I arrived at GUADEC a few days early to participate in the Board and AdBoard meetings.
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| Incoming and Outgoing Board Members |
On my first full day in Karlsruhe the board met to slog through a long list of agenda items. We started the meeting with some team-building exercises. In general I hate team building, but Nuritzi's exercises weren't too bad. As part of one of them I told a story about a carved table a sculptor friend recently gave me:
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| Table with Carving of Coelacanth by Christopher Tucker |
After the ice breakers were done, we sat down and went through outstanding tasks on the Board's to-do list. Some of the outstanding items were re-assigned to new board members, some were closed, and some were discussed. Cosimo took the task of
asking the community how we should use the Privacy funds. It's a priority for us to put the funds to use, so tomorrow during the weekly board meeting we are going to review the community's feedback and decide on next steps. Another item we discussed during the meeting was how to create a standard code of conduct for GNOME events, so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time. Allan, Nuritzi, and I worked on first steps towards that during the second day of the Diversity BoF.
On the main conference days I attended talks and a few unconferences, and met with some of the other members of the LAS GNOME team to work out the
conference schedule. The local team did a fantastic job organizing the conference, and there were a lot of nice touches (like ice cream and the pool). Many of the talks were interesting, and it was nice to catch up a bit on what is happening in GNOME, and where people are interested in taking it in the future. Kudos to the GUADEC team for getting the talks uploaded so quickly. Some of my favorite talks from the conference were:
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| Light show at the Karlsruhe Palace |
After the main conference I attended the
Diversity BoF. On the first day we formed a diversity working group and defined a mission statement. We spent the remaining time brainstorming around the first point of the mission statement, which is to attract newcomers from underrepresented and marginalized groups. Here is an
etherpad with notes from the first day (thanks to Philip Chimento for taking notes and emailing them to participants). The second day of the BoF we focused on forming a working group for the code of conduct. Allan, Rosanna, Nuritzi, Marina, and I signed up as core members of the group, and Cosimo, Benjamin Berg, and Federico signed up as supporting members. As our first action we sent an email to the board outlining the process we want use to put together the code of conduct, including how we will solicit feedback and ideas from the community, review resources, and present drafts of the CoC to the board and to GNOME foundation members. If things go as planned, we will send an email soon to the foundation list, asking for more volunteers as well as feedback and resources from the community.
As always, it was great to see everyone! Hope to see you all next GUADEC.
