I was invited as a guest speaker at GNOME Asia 2023 during 1-3 December 2023, in Kathmandu, Nepal. This was the second time I received the opportunity to travel to a global in-person conference by Red Hat.
My experience at the event made me learn about open source more closely. I even learnt to overcome my self-doubts and to deliver better presentations with the last-minute reviews of my Fedora friends.
GNOME
GNOME, originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
GNOME strives to have a strong presence in Asia, and each year hosts a number of events for the users and developers in Asian countries.
GNOME.Asia Summit is the featured annual GNOME conference in Asia. It focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop but also covers applications and platform development tools. The summit brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments, and businesses to discuss the present technology and future developments.
Here is my review on some of the talks I found interesting during the conference:
was one of the keynote talks delivered by Justin W. Flory that tapped into how open source evolved over the years and what is the future of working in open source, in a very interesting and interactive session.
The basic litmus test on whether something is āopen-sourceā was very interesting
I was greatly keen to hear about the integration on IoT with open source, which was used to conduct medical delivery in nepal using drones. The team behind this was Prokura Innovation which is one of the drone startups funded by the Unicef Innovation Fund and works closely with National Innovation Center with an aim to provide last mile delivery of medicines in the hardest to reach places of Nepal. Justin went on to explain how the US government integrated open source into their policies and even how international NGOs and agencies make use of it for real world applications.
delivered by Federico Mena Quintero (Co-founder of the GNOME project) and Rosanna Yuen (Director of Operations at the Gnome Foundation) focused on GNOMEās Code of Conduct, while giving examples of incidents that can and cannot be acted upon. They also touched upon how to behave and report such incidents after their identification.
Me with Rosanna and Federico
To celebrate Fedora Linux 39 and the 20th anniversary of the Fedora community, a F39 release party was conducted on the first day of talks for a 2 hour slot. It started off with introductions and a fun ice breaking session, followed by the cutting of an icy Fedora cake (it was an ice-cream cake).
We then had a quick intro into the Fedora DEI team by Amita Sharma, a talk on Toolbx by Sumantro Mukherjee, a discussion on the F39 changes by Jens Petersen, about the Fedora infrastructure and release engineering by Akashdeep Dhar and Samyak Jain, concluded by a discussion on Fedora Quality by Sudhir Dhananendraiah.
