Hello everyone, my name’s Emily Gonyer! I’ve been involved with the GNOME Foundation for a little more than a year now as a contributor. I got started through the GNOME Outreach Program for Women which I participated in last winter, and was then a Google Summer of Code student working with Seif Lotfy & Allan Day on GNOME Clocks over the summer. Since GOPW I’ve stayed active with the Marketing Team helping to promote GNOME as I can.
I’ve been a consistent user of GNU/Linux since sometime in the late 1990s, and switched completely in the fall of 2006 when I deleted Windows XP for the last time while installing this new distro that was supposedly good called Ubuntu – it was the first time that I installed GNU/Linux and didn’t immediately spend hours getting my modem/sound card/video card/etc working! I was (and still am) amazed by this :) I’ve used Ubuntu ever since, though I’ve debated switching away for the last year since Unity came out. But the ease of installation and wonderful support on Ubuntu Forums is just hard to beat. And with the wonderful new Ubuntu GNOME Remix I doubt I’ll move away now.
Anyhow, about a month ago I started posting on my blog [1] about community and how we can better involve all our users in GNOME. Eventually it came to me that what I felt GNOME needed most was a forum, and as a result of those posts I contacted the World of GNOME. Together, Alex & I launched forums on World of GNOME for GNOME users, contributors and anyone else interested in GNOME. World of GNOME is hosting them and they can be found at http://forums.worldofgnome.org.
If your reading this, I invite you to join us there in talking about GNOME – development, design, translation, testing. Tell us about what you love about GNOME – and what you hate. What you couldn’t live without and what you wish we had. Together we can build a community of people who love GNOME and want to make it better than ever!