I continue to have a great time here at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I keep putting off blogging as I’m just overwhelmed with everything going through my head, and trying to make a succinct blog post has been a challenge.

One of the best parts, especially as it’s my first GUADEC, is how welcoming everyone is. I think I’ve had lunch or dinner with a different group of people every meal. (The meals here are pretty good, but the conversations are even better).

I had the opportunity Monday to give an update on Documentation in the GNOME 3.0 Status session. It’s a bit intimidating standing in a spotlight (literally) and talking for 3-5 minutes about everything we’re doing. (Yes, Shaun, I made sure to make a point you released Mallard after 4 long years, though I forgot to give Bastien credit for helping fix my laptop so I have Mallard working on it). I was very nervous – I really need to practice my public speaking skills, especially as I want to do more talks for Marketing later in the year on the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release.

I also met Thomas, who does a lot of work on GNOME PR here in Europe and Germany, including working in the Press Room here at Gran Canaria for the Desktop Summit, and he had some great ideas of how we can improve our marketing communications, and some fair challenges about how it’s been done in the past. I look forward to working on bringing some of those ideas to life.

Speaking of Marketing, yesterday I had the chance to talk about the work the Marketing team is doing before the Advisory Board. I thought it went pretty well, and it wouldn’t have happened without Claus’ work on the marketing campaign on the Marketing wiki. I had a great conversation with Andreas last night as well, and I’m glad we have the Art team’s support with some of the ideas we have. I’m happy that a few people have come up to me and volunteered to help out more with Marketing stuff. Definitely need to get that task list and release calendar ready! And please come to the Marketing BoF at 3:00 tomorrow to learn more, though I’m guessing a lot of people will be doing the local tour.

The only downside to going to the Advisory Board meeting was missing a couple of the sessions I really wanted to see late yesterday afternoon. I need to go track Aaron down and learn more about what’s new in Banshee!

I’ve also recruited a few more writers for GNOME Journal – don’t forget, if you have a cool app you want to talk about or demo, please come find me. I’d love to turn those into articles for GNOME Journal later in the year.