Thanks to the GNOME Foundation, for the second consecutive year I went to Fórum GNOME, in rainy Foz do Iguaçu. (also, for the second year I had problems landing there due to the rain!).

The event was together with Latinoware, the (biggest?) Latin American free software conference. Latinoware itself went a bit strange this year. Maybe there was something wrong with organisation, or it was just the rain. The rain was so strong in the last day that almost only half of the participants went to the conference.

For the Fórum GNOME, we got a booth during all the three days and a room for talks during the entire Friday. There were always questions about GNOME 3 by users in the booth, and we spent a great time talking about that and other things with people from all Latin America.

Most of the talks had a focus in the end-user — these were most of the participants in Latinoware. Licio started with his talk explaining how to join GNOME and the GNOME Love Project. Then we got Rodrigo Flores, talking about how to contribute with translation. Alessandro Binhara did a talk about something between Mono, Mono Brasil and Star Wars , which was followed by the GNOME Women talk by Izabel and Luciana. Lastly, I did a talk about user experience in GNOME and Tiago filled the room with his talk about theming and customization.

It was awesome to see many enthusiastic friends from GNOME, Ubuntu-BR, Fedora and KDE. Also, during the conference Everaldo and I discussed a lot about how to clean the user interface of some GNOME applications. We didn’t publish it anywhere yet. But we stopped to think how to do it properly. Like what happened with Hylke’s idea for the font dialog (a designer suggested something and was implemented very quickly by a developer), we agreed it would be nice to have a ArtRequests-like page in the wiki, but for designers asking changes to be made by the developers. We still need to organize a lot of our thoughts however .

I need to say a big thank you to the GNOME Foundation and to all the people who helped the forum happen. Thank you!