Some GNOME developers have gathered in Boston for for a Python GNOME hackfest that is hosted by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The primary goals behind the hackfest include establishing a strategy for delivering Python 3.0 compatibility for the GNOME platform and advancing the Python GObject introspection project.

The GNOME community's design and usability experts gathered for a week-long hackfest hosted by Canonical in the UK to shape the next major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment.

"From 7 to 13 November 2009, the Free Software Week will be held in Bolzano, Italy. This event will consist of various conferences: the Gnome Hackfest, the Sugar Hackfest, the Geospatial free software conference, and the South Tyrol free software conference. The event will take place at the TIS Innovation Park..."

"So, Saturday was the grand Kongoni hackfest. We had about 5 people on-site and a bunch more online, and people were hacking code. It was quite an event, one of those extra hot Cape Town days with a bunch of people (interestingly – men and women in roughly equal amounts) sitting around a coffee table with their laptops and hacking on code files – it just worked, beautifully..."

Last month we talked about a hackfest to improve Linux video playback that came about after a GNOME developer began work on using Cairo/Pixman for raw video in GStreamer and looking at other ways to leverage hardware acceleration within this major open-source multimedia framework.

Contributors to the WebKitGTK+ project recently gathered for a hackfest to improve the open source HTML renderer's integration with the GTK+ toolkit. They added some cache control APIs, improved support for HTML5 video, form persistence, and other features.

With the recent discussion in blogs around the GNOME world, it can be easy to forget that there have been some great new applications for GNOME appearing recently. Many of these are written by a new breed of GNOME developer, young students with none of the weight of history sitting on their shoulders, and they are great!

Neil Patel of Canonical recently posted an outline of the new user interface concepts that Gnome developers envisioned during the “Gnome User Experience” conference in Boston a couple of weeks ago. But are the concepts a good move?

"Kongoni is planning a major hackfest event that will coordinate both an online and offline code-sprint. The purpose of the work is to modify our kongoni_current ports tree to be compatible with the new FHS-compliant slackware64 structures so that we can migrate to it as an upstream for kongoni Cicero..."