I discussed with Baris at the end of last week, and he told me he can't create some buzz around GUADEC because he doesn't have a blog yet. So let me be his slave for a few minutes :-)

First, and that's important, there's the deadline for paper submission which is really soon now: it's on March 30th. In case you don't have a calendar right in front of you, it means this week is the last week to submit your talk. So if you're thinking of talking about your latest great idea at GUADEC, don't wait and send your talk proposal now!

The GUADEC team also worked hard on getting sponsors. This is still a work in progress, but here's a the beginning of the results of this work with a preliminary list of sponsors:

• Gold sponsors: Linux Foundation, Novell
• Silver sponsors: Igalia, Mozilla Corporation, Opened Hand

More are of course coming soon and will be announced in a near future. Many thanks to those five organizations, and congratulations for being the first sponsors! This event wouldn't be so successful without all the sponsors that help us each year, so it's great to see them continue their support of our community.

I think I'm done with my slave status and I can be free again! First, I'm really happy to see that Novell is among the first sponsors to support GUADEC ;-) While it probably doesn't mean anything for a lot of people, it's important to me to see that the company I work for is responsive when it comes to supporting a project I love. Anyway. Don't know about you, but I'm quite excited about this GUADEC. I mean, I can't wait to go to Istanbul, and I'm confident the conference will rock as usual. Why am I so confident? Well, there are so many reasons: lots of great people (and friends!), interesting topics to discuss, lots of fun, a beautiful town, etc. And hopefully, Diego will be there and we'll be able to meet for one of the most important event of all times: our second round of the epic ice cream battle.

I fixed the openSUSE package conventions about .desktop files a few minutes ago. No big change there (see the details of the changes), but it contained some outdated information and some errors. I was especially annoyed by the fact that it was talking about the GenericName key for tooltips instead of the Comment key: because of this, there are some patches in our packages to change the .desktop files to use the GenericName key instead of the Comment one. The page can probably do with some more work to clarify things, and I guess I'll do this in the future.

It reminded me that last year, I contacted someone to change the Fedora packaging guidelines because the example was not a valid .desktop file. Do other distributions have packaging guidelines or conventions related to .desktop files? If yes, please tell me where I can look at them so I can check that they're fine :-)

After a GNOME release, I generally spend some time reading the comments about the release on various websites. I'm generally quite passive, since I don't reply to any of them, but it's always interesting. After reading a lot of comments, it's quite easy to find out that there are some standard categories for the comments:

• comments from happy users who are excited about this release, either because they love GNOME in general, or because some feature they were waiting for got added or a long-standing bug finally got fixed.
• comment raising some valid concerns in a constructive way. Even if it's saying something bad about our project, even if I disagree, it's still a constructive comment, and therefore it's useful.
• comments from people who seem to just have some irrational hate for GNOME. Those ones always make me a bit sad since, to me, it sounds like "what you're doing is crap".
• comments that are good or bad, but really subjective, often because it's about something which is a matter of taste, like the default theme or background.
• comments from users that are a bit sad that some bug wasn't fixed yet. We should really have people gathering those kind of comments, since it gives an idea of what people care about and so it's some feedback we should consider.
• mmh, I forgot at least one category ;-)

And quite often, there's one comment that just makes me happy. For 2.22.0, this comment made my day, especially the last paragraph:

Software development ain't easy, especially not in the decentralized volunteer world of free software, but the Gnome guys seem to have it down pretty well. Kudos to them.

I can think of many things that could be improved in what I'd call our "release management process" (this name is a bit too restrictive in this context, but I can't think of a better one), but let's not forget that it doesn't mean we're doing bad. And seeing people noticing this makes me feel good :-)

A bit later than expected, but they're finally here: the GNOME Foundation annual report for 2007 and the GNOME Foundation budget for 2008.

I won't write too much about the annual report since Lucas, Federico and others already blogged about them. It's really nice to have such a document that summarizes many of the things that happened last year. Congratulations to Lucas for leading this effort and to everybody who contributed some text, photos, design and proofreading time! For the 2008 report, I guess we'll probably try to start the work a bit earlier so that it can be released earlier too (December/January).

Also, at the end of last year, I started working on a budget for 2008. Not that I'm good at this kind of job, but I was treasurer at this time. Dave helped me write a first version, and it got reworked a few times until mid-January. So, it's released two months too late, according to me, but I can only blame myself for not pushing harder and for not finding more time :-) What's in this budget? Well, here are some highlights, related to things that are important to me:

• we've allocated money for hackfests. The GTK+ hackfest is going strong, with lots of action happening right now in Berlin, and so I'm even more convinced now that we need to do more small hackfests on specific topics. More news to come on this topic, hopefully.
• there's quite some money allocated for some local groups and events. It's been hard to prepare the budget there since it's hard for local groups to know how much money they'll need during the whole year. Still good, though: I think we'll be spending more money on this than any year before, which is good.
• we're planning to support the Latin America tour that Diego proposed last year. It's still in the planning stages, but it should get more attention in the next few months :-)
• there's the sysadmin job in there. Right now, we're trying to not go crazy and we're thinking of starting small, with a part-time job. It's still a work in progress, but I really hope we'll make it happen.

Of course, there are other interesting things in this budget, but I'll let you have a look at it!

Our friends at Mozilla love us and we also love them. It's been a really good relationship for years now. So, at the end of last year, when Chris started working at the Mozilla Corporation, we quickly started talking about what we can do together. Mozilla and GNOME have lots of things in common. Technical things, of course, but also, and that's way more important, our communities both share some values, like freedom and innovation. Therefore the GNOME Foundation invited the Mozilla Foundation to join our advisory board, and we also discussed various cooperation ideas. One of the result of those discussions is the GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility (which Google, Canonical and Novell later joined as sponsors), something we're really proud of.

As a summary, we've been making our collaboration a bit more official, and we're playing with new ideas! And we've finally announced all this. Okay, this was not a secret since quite some time (Chris talked about it back in January, eg) ;-) Welcome to the advisory board, MoFo, and I'm glad we'll be able to do a lot of cool things together!