It’s pronounced Gwahdec

I’ve been terrible about it, but here’s the big update — I just got back today after spending the last week at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, location of the first co-located GUADEC and aKademy. It’s been amazing, and I don’t know where to start. Let’s try the beginning.

The GNOME Foundation has funded a very significant part of my expense for this trip (making it possible at all), so a huge thanks to Travel Committee for giving me this opportunity. :) To summarise …

Sponsored by GNOME!

Shreyas and I reached Gran Canaria early in the morning of Day 1, but were too tired to make it to the first 2 keynotes. We woke up, had breakfast by the beach (the apartment we were in was <100 steps from the beach, and the auditorium was a 20 minute walk down the same beach — photos soon).

We did make it to Richard Stallman’s talk. It was quite generic, not surprisingly about software freedom, and nothing new to most of us. Of note were the great vitriol towards C# and the heathens who use it to create new software and a rather terrible and inappropriate attempt at humour that has been blogged about to death.

I met a huge number of people subsequently, some who’ve been at FOSS.IN before, and many whom I only knew by their online presence. The second half of the day was devoted to a number of Lightning Talks. I was pleasantly surprised to see the amount of work happening on semantic-aware projects. Good stuff.

Way to sleepy to continue making sense. More details on subsequent days, photos and so forth to come soon.

Edit: In the name of avoiding further procrastination, here are the photos.