GUADEC 2004 and talks

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

Many of you probably already know this, but the fifth GNOME Users And
Developers European Conference, or GUADEC for short, will be held on
June 28-30 2004 in Kristiansand, Norway¹.

GUADEC is the main GNOME developers' conference. All contributors,
whether you're a translator, helped hunting bugs, provided the
occasional patches or are a full-time maintainer, are welcome.
Interested users are of course also welcome.

I'm writing this as I believe we certainly need more translators to
attend GUADEC. The GNOME Translation Project has a lot of contributors,
but unfortunately only a very small percentage of those ever show up on
the conference. The more we are represented, the better we can put focus
on, discuss, and solve translation related issues. And it's also an
excellent oppurtunity to finally meet in person all those people you've
only seen the names and nicknames of on mailing lists, CVS, and on IRC.
And last but not least, every GUADEC tends to bring a lot of fun as
developers, translators and other contributors have a great time
together and enjoy themselves. I'm very confident that the fifth GUADEC,
GVADEC, won't be very much different on that point. :-)

I'm very well aware that many translators won't be able to attend due to
the costs of travelling to Europe, or that the time for the conference
may be in conflict with other things planned. All I'm hoping for is that
as many translators as possible seriously consider coming to GUADEC and
Norway this time.

For people interested in also giving talks or holding BOF discussions,
the time is a bit more limited. If you want to hold a talk, the abstract
submission deadline is in a month, February 16th². I'm hoping that we'll
have many i18n and l10n related talks and discussions at GUADEC, and
urge everyone who could be a speaker to submit abstracts, and for anyone
who has an idea for a talk or discussion to share those.


¹ Relevant links:
  http://2004.guadec.org/
  http://www.guadec.org/
  http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/guadec5.html
² http://2004.guadec.org/cfp2004.html


Christian