User Observation Hackfest

In September, a group of GNOME hackers met in Florida for the User Observation Hackfest, which was held together with the 2012 OpenSUSE Summit. The central event of the hackfest was a visit to the city of Largo, home of a large GNOME deployment within its public sector. During the hackfest, the developers had the opportunity to talk to users that use GNOME in a day-to-day basis and hear about their goals, their tasks, their attitudes and about how they communicate with the software they use. Work was done on extracting user behavioral trends from the evidence collected during the visit to Largo. This material is one of the foundations that help shape our GNOME Pattern Language and the new version of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines. Events like the User Observation Hackfest are crucial to GNOME in its mission: Design is part determining problems and part providing solutions, and the problems are out there to be observed. Good interface design starts with understanding people: who they are, why they use our software and how they communicate with it. The more we know about our users, the more effectively we can design for them. User observation is, among other tools, one of the ways we can understand our users’ world.

A Coruña UX Hackfest

With design taking a bigger role in the GNOME project, designers and developers decided to come together to refine what would become the GNOME 3.6 release at the UX Hackfest, just a few days before GUADEC. The event, kindly hosted by Igalia at their office in A Coruña, included the presence of some of our awesome Google Summer of Code and GNOME Outreach Program for Women interns, who contributed with a good deal of fresh ideas. Great collaboration came out of having core design contributors and hackers working together to ensure that our upcoming 3.6 release would be great. The group worked on several core pieces of the GNOME experience, including the lock screen, the new setup assistant, and the design updates for Nautilus, Documents and Contacts. Additionally, a set of design guidelines for search within GNOME applications was developed, drawing inspiration from a variety of previous search implementations in our project. The search pattern will be one of the pieces building up to new version of our Human Interface Guidelines. An impressive amount of progress was made during the event which helped make sure that our 3.6 release was a success!

GNOME.Asia Conference

GNOME.Asia had in 2012 a quite varied type of attendees ranging from contributors and enthusiasts to students and other people who might want to participate in GNOME in the future. With help from hard working volunteers, the conference ran smoothly. There were over 175 registrants who attended across the two days of the conference. The conference was held in Hong Kong and there was strong local sponsorship of the event.

On the day before the event, the local team organized a Design Workshop and invited key GNOME designers to run it. Allan Day, Jakub Steiner and William Jon McCann explained the process they undertake to design for GNOME. The event was well attended by professionals and students alike.

[NOTE: the awesome poster from the design workshop is here: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/asia-summit-list/2012-June/msg00008.html]

[NOTE: It could also be fun to include these stats: 2-day conference 176 registrations 7 walk-ins 31 speakers 7 local volunteers 4 sponsor donators 2 media partners]

GNOME Boston Summit 2012

This year, the Boston Summit convened curious newcomers and experienced developers together to learn about GNOME and discuss the project's future. For the first time, organizers held a special event for newcomers and on Friday new faces were spotted everywhere while key contributors of GNOME provided lessons on how essential tools such as JHBuild, Bugzilla and Git can be used to participate in the GNOME Project. The new focus on introducing newcomers to GNOME at this year's Boston Summit was a big success and many aspiring contributors managed to fix their first bug in the "Fix-your-first-bug" mini-hackfest, which was held on Sunday. Meanwhile, developers gathered for useful discussions regarding future goals of GNOME and its many subsidiaries. Topics varied from being about methods in which you can maintain large amounts of code to how multi-monitor support could be implemented in an efficient way. Long lists of bugs and feature suggestions were created for libraries such as GTK+ and Glib and ideas for better communication were put on the table in a big marketing brainstorm. The Boston Summit lasted three days but the event left attendees with new insights, making new as well as experienced contributors ready to shape forthcoming GNOME releases.

Engagement/AnnualReport/AnnualReport2012/Hackfests (last edited 2013-08-10 12:10:04 by AllanDay)