Nice headline, isn't it? I should considering moving to a press job :-)

Today at Akademy is an embedded and mobile day, and Nokia gave away one hundred N810. Since then, wherever I go, I see people playing with their new device. And since it's GNOME-based, it means those KDE developers are using GNOME! More seriously, Nokia's strategy of giving devices away for free (or at a reduced price, like they also did previously) really seems to help attract people.

Also, it looks like some KDE people have planned a trap to imprison me here. Hopefully, I'll still be able to escape today. Not that I dislike the discussions I have here (quite the contrary, actually), but I'm supposed to travel to Romania very early tomorrow morning. This also means I'll be offline for a few days and it will be my first complete offline experience since quite some time... I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy this!

It's been only two days so far, but I'm really glad to have come here, at Akademy. First, and I guess it's not a surprise for anybody who ever went to a conference, there's the usual pleasure to see old friends and finally meet some people. And I promise I'm not being threatened by some group of crazy KDE developers when I say that the KDE community is amazing. Of course, not as amazing as the most amazing GNOME community ;-) Actually, having discussed about this here, there are certainly big differences between our two communities, but they are also both really similar in many aspects. It all makes me feel good about the co-located GUADEC+Akademy next year since I see how great it could be.

But the social side of the event is not everything: since I usually don't have time to closely follow what's going on in KDE, Akademy is a good occasion for me to catch up and learn. Learn about technologies, but alors learn important facts like the fact that some highly-visible KDE developer who shall stay anonymous (let's name him A.S.) is a foot fetish. At least, that's what he told me yesterday evening...

The real reason I came here was to give a talk about collaboration -- but not just between GNOME and KDE, although I guess the fact that a GNOME person gave it at a KDE event might give this impression. And the talk went quite well. The goal was not to convince people that it's a good thing (if some people are not convinced about this yet, then I'm not sure how I'd be able to convince them since others already tried before), but to get people obsessed about it. Collaboration should be something we do by default, in a proactive way. Sure, collaboration requires time and can slow things down a bit; and it's not even always possible or sometimes we just don't agree. This explains why pushing this collaboration back to later can easily happen, but sometimes this later is just too late... Also, on a more general note, simply getting more communication going between the relevant people in one specific area would definitely do wonders for this area.

My battery is dying right now, so I won't elaborate more about the talk and won't tell you about how poppler is an amazing success and how the fact that having different solutions for keyring/wallet creates a situation where we encourage Firefox to continue to use yet another solution because there's no common approach.

I saw many people using this image and then I saw this post. Heh.

I guess I'll have a good time with the KDE people there. Belgium, here I come!

I heard here and there people wondering about the Boston Summit this year: Will it happen or not? When will it be? Where? Who? What? Why? 42?

It turns out we're starting to have most of the answers to those questions. And I'll leak them now because I'm sure it will help a few people -- there'll probably an official announce with a nice mail and everything later. First, of course it's going to happen :-) And you can already find the important details on the wiki page:

• date: October 11-13
• place: MIT Sloan (E51 building)

So you can start booking everything and tell us you're coming! If you want to step up and help with the organization, I'm pretty sure you'll be welcome. A good first task would be to help writing an official announce, for example ;-) But you can also propose a session, or help create a schedule for the summit, or propose a few places where people can meet in the evening... I guess many people already know the drill.

Just one small warning: we're trying to organize a small hackfest related to user experience the week before the Summit (I'm saying trying because we're still looking at the financial side of it so we can't confirm it yet). There'd be some hackers, artists and of course UI people. If you think there's a good reason for you to attend this hackfest, then the first thing is to wait a bit before booking your travel for the Summit. No, really, you don't want to book a flight for the Summit and then realize you also want to book a flight for the hackfest :-) Once you're convinced to wait, send a mail to Owen and me. Only around 10 people would attend this hackfest, and we already have some people in mind, but maybe we didn't think about you yet... Hopefully, we'll have more details about this hackfest in a not-too-distant future.

• Got positive feedbacks about our plans. We still need to write down things for people who are not at GUADEC (sorry that it feels like teasing to you). I'm not posting the slides yet since, well, they're pretty much useless without some text. Some people are worried that we're going to do something big that might destabilize GNOME: we're pretty aware of those kind of risks and that's relly not the plan. We will try to write all the details today or tomorrow, but it's hard to find free time for that during GUADEC.

• New plan for copyright assignment and licensing in evolution. Summary: no more copyright assignment, move to LGPLv2 and LGPLv3. I was far from being a fan of the copyright assignment requirement, so cool news.

• Matt Webb's keynote was good. Many interesting thoughts, and it was funny to see him recommend some kind of documentation for the various D-Bus APIs we have -- something I had in the back of my head: it will indeed encourage people to start playing with them. And doing new stuff.

• Had a discussion with Dimitris about how to organize the work on Transifex, and he sent his thoughts as a roadmap.

• Yet another meeting. With Lennart, Bastien, Jens and Marc-André about sound in GNOME. Productive, with action items.

• The boat party was great. Many thanks to Collabora for such a good time!

• We of course had the Ice Cream Deathmatch. So, it seems people thought it was all about speed, while really it's all about enjoying :-) On the other hand, Henri Bergius (if I remember well) is just not a human since he ate everything so quickly. But, well, his bio mentions Henri Bergius is a former Viking based in the Nordic country of Finland...

• A party on a boat is great. There can be some small issues, though. Like: when you don't hear that you have some limited time to go out of the boat before it does another round. We were quite a few people in this situation. Ooops :-)

• Chatted with Owen and Andreas. Result: we'll try to organize a hackfest. I love how starting to talk about something can lead to some really concrete idea.

• The gourmet restaurant tradition has been honored. GUADEC wouldn't be GUADEC without this.

• Lucas and I have been volunteered to do a lightning talk about GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility. One of the things that people seem to not really know about this program is all the small tasks that are easy to complete. Everybody should at least take a look!

• To let people know that their lightning talk time was about to end, Behdad hacked some quick & dirty script that beeped quite loudly. Annoying. Amazing.

• Around 115 people attended the Foundation AGM. Went great -- we actually expecting tougher questions ;-)

• Federico knows how to do awesome demos during a keynote. Sure, he's cheating with non-live stuff, but still awesome!