Digital autonomy and the GNOME desktop
While GUADEC, the GNOME community's annual conference, has always been held in Europe (or online-only) since it began in 2000, this year's edition was held in North America, specifically in Guadalajara, Mexico, July 20-25. Rob McQueen gave a talk on the first day of the conference about providing solutions that bring some level of digital safety and autonomy to users—and how GNOME can help make that happen. McQueen is the CEO of the Endless OS Foundation, which is an organization geared toward those goals; he was also recently reelected as the president of the GNOME Foundation board of directors.
His talk was meant to introduce and describe an objective that the GNOME board has been discussing and working on regarding the state of the internet today and how GNOME can make that experience better for its users. The cloud-focused computing environment that is prevalent today has a number of problems that could be addressed by such an effort. That topic is related to what he does for work, as well, since Endless OS is working on "bridging the digital divide" by helping those who are not able to access all of the information that is available on today's internet. Some of those efforts are aimed at bringing that data to those who cannot, or perhaps choose not to, directly connect to the internet itself—or only do so sporadically.