While we had all those GNOME people around we took the opportunity to set up some extra sessions for the “public” to benefit of the event. March 31st and April 1st saw 4 extra sessions organized with specific objectives separate from the GNOME 3.0 release: student training sessions over 2 days, one full day for a business sessions and a distribution collaboration meeting while we had some of the right people on site.

The student training was very popular, all the tickets sold out within a day and the trainers nicely extended the session by doing an extra day in order to accept more students.  In total over 250 students were trained and introduced to the Google Summer of Code program. We received a lot of positive feedback and it was nice to see that participants are all very passionate about joining the GNOME community. As usual, we collected email addresses and will make sure they can join the local GNOME User Group later! For those who may not know I will talk about Building a GNOME User Group on Sunday (hopefully my voice will return – maybe too much GNOME people baby sitting?). It is probably a good idea to come and discuss if you are interested to learn some of the tricks to establish or grow your own community.

April 1st (yesterday) was the last day before the conference, so I spent most of my time with the volunteer team to make sure everything was ready for The Day including the three tracks, the exhibition hall and a few other details.

Being part of this hackfest really made me happy and I wouldn’t have thought being around all these GNOME hackers could be such an enjoyable experience! I was also very impressed by how productive each respective team – release, marketing and GNOME.Asia – has been on its own and in their collaboration with one another. Everyone has been working really hard to ensure the success of GNOME 3.0 and of the GNOME.Asia Summit. The hard work of the past 8 months for some, and more for others, was definitely worth it! Please stay tuned as I will continue to cover the two conference days on this blog.

Members of the GNOME release and marketing teams have started to arrive last night and will continue to land in Bangalore today and tomorrow. We have been welcome by a lovely weather which is a change for most of us living in colder countries at this time of the year. The local GNOME.Asia team has done a wonderful job in picking the place where we are all staying and we could say that the moral is really high! Indeed the week ahead is going to be busy for all of us working at the GNOME 3.0 hackfest and the warmth and sun from Bangalore can only give us more energy towards our goals.

As a side note the second training session has been filled in no time and unfortunately we are not able to provide more seats. Now considering the interest we strongly believe that the local GNOME User Group will have no other choice but to rock and provide monthly doses of GNOME technology to its community.