Later this week, I have the opportunity, along with Shaun McCance, Phil Bull and Milo Casagrande, to attend the Writing Open Source conference, which is thought to be the first conference to be focused on open source and documentation. We will have keynotes on Friday, an unconference on Saturday, and a GNOME documentation hackfest on Sunday.

GNOME is sponsoring four of us to go from a donation by Intel. Each of us is paying the conference fee out of pocket, and GNOME has subsidized our airfare and lodging (I paid for my own airfare).

Wouldn’t it be cool if GNOME could sponsor more hackfests and travel subsidies for GNOME hackers each year?

If you look at this page, GNOME’s goals from the Friends of GNOME program include:

  • Produce more end-user-focused technology and features through technology-specific hackfests. Hackfests are events where a core team of project developers get together and spend a week in the same place, discussing plans and writing code. They are particularly useful for getting new projects or large features launched (like GTK+ 3.0) or getting a large amount of code written.
  • Provide travel subsidies to bring our worldwide community of volunteer developers together. This enables them to work on existing projects, plan new projects, and work with partners and companies that use GNOME technologies.
  • Support local conferences such as GNOME.Asia, GUADLAC (Latin America), the Boston Summit, GNOME.conf.au (Australia), and Forum GNOME. Local conferences provide a forum for building community, sharing technology, and bringing developers, companies, and users closer together.

And this is just three of the twelve goals the Friends of GNOME program is trying to support!

I understand these are tough economic times. If you can, any support you can give helps. I’d also ask you to consider the “Adopt a Hacker” option at $10 a month. This helps you by being a small amount each month, rather than a larger one time donation, and by donating monthly helps GNOME plan more effectively through having a consistent monthly revenue source.

And don’t forget about the framed GNOME artwork Behdad blogged about last week! The first person who donates at the Philanthropist level gets this one of a kind engraved plaque.

I became a Friend of GNOME this past April, will you?