Karen Sandler has been serving as GNOME Foundation Executive Director since June 2011. Today she announced that she will be leaving the post, to take up the position of Executive Director at the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Announcing her departure, Karen said: “Working as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director has been one of the highlights of my career.” She also spoke of the achievements during her time as Executive Director: “I’ve helped to recruit two new advisory board members… and we have run the last three years in the black. We’ve held some successful funding campaigns, particularly around privacy. We have a mind-blowingly fantastic Board of Directors, and the Engagement team is doing amazing work. The GNOME.Asia team is strong, and we’ve got an influx of people, more so than I’ve seen in some time.”

“With all these achievements, I think it’s time for me to hand the reins over to someone new, who can bring their own personal strengths to the role.”

Though Karen will no longer be the GNOME Foundation Executive Director, she will still be a part of the GNOME project. She has announced her intention to run for the Board of Directors, and wrote “I will stay on as pro bono counsel, and of course I’ll continue volunteering in other ways.”

Thanks and good wishes from the GNOME community have already started to pour in. Emmanuele Bassi, a Foundation Board member, said “I’d like to thank you for your great, indispensable work over the past few years. Your enthusiasm and involvement in GNOME have been incredible and inspiring.”

Meanwhile, the GNOME Foundation Board has already started to consider potential candidates for a new Executive Director, and interested parties should email board@gnome.org. Arrangements have also been made to ensure that the Foundation continues to run smoothly.

Developers from the major Linux Desktops (GNOME, KDE, RazorQt and Unity) are currently meeting in Nuremberg for the second FreeDesktop Summit.

The summit is a joint technical meeting from developers working on ‘desktop infrastructure’ on the major Free Desktop projects and the event aims to improve collaboration between the projects by discussing specifications and the sharing of platform-level components. GNOME developers are in attendance, and one report is already online. More updates will be posted to Planet GNOME.

Like last year, the event is supported by SUSE.

Check the report from last year to get an idea of what this event is about.

The GNOME Project has released GNOME 3.12 today. The next milestone release in the GNOME 3 series includes many new features, enhancements and updates, as well as new capabilities and APIs for application developers. The new version continues to improve the GNOME 3 user experience and includes many small bug fixes and enhancements.

Speaking on behalf of the GNOME Release Team, Matthias Clasen said “This is an exciting release for GNOME, and brings many new features and improvements, including app folders, enhanced system status and high-resolution display support.” He also thanked the GNOME community for their work on the release, saying that “This six months’ effort wouldn’t have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world”.

Major features for this release include:

A significant update to the experience for finding and installing applications.

Major facelifts for the Videos and gedit applications.

Greater high-resolution display support.

Big updates for the Software and Web applications.

Improved start up times as well as more efficient resource usage.

A new application folders feature, which lets you organize your apps.

3.12 is also a major release for developers, and comes with new interface widgets and APIs, as well as improved documentation.

The release contains many other improvements, which you can read about in the release notes.

The latest GNOME release has been met with anticipation by the project’s partners. Christian Schaller, manager of Red Hat’s Desktop Team, said: “Red Hat is very pleased to see the GNOME community continuing to push the GNU/Linux desktop forward. We are looking forward to the innovations in GNOME 3.12 arriving in future versions of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” GNOME 3 is already in use by many companies who will benefit from the improvements in the new release.

Arun S A G, Software Development Engineer at Yahoo Inc said “GNOME is the desktop environment of choice for many Yahoo developers. It provides a stable foundation for GNU/Linux power users to get things done, from reading emails to writing code.”

The GNOME Foundation thanks all of the contributors for their hard work, perseverance, and vision in this release.

The 3.12 announcement press release includes additional materials.

With the summer coming closer, the GNOME Foundation are excited to announce applications are open for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women.

Outreach Program for Women

Outreach Program for Women offers a $5500 stipend for a four months internship working with a Free/Open Source organization. The program accepts proposals not only for coding projects, but also for documentation, design, and marketing projects. Every organization has mentors to guide and work with accepted participants during the course of the internship and application process.

As part of the application process, applicants must contribute to the project they indents to work on during the internship.

“Participating in the GNOME community as an intern allowed me to gain an understanding of the technologies used for development and the structure of free/open source teams. These skills have helped to enrich my understanding of FOSS and computer science”

-Meg Ford former Outreach Program for Women intern

The GNOME community encourages anyone interested to visit the Outreach Program for Women website, and to check our wiki where project ideas are listed. The application deadline for this round of the program is March 19.

Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an internship program sponsored by Google. Just like the Outreach Program for Women, GSoC offers a $5500 scholarship for students to work on Free/Open Source projects along with a mentor from the community.

2014 marks the 10th year of the program, and the GNOME project has participated every year. The program presents a great opportunity for students to get involved with our community, and to use their developments skill to contribute to the project. Many project ideas are available, and as usual students are also welcome to discuss their own ideas with prospective mentors!

Applications for this year’s round of GSoC are open until March 21.

Join Us

We are looking forward to welcome this year’s interns for Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women!

If you’re interest in applying to work with GNOME, get in touch with us! The sooner you start your application, the better your chances to be accepted for both programs.

GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 will be held in Beijing, China in May 24-25, 2014. We are looking for YOUR help to design t-shirts for this year’s Summit. We need two new shirt designs, one for participants and another for volunteers.

The contest is open from now until March 31st, 2014. Voting will begin April 1st and run through April 3, 2014.

Everyone is encouraged to log in and vote at this page:

http://2014.gnome.asia/tshirts/

Prizes No contest should be called a contest without some prizes! This year we have the following up for grab: Winner: A Special gift from local team and two t-shirts with your winning design

Note: The final decision will be made by GNOME.Asia Summit Committee. Please understand that the highest vote score of the design may not be designated the final winner due to cost or other production considerations.

Good luck!