Already 5 days in Bangalore, India and time to give an update on what has been done and what’s left to finalize. I have indeed been silent the past 2-3 months preparing the GNOME.Asia Summit and working on Software Freedom Day to get up to speed for 2011. So I am at my first GNOME hackfest and from what I have been told, one of the biggest ever. In total we have about 16 people working on the GNOME 3.0 release, from making sure we catch all the critical bugs, to fixing them, writing documentation (I’ve just been assigned to write some missing sections – that will be my first contribution to the GNOME code base) and preparing the associated marketing campaign (which has already started of course).
On top of those major tasks we are also providing training to the students of Bangalore (2 days totalling 200 seats), organizing a business session with case studies to explain to local companies how others make money with GNOME and Free Software, running a helpdesk to support people curious about GNOME 3.0 and, making sure that all the necessary tasks for the GNOME.Asia Summit have been completed. I have to send a huge thank you to Bharath for his devotion and support everyday and all the sponsors who have made this great event possible. It is a real pleasure to see so many people supporting us and we can definitely feel the pressure not to disappoint anyone.
In that respect I have been particularly impressed with the release team who is not taking their task lightly and have somewhat skipped the group meals since Tuesday. They still move from the hotel to the hackfest location with us but seldom leave their keyboards. The above photo is a shot I just took in their room before writing this post… Of course no one in the team has written their talk for the weekend, but that shouldn’t prevent participants from attending 😉
On the bright side we have reached 1400 registrations for the summit and I doubt anything could stop the success of what we’ve been working on for the past 6 months. India even got qualified for the cricket world finals, which has only happened twice since 1975 (2003 best runner up, 1983 winner). So obviously everything is on our side and the 3.0 release should be a magnificent one.
Last but not least I want to thank the GNOME Foundation for its support and allowing me to join the hackfest and the conference.
