GNOME GUADEC 2022 & Debian Albanian women trafficked to Mexico?
Reprinted with permission from the Free Software Fellowship.
THE DebConf22 and the GNOME conference, GUADEC 2022 both took place during the same week from 20 to 25 July 2022.
DebConf22 was in Prizren, Kosovo, a 3 hour bus trip from Albania. GUADEC was in Guadalajara, Mexico, which requires a long haul flight from Europe.
In 2022, GNOME published a 25 years Happy Birthday GNOME web site which has since vanished. HappyBirthdayGNOME.org is the original site, Archive.org has a backup copy.
The 25 years report includes a photo from a GUADEC women's dinner. Two thirds of participants are from Albania.
There was already a lot of controversy at DebConf19 after a group of Albanian women were taken to Brazil. The woman who sat closest to Chris Lamb in Brazil won a $6,000 Outreachy internship eight weeks later.
The two women closest to Lamb in Brazil are also pictured in Mexico at the GUADEC women's dinner. Given that DebConf was so much closer to their country in adjacent Kosovo, how did they go to Mexico? One of them works for GNOME so she has a legitimate reason to be in Mexico.
GUADEC 2022 was the last GUADEC for Neil McGovern as Executive Director. We already wrote about the manner in which GNOME parted ways with McGovern. Given the murkiness about his departure and the GUADEC day trip to the city of Tequila, we feel the funding of Albanian women needs careful scrutiny.
Therefore, as both conferences were on the same week, we wanted to ask where was Chris Lamb? The former Debian leader is completely absent from the DebConf22 schedule. Querying his username finds nothing. Did he skip DebConf and travel to Mexico to attend the sending off of his friend Neil McGovern, along with the Albanian friends?
Is it a good use of GNOME funds to pay for the outgoing director and members of the Debian Cambridge clique to travel to the city of Tequila with Albanian women for a farewell party? █
