After a lot of careful consideration and consultation with the local organizing team, the GNOME Foundation has decided that GUADEC 2020 will take place entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The event will feature the expected high quality content, streamed over the internet for anyone to participate. Mexico will now host GUADEC 2021, and we are planning for GUADEC 2022 to be in Latvia.
“Although over three months away, there is no way we could ensure that the event could continue in a way that would keep our community safe.” said Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. “It is with a heavy heart that, after consultation with the local organizing team, we won’t be visiting Mexico with GUADEC this year.”
We at the GNOME Foundation love GUADEC, it’s a once-a-year event that brings us together to collaborate, celebrate, and learn; meet our colleagues and friends; and strengthen the most special part of the GNOME project — the community. While we will miss meeting in-person, we are excited for the new opportunities that meeting online will bring to the event. People who weren’t able to participate previously will be able to. We’ll have a much wider pool of potential speakers and session facilitators, as visas and travel fees will no longer be an issue. We’re looking into creative and innovative ways to bring new types of socializing, sponsor representation, and community time to GUADEC 2020.
Due to the new format, we are re-opening the Call for Papers.
We’ll be keeping you updated on things as they develop, on GNOME.org, the Engagement Blog and on social media. Follow, subscribe, or just check in!
Forgive me if I’m missing the obvious. The Call for Papers, or abstracts as the link describes them, what are they? Generalized brainstorming topics for the GUADEC 2020?
For example, would a difficult bug report be a good candidate?
How about new feature requests for Gtk/Gnome?
Or should they be more like:
Look at this great app I made.
Or maybe even:
I like Gnome, and here’s why.
I never attended a GUADEC, and I’m hoping to attend this time, so I am curious on how to participate.
It’s sad that people have been planning for so long to meet in person. It’s also sad that may won’t see each other in person this year.
It’s happy that many more of us in the community can participate this year! For example: I thought I wasn’t going to be able to attend GUADEC for the next couple years, but now I can! And I’m sure there are many more people in a similar situation. There are definitely GNOME users and developers who can’t travel much due to health, money, time off restrctions, and/or logistic reasons. Now we all can participate this year, just as much as anyone else! Awesome!
Here’s a bunch of questions I’m wondering about (perhaps not all of them are answerable, as this is really new territory and we’re still a few months away):
Is there going to be a “hallway track”?
How are BoFs / hackfests / lightning talks going to work?
Has there been a choice on what will be used for video streaming? (Jitsi?) For chatrooms? (Matrix?)
Are talks going to be given live? Or pre-recorded with Q&As after? Or a mix?
Are timeslots going to be the same? Or will get fit to content length?
Is there going to be one main track or multiple concurrent tracks?
Will sponsored travel money be reallocated? (Perhaps buy and send presenters some higher quality microphones and webcams, for example, to improve everyone’s conference experience? There are probably other great ideas around this topic too.)
How will accessibility needs be met, especially concerning transcripts? Are people going to provide closed-captioning? Will there be specific chatrooms dedicated to someone typing what’s said?
GNOME releases have been named after the places where conferences have recently taken place. What are we going to call the upcoming GNOME release tied to this GUADEC?
Hopefully not “Jitsi”, “Bluejeans”, “WebEx”, or whatever software we use.
We probably don’t want to call it something like “Conference Video” (“covid” for short )
Will future GUADECs become a hybrid conference, with a mix of what we experience with this one and a physical location? (I’m sure this is a relevant question for all the conferences that have been and are moving to online-only this year.)
Hi Garrett, and welcome to GNOME’s Discourse instance!
At the moment, I think I can answer approximately zero of those questions with certainty
However, what I can say is that we’re actively looking at how best to run the conference, and we want to ensure that it is a huge success. For example, we’re evaluating various software systems for streaming, and working out how we can fit all that together with both live and pre-recorded talks. We’re also looking at live closed-captions. At the moment, it’s all early days, so I’d expect that the answer to those will start being clearer as the conference draws closer
I guess the other big question is how time zones will be handled. It’s hard to participate if all the events are held in the middle of the night.
This was definitely an impediment to participating in past virtual Ubuntu Developer Summits: all sessions were scheduled to try and fit within an overlap between daytime in Europe and Americas, which meant nothing was at a convenient time for Asia/Oceania.
Something unrelated. Is the new edition of GNOME named after the last GUADEC? If yes, then what will be the name of the immediate GNOME release after this online GUADEC?
We have now some answers to your questions:
Please check those below:
Is there going to be a “hallway track”?
We are considering using this https://joeyh.name/code/virtual-hallway-track/ for this purpose, but its still something we are thinking of. If you know any other way we can make this happen, please let us know.
How are BoFs / hackfests / lightning talks going to work?
This are going to work as usual. We will open a form this month to signup your workshop/Bof and will happen online on 26th and 27th of July.
Has there been a choice on what will be used for video streaming? (Jitsi?) For chatrooms? (Matrix?)
We will use BigBlueButton https://bigbluebutton.org/
Our infra team is still working on the installation.
Are talks going to be given live? Or pre-recorded with Q&As after? Or a mix?
Talks are going to be given online with Q&A after the talk.
Are timeslots going to be the same? Or will get fit to content length?
Timeslots are 50 min and 25 (Q&A included)
Is there going to be one main track or multiple concurrent tracks?
It will be the same voting process as previous years and will be announced during AGM meeting.
Will sponsored travel money be reallocated? (Perhaps buy and send presenters some higher quality microphones and webcams, for example, to improve everyone’s conference experience? There are probably other great ideas around this topic too.)
Unfortunately we won’t be able to allocate those funds for microphones or webcams as we would need to pay for other services.
How will accessibility needs be met, especially concerning transcripts? Are people going to provide closed-captioning? Will there be specific chatrooms dedicated to someone typing what’s said?
We will have live captioning during the conference for all the tracks and all the talks from 22nd-25th. The company that will provide this service will share later with us all the other details.
GNOME releases have been named after the places where conferences have recently taken place. What are we going to call the upcoming GNOME release tied to this GUADEC?
Hopefully not “Jitsi”, “Bluejeans”, “WebEx”, or whatever software we use.
We probably don’t want to call it something like “Conference Video” (“covid” for short )
This is a very interesting question. Unfortunately we still haven’t decided on the name. We will see if we can come up with any interesting name
Will future GUADECs become a hybrid conference, with a mix of what we experience with this one and a physical location? (I’m sure this is a relevant question for all the conferences that have been and are moving to online-only this year.)
Unfortunately, I don’t have any valuable answer for you on in this moment, we are still not sure how this whole situation will shape our future conferences, but what I believe is that there will be some footprints which we will carry for a long time in other editions.
I hope my answers were helpful to you.
Please do not hesitate to reach me out for any further questions.
We will start the conference from 15:00 UTC to 20:15 UTC.
All sessions will be recorded for everyone who won’t be able to attend talks due to timezones.
Hello, I am glad GNOME to use BigBlueButton for GUADEC conference. I wish you success. Thank you very much GNOME in general and @kprogri in particular.
I have never used this system (I’m guessing I’m probably not the only one) and I’d like to be able to test it in advance (once it’s ready on GNOME’s infrastructure) to ensure my sound + video + screensharing works (especially with Firefox). The medium is the message, and I really wouldn’t want to be troubleshooting this during the conference.
Will you have two or more bridge servers (if that makes any difference)? For example one in Europe, one in North-America, and maybe one in Asia? One concern I have is that the transatlantic latency (100-150ms) might be a problem for those of us connecting from North-America (even worse, I presume, for those connecting from South-America), if there’s only one server and it’s located in Europe. My ping to something in the USA or Canada is 9 to 32 miliseconds but to Hetzner (Germany) I have 100-115 ms. I remember that sort of latency being problematic for VoIP/conferencing in my previous experiences.
I’ve written a few scripts that might be of interest for processing the recordings BigBlueButton produces:
It downloads the various files from the recording that BBB’s web player uses (camera footage, screen share, and slides), and edits them together into a single video. This can be used to upload the recording to YouTube, or to create an archival copy that’s not going to depend on a bunch of JavaScript to play.
?
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Glad you can attend this time!