Instead of this book: (Or if you really liked this one.)
Sugar Blues by William Dufty
Try this one:
Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and
the Controversial Science of Diet and Health by Gary Taubes (Or see my short review of the very long book and my review of one of Taubes’ webinars.)
I was looking at my Paperbackswap wish list and discovered some interesting things:
What’s your wish list dynamic look like?
We’ve been working on the GNOME Foundation’s goals for 2010. We distributed them for comment on the Foundation list. I’ve also created a quick survey if you want to show which goals you like. (The results from this survey are now available.)
In addition to the goals, we also need:
If you use GNOME, you should let us know what you think the Foundation should accomplish in 2010!
Feel free to comment on the existing goals or to suggest new ones.
that come out of these relationships.
Invest in GNOME Love, partner with other organizations,
develop a working on mailing lists guide, etc.
This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.
Finally wrapped up the very long thread on the Foundation list and most of the side conversations.
Met with a couple of advisory board members (via phone, email and IRC) to discuss funding and GUADEC.
We are partnering with Project::Possibility! Look for updates from the GNOME accessibility folks.
Got all the GNOME Q4 report updates in the report and edited except for one … actively waiting on that one!
Read all the Google Grants instructions, set up an Adwords account, set up campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords. Was ready to submit and the checklist says we need at least two ads per adgroup, so going back to fill in today. (Also got a login on our Piwik account from Jaap Haitsma to see gnome.org web page traffic to
help evaluate our adwords usage.)
Sent out requests for sponsorship for the usability hackfest.
Attended GNOME board meeting.
Met with Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation. Briefly discussed Collaboration Summit, GNOME participation, mobile, Moblin and fundraising/memberships.
Sent out thank you’s for Friends of GNOME.
Worked with Grace Hopper (a women in computing conference) on FOSS (free and open source) plans for the conference. They were already working on it and they’ve added me to the group discussing the plans. It’s looking promising.
Attended Snowy (Tomboy Online) IRC meeting.
Talked to Gregoire Gentil from Always Innovating. Their Touch Book uses GNOME technologies. They’d love to see better touch screen support for GNOME. (Right now you have to use a stylus instead of fingers.) Set up tentative plans to meet in person at the Collaboration Summit.
Helped with a couple of things (panel, lightening talks, schedule) for OSCON and for the Women in Open Source miniconference at SCALE.
Luis de Bethencourt is going to represent GNOME at FOSS Nigeria. Thanks to AgustÃn Benito Bethencourt for recruiting him.
Chuck Payne and Zonker will represent GNOME at the Texas Linux Fest.
Worked on planning my travel for the year. I’d love to see more people officially representing GNOME at events.
Lots of corporations work really hard to increase diversity.
In the mean time, I think free and open source software projects have figured it out. They may not be diverse in every way possible (there's a notable lack of women and an over representation of developers – go figure) but they have succeeded in not only attracting a diverse set of people but creating a really well working diverse group of people.
I think a couple of factors have made that possible:
Take the GNOME Board of Directors, one of the most effective and diverse teams I've had the pleasure of working with:
They are diverse in other ways too but these facts are most public.
They talk every day via email, IRC and IM, debate some pretty difficult issues and come to working agreements without a boss. (They hired me, not the other way around.) They run the GNOME Foundation.
How many other teams do you know that are that diverse and that successful?
Their passion for GNOME brings them together, the internet enables them to work together and their diversity helps them succeed.
So today I was feeling frustrated that I hadn't crossed many items off my todo list. I'd been really busy and felt like I had a pretty productive day, but I'd only managed to cross a couple of items off my list.
So I took a break to see exactly what I'd been doing. And ended up tweeting this:
As of 2:30pm
today I sent 46 emails, got email in 128 threads, posted 9 tweets + 8
Facebook comments + had 4 phone calls + 5 IM chats.
And I forgot to count IRC chats.
So then I got to wondering what a normal day looked like. Unfortunately I don't have an easy way to count threads (email, IM, IRC and Facebook) and I think threads are most likely the most indicative of work done. (It's fascinating how many different conversations we can carry on at once. Often on very unrelated tasks.)
What was easy to count was how many emails I received in a day and how many I sent. What was surprising was how consistent the numbers were!
Also, look how good I was at not working over the weekend – I don't normally do so good at that.
The next thing that surprised me was how many people commented on how productive I was. So I looked up productive in the dictionary and saw they were right:
productive: producing or capable of producing (especially abundantly);
The problem is I measure productive by how many things I cross off my todo list, not how many emails I send or I'd be in reactive mode all day. Now most of the emails I sent were working towards getting things crossed off my list, but in and of themselves they aren't something I want to measure in order to measure productivity.
The third thing that struck me was how many different topics I handle every day. Those 46 emails were in 37 different threads. Over the course of 6.5 hours, that's almost 6 different topics an hour. Or at least 6 different conversations an hour. And again, that's not counting IM, IRC, twitter … If multitasking is inefficient, how much more effective could I be if I managed to focus on one topic for an entire day?
So what was the point? I don't know, but if it takes me 50-100 outbound emails a day (and at least that many inbound emails) to get my job done (not to mention IM, IRC, Identica, Twitter and Facebook) whatever did people do before email??
P.S. And I'm not complaining. Feel free to continue to communicate with me as often as you want in the medium you find most comfortable. I feel like whatever I'm doing is working well for me at the moment. (Except for that pesky todo list that grows as fast as I cross things off of it!)
I'm just contemplating what this means … your thoughts and insights are welcome.
It's time to decide what events I want to attend this year. Usually I figure it out a bit as I go but with multiple calls for papers deadlines coming up and invitations to speak coming up earlier than ever before, I decided it was time to create a plan for the year.
Every time I'm invited to talk or I see a conference that looks interesting, I struggle with the decision.
So I open up my proposed travel schedule to all of you. Any thoughts or input? Note that this is my conference travel schedule and there are still other trips that might come up like marketing hackfests and partner meetings.
Here are the relevant events I think are happening this year. Let me know if I left one out. I bolded the ones I think I will end up attending. This is not necessarily a commitment, just my first draft or proposal.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Thanks to these websites for the lists of events.
So once again, I open up my proposed travel schedule (and the criteria I use) to all of you. Any thoughts or input?
This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.
Started out my week late as it turns out that Amtrak can randomly cancel trains – like for a whole weekend.
We had a GNOME Advisory Board meeting about GNOME Foundation 2010 goals. We got a lot of good feedback. After adding another level of detail, I think we are ready to send them out. Look for them soon from the board. (My goals and the Foundation goals are very much aligned at this point, so I am looking forward to getting everyone's feedback on them.)
Attended a Women in Free Software IRC meeting about our day long event at the Libre Planet event in March.
GNOME Q4 Report. Got some of the write-ups for the Q4 report – still need to ping some people.
Worked with a couple of the advisory board members on how best to help them support us this year. Agreed on amounts and dates, divided some of the payments up, filled out some paperwork, …
Sent out request for funding for things like GUADEC, the accessibility hackfest and the other machine that the sys admin team would like to have.
Had a few conversations around GUADEC. If you'd like to help with GUADEC this year, please send an email to gmc@sonologic.nl.
Looking for people to represent GNOME at the Texas Linux Fest, FOSS Nigeria, Grace Hopper, Educational Technology Day at Ithaca College. Let me know if you are interested!
Pinged to find out why I/we are not being included in Open Source for America conversations. (Being an advisor is a lot of work if you'd like information.)
Our Google Grants application was approved! Google Grants allows us to advertise through Google AdWords. It's basically like a grant of advertising money. Now I have to figure out how we can best use Google Adwords.
KDE sent a transfer over for the Desktop Summit so we could close the books. All looks good!
Participated in the very long thread about free software, open source software, proprietary software, GNOME and companies on the Foundation list. Had a lot of side conversations about it too.
Attended the GNOME marketing IRC meeting which was very well attended and generated lots of good ideas which people signed up to follow up on.
Worked with James Vasile from SFLC and another organization on some agreements.
Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School definitely gave me lots of pointers for presentations – and lots of trivia for conversations. (It's also quoted often in the book on public speaking that I'm reading now, Confessions of a Public Speaker.)
Some of the points I found interesting:
"if healthy 30-year-olds are sleep deprived for six days (averaging, in this study, about four hours of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60-year-old."
Brain Rules is an interesting and fun read.
It took my 3 year old less than five seconds to discover the problem with this game. In spite of not really understanding the point of tic-tac-toe.
So much for buying stocking stuffers in the dollar bin at Target. (Or perhaps I should blame it on the speed at which I was shopping. Not being a big fan of shopping, I was in and out very quickly. Perhaps a bit too quickly.)
