Wow, so many acronyms in my title! Don’t worry, I’ll demystify them. Here you go:

LAS @ GiNA

First a quick explanation of the acronyms:

LAS = Libre Application Summit (formerly called “LAS GNOME”).

GiNA = GNOME in North America (this isn’t official, but it’s the name we’re proposing for the event in North America that is a consolidation of the Boston Summit and the West Coast Summit)

Ok, so what is LAS @ GiNA? So glad you asked. Basically, we are combining a bunch of events to make it easier for us to plan and also to gain traction. The idea is that we want to incubate LAS within The GiNA Summit for the first few years until it can take off and have a life of its own outside of GNOME. LAS is meant to promote agnostic Linux desktop application technology, but for now, we want to help it grow by putting GNOME’s support and organization behind it.

We met for the planning session at the new Endless office in downtown SF. It has a much more urban feel than the last one.

Most of us “global LAS organizers” are in SF, but Sri joined us from his temporary AirBnB in Denver (congrats again on the new System 76 gig, btw, Sri!).

After 3 hours of planning, we made a lot of progress. We were able to define how a co-hosted event would look like, when it should be, and evaluated the bids we have on the table so far. Here are the basics so far:

• Timing: we’d like it to be a 4 day event (Thursday – Sunday) sometime in April or May of 2018.
• Possible Locations: We have 3 possible locations right now (Denver, Montreal, and SF), and will be spending the next couple of weeks tightening up the bids for each location. We need to select a bid by November so we can announce the CfT (Call for Talks) in December.

There’s a lot more I could go into about the results of the LAS planning session. If you’re interested, let me know!

 

GNOME 3.26 Release Party

While we did order some food for the LAS planning session, we ended up saving some of our appetite for the GNOME 3.26 Release Party.

We were originally going to Golden Gate Park to enjoy some sunshine, corn hole, drinks, and snacks… but we ended up having to change the venue to make it easier for the LAS planners to go to the Release Party. We ended up picking Gott’s Roadside restaurant, a burger joint, at the Ferry Building in SF. It’s about a 15 min walk from the Endless office.

We were happy to see that the Ferry Building looked especially fabulous when we arrived. It was a beautiful day with lots of sunshine, and we decided to sit inside in the air conditioning instead of in the direct sunlight. There was plenty of natural light in the building though, so we didn’t miss out on the sun.

We used some of the money that the GNOME Foundation made available to Release Party organizers to buy some appetizers for attendees. Zana suggested zucchini fries, which were a big hit, and we ordered a few sweet potato fries and garlic fries as well.

Thank you, GNOME Foundation for they yummy fries! The sweet potato ones were my favorite, so double thanks for those.

Oh, and dear reader, do see that shake in the background? That’s a chocolate malt shake and it’s delicious. Definitely try splitting one if you go to Gott’s. You’ll make new friends because the shakes are amazing, and you’ll save yourself the agony of trying to drink a whole sugary concoction all by yourself. In small quantities though: it. is. amazing.

Besides eating and drinking, we had a great time talking about all the GNOME stuff happening in the next few months, which happens to be a lot! Some of us are about to travel to some GNOME hackfests, and to GNOME.Asia. Don’t worry, I’ll post about each of those as well.

K, well thanks for reading this post, and if you’re ever by the Ferry Building, now you know that Gott’s has some pretty great sweet potato fries and chocolate malt shakes! 🙂