Hello,

   The GNOME team would like to thank you all for making possible the
GNOME Users and Developers European Conference (GUADEC) in Paris,
France during March 2000 (http://www.guadec.enst.fr).

   Thanks to all companies, organizations and individuals made GUADEC
possible through their support to bring close to eighty GNOME hackers
to the conference: ACT/Europe, AFUL, Alcove, Eazel, Helix Code, Linux
Magazine/France, Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Telecom Paris and Mike
Shaver.  Thanks a lot to all of you for making this possible!

   The GUADEC conference was organized by Mathieu Lacage of the Ecole
Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris, France and a
team of volunteers at the ENST.  The team not only set up the
logistics and took care of flying the various hackers to Paris and
take care of them, but they also worked with a team that produced the
"GUADEC CD", which is a CD ROM that contains a large collection of
libraries, applications, components and documents produced by the
GNOME project.  

   GUADEC marks a very special day for GNOME: developers that had been
working with each other over the past thirty months got a chance to
meet for the first time and talk to each other face to face.

   The results of the GUADEC conference are many-fold: many issues
that were taking too much time to resolve over mailing lists, or
topics that got frequently ignored or dropped due to low bandwidth of
communications were quickly solved.  Due to the increased
communication provided, we had a chance to unify the views of the
GNOME project rapidly, and we got a chance to communicate various
architectural views to the entire team.  For instance, many new
technologies available in GNOME started to get wildly adopted across
GNOME shortly after the conference.

   The team bound together not only through the various dinners,
parties and cocktails, but various contributors started to work more
closely on various projects after the meeting.  Thanks to the
conference many things were accomplished: from very technical issues
to fully document the system and to user interface improvement.

   Presentations ranged from how to write documentation for GNOME
using Docbook, to the existing and new applications that will appear
in GNOME 2.0, to the new foundation libraries that will be used in
GNOME, as well as how to use, develop and maintain language bindings
for GNOME libraries.

   The various technical and user presentations gave the developers
and users of GNOME a good idea of what we are headed to.

   Also, the GNOME steering committee was formed: a committee that
will architect the release of the various components for the GNOME 2.0
release and that contains representatives from the major GNOME
subsystems.  The GNOME steering committee will also help the effort to
establish the GNOME Foundation in Europe and North America.

   Once again, We would like to thank enourmously Mathieu and his team
for putting endless hours into making this event happen.

   All of these achievements and more were made easier through the
tireless efforts of everyone involved with the conference. The full
GNOME Team would like to extend a warm and heart-felt thank you to all
of you.

The GNOME team.