The Artful development cycle is full speed ahead to the Ubuntu 17.10 release in October. As you may have heard, we’re switching the default desktop from Unity to GNOME Shell in this cycle. With such a significant change, we need all the eyeballs we can get on every part of the desktop experience. As usual we will have our regular testing cycles and automated checks that the QA team runs through.

We are also organising a set of mini-events which we’d love to get our community’s help with. First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th. Some members of the Ubuntu desktop team will be camped out in the Canonical London office for that Thursday and Friday, and we need your help.

Over the two days we’ll be scrutinising the new GNOME Shell desktop experience, looking for anything jarring/glitchy or out of place. We’ll be working on the GTK, GDM and desktop theme alike, to fix inconsistencies, performance, behavioural or visual issues. We’ll also be looking at the default key bindings, panel colour schemes and anything else we discover along the way.

We’re inviting a small number of community contributors to join us in the London office on Thursday evening to help out with this effort. Ideally we’re looking for people who are experienced in identifying (and fixing) theme issues, CSS experts and GNOME Shell / GTK themers.

If you’re in the area on August 24th from around 4pm to 9pm and would like to help us get GNOME Shell on Ubuntu ready for prime time, then fill in this form to let us know. Space in the London office is limited, and we need to inform the building security team about visitors well in advance of the event happening. The deadline for filling in the form is Friday August 18th 2017.

Unfortunately we don’t have room for everyone. If you fill the form in and subsequently can’t make it, please let either willcooke or popey know so we can free up your space for someone else. We’ll provide pizza and beverages for those people who come along and help out.

If you’re interested in joining in the fit and finish sprint remotely, we’ll be available through the day and evening on irc in #ubuntu-desktop. We’ll also have an Ubuntu On Air hangout during the event.