A Coruña proposed to hold GUADEC and aKademy 2009

As this will be my first post at planet GNOME, first I would like to thank Jeff for giving me a place between all of you, and I will introduce briefly myself.

My name is Andres Gomez, I’ve been using free software for 8 years, and I’m a free software developer since 2003, when I joined Igalia. As most of my mates, I contributed to project Fisterra, a free software framework for developing enterprise applications, and I’ve been lately involved in some projects related to Maemo technologies.

Now the interesting part of the post 😉

As my mate Chema has published recently in his blog, people from GPUL, Igalia and University of A Coruña have presented a proposal to co-host GUADEC and aKademy next year in A Coruña. The intention was to show all the possibilities that our city and team have in order to organize such a great event to the community.

Foto nocturna de la bahía del Orzán desde el monte de San Pedro (Coruña)

The proposal’s main idea is:”We want to organize a conference by community people for community people“. Here, in A Coruña, we have the facilities, a passionate team and a lot of ideas after attending several conferences and organizing lots of events (DudesConf 2008, GUAdemy 2007, Guadec-ES 2005, …). We know how important the details are, as well as having second options in case the first one could eventually fail. The main goal is to invest a big effort in achieving that people can come here next year. Because of this, the main expense in our budget will go for helping people to attend the event through sponsoring as many people as possible. That will be feasible thanks to the contribution of the University and volunteers. They will provide, almost for free, all the basics needed to run these two conferences. Also, our regional government, Xunta de Galicia, has an important commitment with this proposal and great confidence in our work at every level. So here it is the final proposal:

BTW, if these events are finally going to be hold here, I will volunteer on them so I will be able to give you advices to visit this beautiful Galician city placed in the north-western coast of Spain 🙂 .

Wanted: Dead or Alive

Montse

As you should know by the time being, since another Igalians have talked about it recently, Igalia has hold its fourth summit, last weekend in Pontevedra. There has been a lot of new blood since the last summit I attended, almost two years ago, but some others have gone. We wish good luck to them.

In this summit we have fit to the usual schedule, having a lot of time to talk among all the Igalians, get a better knowledge of the mates we work with, and also from those we don’t see so usually, as we are splitted in two locations, one in A Coruña and the other in Pontevedra. Also we spoke about the past, present and exciting future of the company 🙂 .
Tanty

We have had a lot of fun and everything has gone quite well due to the good work done by the organizer and new brand HR promise, Eva María Loureiro (I’m writing this just to embarrass her 😉 ).

As you probably know, there is not plenty of girls here in Igalia, probably because computing and moreover, Free Software, is not very appealing for them, but the three we have here give sense to the well known Spanish song “Las chicas son guerreras”. If you don’t believe me, just take a look to the fierce look in the Wanted banner on top of this post, taken just before The Arbo War we hold here between the red and green teams. Just herself alone beat a whole green team batallion 🙂 bringing the flag we were competing for to the red campsite.
Juan

The Arbo War was not matter of joke. Almost all of us got injured. Indeed, I got my knee severely injured and, while I’m recovering for the next battle, I have had the idea of taking advantage of the amazing photos taken by Mario and, the war journalists, Antia (the third and last great girl in Igalia) and Javier Muñoz, so I’ve been creating some “Wanted banners”, inspired in the old west.

If you are an Igalian and want to be hold in the walls of the towns from here to Pecos river, just tell me and I’ll try to do my best 😉

What do you think?