GUADEC/aKademy 2009 in Gran Canaria

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.

GUADEC Core Day 1

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.

A Coruña 2009, GUADEC and aKademy, the proposal!!!

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 2009, Coruña, why not?

Last two weeks we have been working hard preparing a proposal for hosting GUADEC and aKademy in a Coruña next year. After organizing GUADEMY last year we decided that this could be the moment for writing a good proposal for next year, and I feel that we have done it.
The following organizations GPUL, Igalia and the University of A Coruña are proposing together the organization of the most important Free Desktop event in the world, all GNOME and KDE developers together in the same Venue going ones to aKademy and others to GUADEC.

This would create the possibility of organizing cross-desktop global meetings, following the spirit we wanted for GUADEMY.
I would like to thank all the organizations that supported our bid including the Regional Goverment of Galicia Xunta de Galicia, AGASOL, ASOLIF, GNOME HISPANO and other organizations and people from KDE and GNOME that give us really interesting comments to improve our proposal.

In the proposal is the mandatory Queimada and as almost all the people that attended to different events organized by us we can organize a lot of amazing surprises. Excellent food, almost-proffesional organization (lot of years of experience), fantastic volunteers and a lot of love for Free Software. Hope see you next year and we hope you want to come to Coruña. 🙂

Countdown to GUADEMY

Last year the First edition of GUADEMY was organized by GPUL and it was a fantastic experience, this year we are proud of the Polinux guys, because they have decided to assume the challenge of organizing a second edition.

Last year it was quite a success because of the participation of almost of the people from the spanish KDE and GNOME community.This year goal will be improving the communication and sharing of experiences among people from our communities and we will try promoting an international participation.

So will see you in II GUADEMY from April 25th to April 27th. Thanks Polinux.

Testing GNOME Online Desktop

One of the lastest ideas surrounding the evolution of the GNOME Desktop is the concept of Online Desktop. It was introduced during last GUADEC at the Keynote of Bryan Clark and Havoc Pennington.

Today I finally get it running on my Ubuntu 7.10 without not many problems following the instructions. Next weeks i will study about the possibilities of this technologie .Let’s imagine the concept, your desktop will be available from every computer that has installend the online-desktop. Configure once and run everywere.

Here is my snapshot after getting it working 🙂

Online Desktop Snapshot

Last night at Birmingham

I’ve spent last week here at Birmingham attending VII GUADEC. It has been an amazing conference trying to define the future of the GNOME project.

The main discussions have been about the integration of Internet on the desktop and the future of the 3D desktop. This year i haven’t been involved in the organization so i could attend to a lot of talks.

Today i have been preparing my presentation for the BoF “Organizing GNOME events” where i tried to give some indications about what is needed to organanize an event related to FLOSS. The audience was really nice and there was an interesting discussion related to what we need to increase the number of events related to GNOME.

I feel that we should try to define a good documentation related to what is needed to make organization an easier task. Is there is anybody interested in my presentation you can get my Slides here or at GUADEC website.

It was my first presentation in english, so sorry for my accent 🙂

Mi balance de GUADEC-ES

Otra vez nos hemos reunimos la gente que tiene inquietudes sobre la plataforma GNOME en Granada en la IV GUADEC Hispana organizada por GCUBO.

De la organización no se puede decir otra cosa que merecen todas las felicitaciones por el trabajo que han realizado. La GUADEC Hispana ha sido un evento que nos ha permitido reunirnos en un entorno ideal gracias a GCUBO.

  • Cosas que me gustaron: la atención de los organizadores, la ciudad (granada y la alhambra), el restaurante de la cena, algunas charlas muy bien preparadas, el diseño de todo el material (y esa pancarta), la participación del público en las mesas redondas, el éxito de los talleres de diseño, ver a toda la gente.
  • Cosas a mejorar: que la gente envíe los artículos de sus ponencias, que se cumplan los tiempos del call for papers, la realización de tracks para hackers/usuarios (debe ser interesante para todos también para desarrolladores), que la próxima vez puedan venir la gente que no pudo como rodrigo, acs, alo, arc, etc…
  • Cosas que no me gustaron: la duración de algunas charlas (no es bueno llevar retrasos en el programa), que haya gente informal que no avise de su ausencia cuando tiene una ponencia que ha enviado.

Resumiendo, GUADEC-ES el año que viene tiene que hacer bastantes cosas para superar el trabajo organizativo de este año, esperemos que la gente de la URJC nos confirme que están interesados en organizar la próxima edición :-).

Muchas gracias a Arturo, Loren, Manuel, Miguel y al resto de la gente por todo vuestro trabajo.

This week GUADEC-ES in Granada

I wanted to post about this year GUADEC-ES, but i’ve been very busy these days. This year this great GNOME event will be at Granada, one of the most beautiful cities i know. It was a pity that the Alhambra wasn’t one of the 7 wonders of the modern age, but it continues being wonderful.

This year GUADEC-ES has been organized by GCUBO.They are doing a great work, as far as i know they have been working really hard.

For this fourth edition i’ve proposed a pair of panels:

  • Past, present and future of GNOME HISPANO, this talk it’s about how GNOME HISPANO was founded and what have we done until now. Alvaro del Castillo, José Ángel Díaz and Germán Poo will help me to drive this panel to answer some questions that we should solve to analyse the future of the group. I’ve wrote a short paper in spanish with some details abour our brief existence.
  • GNOME in 59 seconds, this talk is based on the format we used at last year GUADEC-ES during a free software projects panel. The audience can ask any question to the developers present in the panel, but each answer can only last 59 seconds in order to make easy the participation of everybody. Alvaro López Ortega, Fernando San Martín, Fernando Herrera, Carlos Garnacho, Juan José Sánchez Penas will be our nice volunteers who will participate in this second edition.

We will have the asembly of GNOME HISPANO association like every year at GUADEC-ES, so don’t forget to pay your subscription as member of the association, remember that i’m the treasurer and i will publish people that have pending payments 😉

GUADEMY experience

It’s a long time since my last post, so if you ask why is this guy writing about GUADEMY its because i haven’t written about that wonderful experience.

I think that GUADEMY was one of the more interesting activities organized by GPUL, the experience of meeting with all GNOME friends and having a nice weekend all together with KDE people was wonderful . I would like this experience could be repeated next year, i don’t know if should be at Coruña again or in another place. But by the moment that many people from the organization would like to repeat this experience.

Even that i sent this post to late, i would like thanking all the people that attended GUADEMY.

By the way DUDESConf was really amazing too.