GNOME’s Guadec 2010 Hosted at The Hague

BOSTON, Mass — November 30, 2009 — GUADEC, the annual GNOME
conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th
through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw
more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the
GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development
and user community, as well as many participants in the overall
FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and
companies.

The conference will lead up to the GNOME 3.0 release in
September 2010. Keeping with the 3.0 theme, the three primary
themes for GUADEC 2010 will be Government, education, and end
users.

The Hague was one of several locations proposed for GUADEC in
2010. It was chosen in part due to the excellent facilities at the
bid site, as well as easily accessible site for those traveling to
GUADEC. The conference will be held at the Haagse Hogeschool, the
higher vocational education institute in the region with an
existing affinity for open source.

“Free Software is of great importance to culture in the digital
age,” said Kees Vendrik, Green MP and advocate of open source and
open standards in the Dutch public sector. “It offers a fertile
feeding ground for education, innovation, and the economy at large.
My party is delighted that the GNOME conference is coming to The
Netherlands and we believe it will inspire our governmental bodies
to put policy into practice.”‘

The core team of the winning bid consists of Vincent van
Adrighem, Koen Martens, Sanne te Meerman, Fabrice Mous, and Reinout
van Schouwen. Each of the core team members are well-rooted in the
FLOSS community at large, with network spanning the most active
FLOSS organizations in The Netherlands.

“We are very excited and honored to host GUADEC next year,” said
Reinout van Schouwen. “With the upcoming release of Gnome 3.0,
we’re confident that the conference will be one of the most
important ones in the history of the Gnome project. We would like
to invite the Free Software communities in our country and abroad
to take advantage of this opportunity and show the world that open
technology offers solutions for everyone!”

GUADEC is now in its 11th year, and follows a successful joint
conference, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), in 2009 with
the KDE Project. As planned, GUADEC 2010 will be hosted on its own,
but the door is open to another co-hosted event in the future.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said
that GCDS was “a great conference, and an opportunity to work with
our friends in the KDE Project on areas where both desktops can
benefit. We hope to build on that experience this year with
GUADEC.”

See the GUADEC Website for more information about the
conference. Registration details and information on the call for
papers will be up by January 6th. Look for another announcement at
that time with more details about the CFP and tracks for GUADEC
2010.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a
complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and
Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete
development environment to create new applications. It is released
twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the
world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix
distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate
deployments and millions of small business and home users
worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and
industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization
committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is
a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial,
organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps
determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be
found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.

Complete Story