Tales from GNOME Asia 2023
Epilogue
The GNOME Asia 2023 Summit, a key event in the open-source technology calendar, took place in Kathmandu, Nepal, from December 1 to 3, 2023. This conference is the premier annual event for the GNOME community in Asia, focusing on the GNOME desktop, applications, and development tools. The GNOME Foundation, which oversees this summit, aims to bring together various stakeholders, including users, developers, foundation leaders, government representatives, and businesses, to discuss present technologies and future developments. This iteration of the GNOME summit (as will be covered in the report) will have two parts, the community and the actual event proceedings. GNOME Asia Summit brought back the key FOSS stakeholders of Nepal into the limelight and also collaborated with the Fedora Project - helping them host a Release Party for Fedora Linux 39 and Celebrate the 20th year of the Fedora Project.
Day 0
Like all "great" FOSS Projects do, Day 0 is all about intense collaboration over the Signal group. Everyone is traveling. Folks sharing travel tips and hacks. Mostly laying the pathway for others to follow. Ideally, the plan is to have all the people land and reach safely to the accommodation booked for the next couple of days. This part got taken care of nicely. We all had a meet and greet on the 30th of November evening at Marriot Fairfield. We all went for dinner and settled in our comfy rooms for the day.
Day 1
The event venue was less than 5 km away and Justin approached the hotel to get us a bus so everyone could fit in. The agenda had a few sessions that were of interest and of course the release party!
The keynote was by Justin Flory. Justin talked extensively about Open Source and drew parallels between the methods and the culture of a community where Open Source thrives. Justin also shared his stories with the community and how that has helped him grow as a professional.
The session following this was with Matthias Clasen, who happens to work in GNOME Desktop and GTK at Red Hat. He spoke in depth about "How GNOME works", this was one of the most insightful sessions for me. Being someone who is a Quality Engineer for the Fedora Project, it becomes crucial that I know in depth about the primary release blocking Desktop Environment (DE). Matthias also shared his knowledge on Dbus and compositor, and the audience enjoyed it.
Jens Peterson from Fedora gave a talk about Declarative GTK programming, this was also a very interesting thing for me. It taught me a few neat things about GTK.
Here's some photos
Day 2
On the second day, we had a lot of sessions around GNOME but the most important and the one I loved the most would definitely be Nikita speaking on Krita. That talk taught me so much about brushes and gave me a good overview as novice on "why and how" Krita can do better than many closed source tools and softwares.
#wearefedora :)
The move forward
These are changing times, socially we are now safe from COVID and we are at the juncture where we need to bet on building Fedora community stronger the in emerging markets of the upcoming years. Every community event like such will have deep and lasting impacts on the generations who will contribute and make meaningful strides in furthering our mission and vision.
Nepal has always been a strong advocate of Linux in local language and I think fedora can help reboot some of the initiatives. I believe there is a lot of potential in having such events. More than 80% of our audience inquired about getting started and building packages.
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