GNOME.Asia 2015, part 1: the conference

This article is part one of three, each focusing on a different aspect of my trip to Depok, Indonesia, for the 2015 edition of the GNOME.Asia conference. I wouldn’t have been able to attend without the sponsorship from the GNOME Foundation, and I’m very thankful for this opportunity.

This one is about the conference itself. Part 2 is about the talks that were given there. Part 3 is about my touristic experience in the country.

First of all, I have to say that this event was very well organized (and I know a thing or two about organizing a conference). Siska did an amazing job as an MC. It was good to meet Max again and to see that he was there to provide guidance to the local team.

For someone like me who’s more used to conferences like GUADEC or FOSDEM, the audience is quite a change. People are discovering free software and projects such as GNOME, but they are so enthusiastic and eager to contribute!

There was one day of workshops and two days of talks. I’ll cover the talks in part 2. My overall impression on the workshops is that it was not practical enough and that we tried to explain things too much. I say we because I co-presented one of them with Kat. The topic was “Your first contribution to GNOME”, Kat covered a variety of domains with a focus on docs while I gave some details about translations. After our introduction, we split into groups and with a little help from other experienced contributors, we helped newcomers work on engagement, bug squashing, documentation and translations.

As usual, this conference was the occasion to meet some awesome people from the community. Some I know quite well now (Tobi, KatDave, Olav, André, Olivier, Julita), some I had only met from afar or even not at all before (Matthew, Nirbeek, Andika, Ahmad).