I got back from the Boston Summit around 22:00 Sunday evening and by the time I arrived home from the airport I was too tired to write up a blog post. Then Monday morning came and after all the meetings, work and side projects, I decided to spend some quality time with my kids, as I had not seen them since Friday evening.

The second day was very busy and full of things to do and interesting discussions. So much so that I barely had time to do some of the things I had on my plate from the Friends of GNOME session on Saturday. It was worthy though, as the conversations in and out of the sessions were, in my humble opinion, the best part of it all! The level of camaradaries that takes place during these types of events is something that it is hard to explain. Where else could you get a bunch of strangers who share a single common goal (make GNOME kick ass!) and are very passionate about what they do to give up their weekend to discuss and plan the future of an open source project? My only regret was to have missed the Beer Summit, which from Jason's pictures, looked to have been pretty cool!

For anyone out there wondering about the future of GNOME, know that there is a very resolute bunch of people working really hard to make sure that things get done in a timely and satisfactory fashion so that you’ll get a great desktop experience. Expect great things from GNOME 3.0 and if you are interested in supporting more of these events such as the Boston Summit, I kindly ask you to visit our Friends of GNOME page. It has never been so cool to be a Friend of GNOME!

Finally, a few thank you are in order:

• Robert MacQueen for the Outreach Program and sponsorship
• Litl for an awesome coffee/cheese/pastries break and sponsorship
• j5 for organizing and herding all the cool cats and all the small but important things that had to be done to ensure a smooth experience for all
• Red Hat for sending a bunch of their guys
• Canonical and Collabora for the yummy bagels, coffee and open bar (unfortunately my flight left before #BeerSummit but I left some very capable people in charge of drinking my share).
• Jason Clinton for capturing a lot of what happened during the Summit on his blog. If you want to catch up with all the things that happened this weekend, definitely check his blog posts!
• The GNOME Travel Committee and our current Friends of GNOME subscribers who managed to sponsor people to events all over the world!