Every six months GNOME releases a new version and GNOME's users get a chance to see the development and innovation the developers help create in the GNOME platform and its applications. What you might not see is all the work that goes on behind the scenes and how GNOME's communities work together.

In 2009, Stormy Peters organized the various GNOME teams to start summarizing the work they were doing and publishing these updates quarterly in the GNOME Quarterly Report. The following recap is a look into all the work these volunteer teams did in 2009 to bring you the GNOME Desktop.

BugSquad

The GNOME Bug Squad team started having monthly meetings in 2009 to discuss new policies and ideas including setting small concrete goals for the team to help build consistency in bug reporting. A new policy was put in place on handling older bugs for older or unmaintained GNOME applications and there are plans to bring back Bugdays to to introduce new potential Bug Squad members to triaging and the GNOME community.

A look back at GNOME bug statistics in 2009:

Overall statistics:

• 2009 2008 2007

• Open reports at the end(*): 40527 37180 33967 Opened in that year: 39403 59309 114043 Closed in that year: 40280 56546 108807
  • (*): Excludes reports marked as enhancements [A valuable number of reports had also been blocked by
    • GNOME Bugzilla's auto-reject feature until 08/2009 or went to crash.gnome.org which is down.]

The following people closed more than 700 bugs in 2009:

• 2434 Akhil Laddha 1784 Fabio Durán Verdugo 1471 André Klapper
  • 939 Bastien Nocera 782 Milan Crha 762 Matthew Barnes 746 Tobias Mueller

The following people reported more than 300 bugs in 2009:

• 508 André Klapper 429 Pedro Villavicencio 371 Bastien Nocera 322 Matthias Clasen 312 Vincent Untz 297 Akhil Laddha 253 Jean-François Fortin Tam

The following people contributed more than 200 patches in 2009:

• 393 Milan Crha 365 Colin Walters 300 Javier Jardón 257 Owen Taylor 227 Dan Winship 205 Matthias Clasen

The following people reviewed more than 150 patches in 2009:

• 273 Owen Taylor 177 Bastien Nocera 174 Sebastian Dröge 166 Dan Winship 164 Milan Crha

Release Team

In 2009, the Release Team oversaw two releases as normal, but also laid the foundation and schedule for GNOME 3.0 coming in 2010.

The year started off with the Release Team working with the Sysadmin Team in planning a migration of GNOME's repositories from Subversion to Git. Git was chosen after a survey of developers in late 2008 showed most GNOME developers preferred Git for distributed version control. After the GNOME 2.26 release in April 2009 all GNOME repositories were transitioned to Git.

GNOME 3.0 planning was finalized including documenting the goals for GNOME 3.0 and how the team wanted to achieve them. In finishing the GNOME 3.0 schedule, the GNOME 2.28 schedule was finalized with changes including a new change in moving the module proposal period to earlier in the cycle, helping maintainers to be able to integrated new modules easier. A few months later the decision was made to formally make GNOME 2.32 become GNOME 3.0 and the development cycle was adjusted with GNOME 3.0 scheduled for September 2010.

In addition to all of the GNOME 3.0 planning, the release team oversaw two GNOME releases in GNOME 2.26 and 2.28 released on time respectively in March and September. GNOME 2.26 featured improvements in disc burning in Brasero, easier file sharing, improved multi-monitor support, and more. GNOME 2.28 released in September included geolocation support in Empathy for instant messaging, improved Bluetooth support, and a number of improvements in the developer platform in preparation for GNOME 3.0.

Marketing

The GNOME Marketing team was busy in 2009 with improving fundraising in GNOME, journalism, the creation of a Press team and its first hackfest.

The Friends of GNOME program was created in 2009 to help GNOME with fundraising including a new monthly donation program. GNOME supporters can donate to GNOME both with a one-time donation or recurring monthly subscription. These Friends of GNOME receive in return a GNOME t-shirt and custom badges they can display on websites or blogs. In 2009, GNOME raised more money from the Friends of GNOME program than 2008 and 2009 combined. (The GNOME Foundation thanks all of its supporters!) Other fundraising activities included a survey to financial contributors and the creation of an Amazon Affilliate store.

After a one year hiatus the GNOME Journal (http://www.gnomejournal) returned with four issues, including its first ever special edition, Women in GNOME, with eight articles written by women in the GNOME community.

A GNOME Press team was created to help with outreach and inquiries by journalists. Marketing tools including Piwik web analytics and CiviCRM were installed by the Sysadmin team to help the Marketing team.

Lastly, the Marketing team held its first hackfest in Chicago, IL in November, which was sponsored by Novell and Google. The hackfest team worked on the beginnings of a marketing launch plan GNOME 3.0, conference materials including presentations and tools for presenters and booth organizers, and more.

Usability

GNOME has long had a focus on usability and how you interact with your desktop. 2009 was no different and a number of workstreams were undertaken. These included turning off button and application icons by default in GNOME 2.28. This change improves visual consistency, reduces clutter and the need to continually invent new icons for every new function that becomes available in GNOME, and also helps with accessibility themes allowing them to provide better icon coverage.

The team also has done work in planning a potential control center redesign for GNOME 3.0 and a potential redesign of tabbed applications and GNOME's tab widget.

Lastly, the team has discussed and started planning around a GNOME Usability Suite. After reviewing a number of open source and proprietary applications a number of mockups have been designed, personas collected and a git module created to start working on the project.

Travel Committee

The GNOME Travel Committee was created in April, 2009 to help manage the travel budget for GNOME community events. The team consists of Germán Póo-Caamaño, Chema Casanova, Emily Chen, Rosanna Yuen and later added Bharath Achary. The Travel Committee has streamlined the process for Foundation members to apply for travel subsidies and receive reimbursements, helping the GNOME Foundation save money when sponsoring travel. As a comparison, the GNOME Foundation spent $41,000 in airfare for 36 people in 2008 and was able to reduce airfare expenses and increase attendees for GUADEC 2009 to $31,838 and sponsoring 39 people. The travel team also instituted a policy that individuals who receive sponsorships should share their experiences in blogs, so the ones who missed out could relive the fun and various sessions at the hackfests and events, which has been a great success.

Web Team

The GNOME Web Team was re-organized last year, led by Lucas Rocha, to work on implementing a new content management system for the GNOME website. The Web Team is working hard to implement the Plone content management system and the web team has been split into three sub-teams: Art, CMS and Content. The teams has produced a reviewed content structure, a new website design, and the initial implementation of important Plone components including the ability to add localized content to the CMS. An alpha version of the site was launched for review and the team plans to launch a new GNOME.org later in 2010.

Documentation

The Documentation had their first ever hackfest in 2009, attending the Writing Open Source conference in Owen Sound, Canada. At the hackfest the team decided to start holding regular IRC meetings which continued throughout the year, Yelp added support for the new Mallard XML language which GNOME will be using for documentation going forward, CC-BY-SA 3.0 was chosen as the new license for all documentation work and work started to re-write Empathy's help as topic based documentation using Mallard. Empathy's new user help was finished for GNOME 2.28 and Empathy became the first application to have topic based help in GNOME.

Additional applications started to have new documentation developed including Tetravex, gbrainy, Tomboy and more, and new user help should start showing up in these applications in 2010.

Sysadmin

The Sysadmin team added new members in 2009 including Paul Cutler, Jeff Schroeder, Alexandro Silva. The Sysadmin team was active in 2009 keeping GNOME's infrastructure and updating it where needed. Owen Taylor of the Sysadmin team, working with Kristian Høgsberg, Behdad Esfahbod, Federico Quintero, and others successfully migrated GNOME from Subversion to Git. Other new applications installed in the GNOME infrastructure including Piwik and CiviCRM for the Marketing team, a Plone test instance for the Web team, and Splinter, Bugzilla extension providing integration for attachment reviews. Olav and Owen worked with Max Kanat-Alexander in upgrading GNOME's Bugzilla, which was sponsored by Canonical, and was installed on new servers donated by Red Hat. Lastly, the GNOME servers hosted by Red Hat were moved to a new data center.

Women's Outreach

The GNOME community is interested in increasing women participation in the project, and started the Women's Outreach program in 2009. The goals are to increase the visibility of the existing women contributors and to create a support system for encouraging women participation.

The purpose of the Women Outreach Program is to encourage women participation in GNOME throughout the year and to create internship opportunities in the summer.

In 2009 women participated in an interview with Linux Magazine ROSE Blog, wrote and published a special edition of GNOME Journal with all articles written by women in the GNOME community and participated in a mini-summit hosted by the Free Software Foundation. Women in the community also gave a number of talks and presentations: Stormy Peters represented GNOME on a panel at the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference, Marina Zhurakhinskaya led the Women Outreach / Marketing session at the Boston Summit, and Izabel Valverde and Luciana Freitas attended Latinoware and gave a talk getting involved with GNOME and the Women's Outreach program.

Accessibility

The GNOME Accessibility team worked hard throughout 2009 to prepare GNOME's accessibility features for GNOME 3.0. Ke Wang developed a Java ATK wrapper, eliminating a Bonobo / CORBA dependency (a key need for GNOME 3.0);

Bonobo and CORBA dependencies were a focus for elimination by the team and Ke Wang developed a JAVA ATK wrapper and Luke Yelavich worked on Speech Dispatcher to replace gnome-speech to address this goal. Team members also worked to implement accessibility in Clutter and WebKit. GNOME-Magnifier was ported to D-Bus and is a key focus area to be implemented in GNOME Shell for GNOME 3.0. The team also started weekly IRC meetings to align on GNOME 3.0 goals and discuss ongoing work.

Willie Walker gave a number of talks about Accessibility in 2009 including a talk at RPI, the Open Source Accessibility Forum and Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Chile.

Membership

At the end of 2009, the GNOME Foundation had 353 members. 115 people renewed their membership and GNOME welcomed 52 new members.

The Membership Committee also oversaw the election of the new Board of Directors in June. A new voting process, single transferable vote (STV), was used for the first time and after a slight modification will be used for board elections going forward.