The GNOME Boston Summit 2010 kicked off a couple hours ago. Dozens of GNOME hackers are at the Tang Center at MIT.

John (J5) Palmieri and Jon McCann helped kick off the Summit.

J5 gave an overview of what the Boston Summit is. It’s different from GUADEC which is many presentations and more formal talks. The Boston Summit is much more informal and run Barcamp style. It gives hackers a chance to hack together and get stuff done. Face to face time is very important and the Boston Summit helps facilitate that.

Jon McCann continued the kickoff and thanked Stormy for her time at the GNOME Foundation as Executive Director to a rousing round of applause.

He then gave an update on things he’s been working on. The Control Center is actively being developed in GNOME git, new themes for GNOME Shell are coming online, and GNOME 3.0 will feature a new font! The new font is designed by David Crossland (spelling?) who is a big believer in open design and is also hosted on GNOME’s git servers.

Jon talked about Shell briefly (and Owen will talk about it more later today). New guidelines are being written for GNOME 3 applications and wiki pages discussing that as well as compatibility and messaging are in progress. He asked the crowd how many people were running GNOME Shell now and about 25% of the hands in the room went up.

Work on the new modulesets for GNOME is in progress and there is a renewed focus on GNOME’s core and a focus on what the desktop is. One conversation that he looked forward to having this weekend is what is the Core OS versus the applications that layer on top of it. A goal is to make it easier to build the core desktop. One example of this is jhbuild – jhbuild has seen its core modules reduced from 255 to 92 modules! Jon is hoping the group will continue to brainstorm on how to make that even easier.

There are 3-5 months left for development (depending on how you look at freezes) and now is a great time for the community to come together. GNOME 3.0 is a very important release for GNOME and it will take all of us.

Lastly, Jon encouraged the community to watch the video of the talk that Michael Meeks gave at Linux Plumbers this week. The talk was about how GNOME is doing open source right. GNOME has a strong message to share and other projects look to us for things such as doing design in the open, community engagement and more.

From there, people proposed talks and sessions to give Barcamp style and we voted to help prioritize the sessions and J5 started assigning rooms and times for the talks.