GUADEC 2010 to be held in The Hague, Netherlands

BOSTON, Mass — November 30, 2009 — GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development and user community, as well as many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

The conference will lead up to the GNOME 3.0 release in September 2010. Keeping with the 3.0 theme, the three primary themes for GUADEC 2010 will be Government, education, and end users.

The Hague was one of several locations proposed for GUADEC in 2010. It was chosen in part due to the excellent facilities at the bid site, as well as easily accessible site for those traveling to GUADEC. The conference will be held at the Haagse Hogeschool, the higher vocational education institute in the region with an existing affinity for open source.

“Free Software is of great importance to culture in the digital age,” said Kees Vendrik, Green MP and advocate of open source and open standards in the Dutch public sector. “It offers a fertile feeding ground for education, innovation, and the economy at large. My party is delighted that the GNOME conference is coming to The Netherlands and we believe it will inspire our governmental bodies to put policy into practice.”

The core team of the winning bid consists of Vincent van Adrighem, Koen Martens, Sanne te Meerman, Fabrice Mous, and Reinout van Schouwen. Each of the core team members are well-rooted in the FLOSS community at large, with network spanning the most active FLOSS organizations in The Netherlands.

“We are very excited and honored to host GUADEC next year,” said Reinout van Schouwen. “With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, we’re confident that the conference will be one of the most important ones in the history of the GNOME project. We would like to invite the Free Software communities in our country and abroad to take advantage of this opportunity and show the world that open technology offers solutions for everyone!”

GUADEC is now in its 11th year, and follows a successful joint conference, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), in 2009 with the KDE Project. As planned, GUADEC 2010 will be hosted on its own, but the door is open to another co-hosted event in the future.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said that GCDS was “a great conference, and an opportunity to work with our friends in the KDE Project on areas where both desktops can benefit. We hope to build on that experience this year with GUADEC.”

See the GUADEC Website for more information about the conference. Registration details and information on the call for papers will be up by January 6th. Look for another announcement at that time with more details about the CFP and tracks for GUADEC 2010.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

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