LAS GNOME Update | Postponed until Spring 2018

[Nuritzi Sanchez <nuritzi gnome org>]

Hello friends, 

I'm writing to announce that, after a lot of consideration, we have decided to postpone LAS GNOME from November 2017 to the Spring of 2018. We believe that this will allow us to have a great conference that helps us meet some updated goals around the libre application ecosystem, especially now that we have launched Flathub and are gaining momentum on newcomers initiatives. 

Below is more information on our wider proposal for what the 2018 Libre Application Summit should be and how it can fit in with regard to other more GNOME-centered events. 

If you have any questions, or are interested in becoming part of the organizing team, please let us know!

Thanks, and we hope to send more updates about the upcoming Spring iteration of LAS soon.

Best, 

Nuritzi on behalf of the LAS organizing team

The Libre Applicaiton Summit / LAS Strategy

Since the long-term vision for the Libre Application Summit is that it outgrows GNOME and becomes its own thing, with many ecosystem players besides GNOME participating, we want to try to get rid of the "GNOME" part of "LAS GNOME." This means we will start to refer to the conference simply as the "Libre Application Summit," or "LAS." 

We would like to incubate the Libre Application Summit within a North American event for about 2 - 5 years. We believe this will help us get more people to attend and provide enough volunteer manpower and GNOME-raised funding to get LAS off its feet.

Co-Hosting with a North American GNOME event

With no formal GNOME-related conference in North America (where a number of GNOME developers reside), it seems prudent to merge the concept of the Boston/Montreal Summit and West Coast Summit into a single unitary GNOME event in North America. 

Last week on foundation-list, Allan proposed having something like a "North American Summit" [1], and we think it's a great idea. However, we would like to propose that the official name of that event have "GNOME" in the title so that we can call it out as a GNOME-centered event. 

We have come up with some ideas for the name of the event, and would love help coming up with others. We are missing a clear vision for what the North American event will become, which makes it harder to name it. We'll circulate a separate email asking for help naming the event soon.  

Next Steps for LAS 2018

We are planning an event for LAS 2018 organizers in a few weeks to keep the ball rolling since the event is still just a few months away. The event will most likely be the weekend of September 30 - October 1st in San Francisco since most of the people interested in organizing LAS 2018 are already in the SF Bay Area. 

If you are interested in organizing LAS 2018 elsewhere in North America, let us know ASAP so we can talk about next steps. 

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2017-August/msg00011.html

--

Nuritzi Sanchez 

GNOME Foundation 

President, Board of Directors