Various of us have been meeting in the Red Hat offices in London this week (thanks Red Hat!) to discuss parental controls and digital wellbeing. The first two days were devoted to this; today and tomorrow will be dedicated to discussing metered data (which is unrelated to parental controls, but the hackfests are colocated because many of the same people are involved in both).

Parental controls discussions went well. We’ve worked out a rough scope of what features we are interested in integrating into GNOME, and how parental controls relates to digital wellbeing. In this context, we’re considering parental controls to be allowing parents to limit what their children can do on a computer, in terms of running different applications or games, or spending certain amounts of time on the computer.

Digital wellbeing is many of the same concepts – limiting time usage of the computer or applications, or access to certain websites – but applied in a way to give yourself ‘speed bumps’ to help your productivity by avoiding distractions at work.

Allan produced some initial designs for the control centre UI for parental controls and digital wellbeing, and we discussed various minor issues around them, and how to deal with the problem of allowing people to schedule times when apps, or whole groups of apps, are to be blocked; without making the UI too complex. There’s some more work to do there.

On Tuesday evening, we joined some of the local GNOME developers in London for beers, celebrating the 3.32 GNOME release. ?

We’re now looking at metered data, which is the idea that large downloads should be limited and scheduled according to the user’s network tariff, which might limit what can be downloaded during a certain time period, or provide certain periods of the night when downloads are unmetered. More to come on that later.

For other write ups of what we’ve been doing, see Iain’s detailed write up of the first two days, or the raw hackfest notes.