the street near our hotel, the one full of pillows, I spend a nice time speaking with Lucas Rocha, German and Pedro.I could practice a little my French too with some people from Fluendo.
Today I first met to Stormy Peters, our new executive director of the GNOME Foundation, she is really motivated in working for GNOME. I have watched her last year keynote at Birmingham and i liked. I believe that she can really help spreading all the fantastic work that GNOME community is doing and I think that she can take this responsibility. She has an extra point, she speaks a really good Spanish.

We will know on Friday where GUADEC is going to be next year, I hope that board will chose our proposal for Coruña, and the same for KDE e.V., but nowadays we can only wait for a decision.
It is too late, and lately Igalians have been closing the pillows GUADEC street, so today we have done it again, thank you Mario for showing us the good path Just 5 hours before getting up and i can see the sunrise throw my window. Good day and Good luck.

Last weekend Emilio, José Millán and me were working hard our proposal to co-host GUADEC and aKademy next year in A Coruña. In our bid we try to show the community all the possibilities of our city and our team to organize such a great event, but we are better working hard than writing long documents. We try to do the best.
Our proposal main idea is:”We want to organize a conference by community people for community people“. We have the facilities, we have a passionate team and a lot of ideas after attending several conferences and organizing a lot of events. We know how important is that details do not fail and having always prepared a second option.

Our main goal is investing all our efforts so that people can get here next year. So the main expense in our budget will be helping people to attend the event by sponsoring as much people as possible. That will be possible thanks to the contribution of the University and volunteers. They provide almost for free all the basic for running these two conferences and our Regional Government, the Xunta de Galicia, has an important commitment with this proposal and a great confidence in our work at all levels. So here it is by GPUL, Igalia and University of A Coruña:

• GUADEC and aKademy proposal for 2009 in A Coruña

• Xunta de Galicia Support to GUADEC and aKademy 2009 in A Coruña

• University of A Coruña support to GUADEC and aKademy 2009 in A Coruña

• Faculty Support to aKademy and GUADEC 2009 in A Coruña