GNOME Asia 2023 in Kathmandu, Nepal
See Fedora Discussion topic for comments, questions, and logistics.
About
GNOME.Asia Summit is the featured annual GNOME conference in Asia. It focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop and 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.
- Website: events.gnome.org/event/170/
- Location: Softwarica College of IT and E-Commerce, P84J+CH4, Mahakavi Marg, Kathmandu 44600, Nepal
- Time Zone: Nepal Time: UTC +5:45
- Schedule: Here
- Fedora Talks & Speakers: Here
- Format: In-person & Online
Duration and Location
The event will be organized in a hybrid from Dec 1, 2023, 8:00 AM to Dec 3, 2023, 11:44 PM Asia/Kathmandu time in Softwarica College of IT and E-Commerce, Kathmandu, Nepal for in-person attendees and on Big Blue Button platform for virtual attendees joining from across the globe. Track one would be organized here and track two would be organized here.
The approved Fedora hotel is the Fairfield by Marriott Kathmandu. It is about a 5-10 minute drive or 40 minute walk to the event venue from the approved hotel. See the directions below:
Visas
Indian citizens do not require a visa to enter Nepal. Travelers with other nationalities require a Nepal visa. Citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Somalia, Liberia, Ethiopia, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria need to apply for the Nepal visa before the trip.[1] Otherwise, the visa can be taken online or on arrival.[2]
Schedule at a glance
- URL: events.gnome.org/event/170/timetable/
- Sunday, 3 December is a community day and does not feature conference programming. A social activity is planned by the conference.
Friday, 1 December
- 09:00 - 09:30 // Fedora team arrival on-site
- 09:50 - 16:20 // Conference Programming
- 16:45 - 18:45 // Fedora Linux 39 Release Party & 20th Anniversary Celebration
Saturday, 2 December
- 09:30 - 09:50 // Fedora team arrival on-site
- 10:00 - 16:50 // Conference Programming
Fedora presence
Are you a Fedora contributor attending GNOME Asia 2023? Add yourself to the table below. Please use the "Comments" column to specify your Fedora role and the nearest airport that you would fly from to Kathmandu, Nepal.
| No | Name | FAS | Fri, 1 Dec | Sat, 2 Dec | Sun, 3 Dec | Travel itinerary | Languages | Topics |
| 1 | Samyak Jain | jnsamyak |  |
|
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DEL <=> KTM | hi, en | Release Engineering, Fedora, community building, open source |
| 2 | Akashdeep Dhar | t0xic0der | |
|
|
PNQ <=> DEL <=> KTM | hi, en, bn | Infrastructure, Virtualization, Observability, Mentorship, Selfhosting, FOSS, Fedora Project, Websites/Apps Representative |
| 3 | Justin W. Flory | jflory7 | |
|
|
DEL <=> KTM | en | Keynote speaker. All things Fedora. Attending as Fedora Community Architect. |
| 4 | Amita Sharma | amsharma | |
|
|
PNQ <=> DEL <=> KTM | hi, en | Fedora release party, Fedora DEI, Fedora Project |
| 5 | Nikita Tripathi | nekonya3 | |
|
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Roorkee <=> DEL <=> KTM | hi, en | Speaker for Creating with KRITA |
| 6 | Sumantro Mukherjee | sumantrom | |
|
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CCU <=> DEL <=> KTM | hi, en, bn | Speaker for Release Party, Testing, Test Day |
| 7 | Sudhir Dharanendraiah | sdharane | |
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BLR <=> KTM | hi, en, kanada | Fedora QA |
Budget proposal
This table represents the approved budget by the Fedora Mindshare Committee. Note that the amount budgeted for is final, i.e. what you write here is final. You would not be reimbursed for more than what is proposed here.
Please estimate all prices in USD. Use latest market rates for approximate conversions from INR to USD on xe.com.
| No | Name | FAS | Airfare ($USD) | Hotel ($USD) | Taxi, visas, insurance, other minor incidentals ($USD) (if applicable) | Comments |
| 1 | Akashdeep Dhar | t0xic0der | $420 | $400 | $100 | Did we account for the food? |
| 2 | Amita Sharma | amsharma | $400 | $400 | $100 | Budget may change a bit while doing actual bookings. |
| 3 | Nikita Tripathi | nekonya3 | $300 | $400 | $100 | |
| 4 | Samyak Jain | jnsamyak | $300 | $400 | $100 | Subject to day of booking :) |
| 5 | Sumantro Mukherjee | sumantrom | $400 | $400 | $100 | |
| 6 | Sudhir Dharanendraiah | sdharane | $425 | $400 | $100 |
- Total Airfare: $2270 USD
- Total Hotels: $2400 USD
- Total Taxis: $600 USD
- Event Total: $5245 USD
Budget actuals
This table compares the proposed budget spend with the actual budget spend for post-event accounting.
Please estimate all prices in USD. Use latest market rates for approximate conversions from INR to USD on xe.com.
| Name | Budgeted airfare ($USD) | Actual airfare ($USD) | Budgeted hotel ($USD) | Actual hotel ($USD) | Budgeted incidentals¹ ($USD) | Actual incidentals¹ ($USD) |
| Akashdeep Dhar | $420 | $395.27 | $400 | $365.10 | $100 | $59.63 |
| Amita Sharma | $400 | $299.00 | $400 | $365.10 | $100 | $66.00 |
| Nikita Tripathi | $300 | $213.16 | $400 | $365.12 | $100 | $51.41 |
| Samyak Jain | $300 | $191 | $400 | $365.10 | $100 | $51.18 |
| Sumantro Mukherjee | $400 | $342.28 | $400 | $377.00 | $100 | $51.00 |
| Sudhir Dharanendraiah | $425 | $390.00 | $400 | $378.00 | $100 | $66.00 |
- Actual Total Airfare: $1830.71 USD
- Actual Total Hotels: $2225.42 USD
- Actual Total Incidentals¹: $345.22 USD
- Actual Event Total: $4401.35 USD
¹ — Taxi, meals, visas, travel insurance, other minor incidentals. Confirm other expense types with Community Architect before proposing here.
Speakers
The following is a list of presentations, birds of feathers, workshops, talks and discussions organized by the community members of the Fedora Project. If you are a part of the community and have a subevent that is selected for the event, please feel free to edit the table below to add an entry with all the related details.
| No | Name | Date | Time (NPT) | Speaker | Description | URL |
| 1 | (Keynote) The Open Source launchpad: A then & now look at tech careers | Fri, 1 Dec | 10:00 - 10:50 | Justin W. Flory | Open Source is “everything, everywhere, all at once.” In 2022, GitHub reported over 94 million developers using the platform and over 3.5 billion contributions recorded on the platform. While GitHub does not only have Open Source projects, it is impossible to ignore the changing drumbeat and record investments made into “Open Work” over the last ten years. But when people say “open source” and “free software,” what exactly do they mean? How do we define “free stuff” and what different ways do we produce this “free stuff?” Furthermore, how are companies, businesses, governments, and international NGOs providing opportunities, careers, and jobs to work on “free stuff?” | https://events.gnome.org/event/170/contributions/544/ |
| 2 | Declarative GTK programming | Fri, 1 Dec | 14:30 - 15:20 | Jens Petersen | In this talk we will look at declarative approaches to creating GUI applications, which could be said to have been popularized first by the Elm web programming language. The first example will be a small GTK application called compare-fonts written in Haskell with the gi-gtk-declarative library. The second part of the talk will look at some examples using Rust libraries like relm4, iced and vgtk. The session will be a cross between demos with code and an interactive mini-tutorial in declarative GTK programming. If you want to follow along on your own laptop please checkout and build https://github.com/juhp/declarative-gtk-tutorial beforehand. | https://events.gnome.org/event/170/contributions/547/ |
| 3 | Fedora 39 Release Party: Celebrating 20 years of Fedora | Fri, 1 Dec | 16:45 - 18:45 | Justin W. Flory, Amita Sharma, Sumantro Mukherjee, Akashdeep Dhar, Samyak Jain, Sudhir Dharanendraiah, Nikita Tripathi | Join friends from the Fedora community to celebrate the most recent release of the Fedora Linux operating system, Fedora Linux 39. We will provide the refreshments while you get to meet other Fedora contributors from across the region. There will be short presentations about Fedora Linux 39 and new changes, the Fedora community, and more. In addition to Fedora Linux 39, the Fedora community is also celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023, so we will have double the reason to celebrate and party near the closing of the year! See you there? :) | https://events.gnome.org/event/170/contributions/560/ |
| 4 | Creating with Krita | Sat, 2 Dec | 10:55 - 11:25 | Nikita Tripathi | Most designers use applications like Inkscape on GNOME, but they do not venture on to explore even more powerful softwares like Krita because of fear of failing or thinking that it is too complicated or that it can’t create what designers have in mind. This talk will introduce the powerful features of Krita that I have explored while using it since my freshman year at college and will help contributors and new designers bridge the gap to using and creating graphic design, digital art or animation with the software. | https://events.gnome.org/event/170/contributions/565/ |
| 5 | Designing in the open | Sat, 2 Dec | 14:30 - 15:00 | Anushka Jain | I'm Anushka, a past Outreachy intern with Fedora. When one of our blog prompts was "everybody struggles", I decided to pen down my struggles with being a designer in open source. During my time in college and professionally otherwise, I had never heard of designers pursuing a career in open source and felt that design didn't belong here. I still believe as a designer; it is intimidating to begin contributing to open-source. But, I also feel designers have the power to shift OSS from being developer-friendly to a user-friendly environment; the community just need a little push. Designing couldn’t be measured in 0s and 1s, as success isn’t determined by if a pull request was closed or merged. Through my talk, I want to start conversations around how open source can reward contributions in design. UX design is a mutually collaborative process where everybody feels related to any idea or implementation. Unlike merging pull requests, it is very hard for designers to get attribution for their work today. There is a huge opportunity waiting for us to make an impact by building designer-friendly OSS tools that are accessible and inclusive, and who knows, we might witness a change in this narrative. Right now, I only have a talk prepared- but with the right direction from the community, I'm open to adding some interactive bits as well so that we conclude with a solution to the problems I raise! | https://events.gnome.org/event/170/contributions/552/ |
Goals & messaging
Fedora 2028 Strategy: “Double the number of Fedora contributors active every week.”
- Find it, use it, change it: Linux accessibility (Fedora Docs, Fedora Linux, release engineering tools).
- Be a mentor, have a mentor: Empower a culture of mentoring in Fedora and scale it.
- Release stories: Fedora releases should have a story behind changes in each release.
- Open collaboration: More partnership with peer communities and upstream projects.
Open Source Values messaging: Freedom, Friends, Features, First
- Freedom: We are dedicated to free software and content. (🔗 more)
- Friends: We are a strong, caring community. (🔗 more)
- Features: We care about excellent software. (🔗 more)
- First: We are committed to innovation. (🔗 more)
Fedora Linux 39 Changes and talking points
- Programming language stacks:
- Golang 1.21: Update of Go (golang package) to the upcoming version 1.21 in Fedora 39.
- Python 3.12: Update the Python stack in Fedora from Python 3.11 to Python 3.12, the newest major release of the Python programming language.
- Perl 5.38: A new perl 5.38 version brings a lot of changes done over a year of development. Perl 5.38 was released on July 3rd 2023.
- Package management - Retire Modularity: Fedora will discontinue building modules for Fedora Linux 39 and further in the Fedora infrastructure and shipping modular content to users.
- Apps - LibreOffice 7.6: Update LibreOffice suite to 7.6. At the same time we plan to stop building LibreOffice for i686 architecture.
- Fun & novel - Color Bash Prompt: Introduce a default colored prompt for Fedora's default shell bash.
- Type & fonts - Use Noto fonts for Indic (Indian language) scripts: Google Noto fonts for Indic (Indian) languages replace the default Lohit fonts. (see all screenshots)
- Spins:
- Sericea and Sway Spin Xorg-less: At the moment Sericea and Sway Spin ship with xorg-x11 packages. This proposal removed xorg-x11 packages from such artifacts.
- Fedora Onyx: Creation of an official Fedora immutable variant with a Budgie Desktop environment, complementing Fedora Budgie Spin and expanding the immutable offerings of Fedora.
- Fonts - FontAwesome 6: Update the FontAwesome package in Fedora to version 6.x, with a compatibility package for packages still needing 4.x.
External links & social media
The list below captures event reports, blogs, and social media posts about GNOME Asia 2023.
From Fedora community members
From event attendees
- Budh Ram Gurung (Dhanu Sir)
- Shuvam Gautam
- Surav Shrestha
- Spandan Guragain
- Aryan Kaushik
- Mantoh Nasah Kuma
- Susheel Thapa
- Aakriti Das
- Bhawna Chauhan
Nepal College of Information Technology
After GNOME Asia 2023, Justin visited the Nepal College of Information Technology to speak to students there about Fedora and Open Source.