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What’s next in GNOME’s future?

October 27th, 2010 in gnome, open source, PlanetGNOME

The thoughts and ideas in this post are mine and not necessarily representative of what the GNOME Foundation thinks or plans to do.

Canonical will be shipping Unity as the default desktop for Ubuntu 11.04. It’ll still be GNOME technologies underneath, GNOME applications will run on it and it’s still optimized for GNOME, but it won’t be the GNOME shell. Not the traditional GNOME shell that we all know and love nor the new GNOME Shell coming out in GNOME 3.0.

Disappointing News

Many developers were really disappointed to hear that Unity will be the default shell on Ubuntu. Some are disappointed because they don’t like Unity. Others are disappointed because they feel like Canonical is doing its own thing instead of working with the greater GNOME community to reach a compromise that works for all.

I understand. We’ve put a lot of work into GNOME Shell, our next big thing, and Canonical is saying that it’s not the best thing for their users. It’s disappointing because we are excited about our new plans and expect lots of users to enjoy them. And we rely on our distribution partners to get GNOME into the hands of users, so we were expecting Canonical to help us in that. We also expected Canonical to push for any different user interfaces they wanted within our community, not to design them and announce them independently. In a sense it feels like a child who’s decided to move out of the house. We thought they were going to stay with us forever and listen to our wisdom and instead they’ve told us they’ve learned from us, they like some of what we are doing and they have grand plans for the future. They plan to use some of what we work on (like kids come home for some holidays) but they plan to do their own thing too. Perhaps they’ll make mistakes that have been made before or perhaps they’ll do something grand.

Trying New Alternatives

The beauty of open source software is that they can decide to try something new, without convincing all of us to do it too. And they aren’t forking the project. They’ll still be using a lot of GNOME technologies – the same ones we are using – with just a different shell on top.

In a way, it’s not all that different from what Moblin and Maemo did. They used GNOME technologies with a different shell. We were ok with that because they were expanding into new markets – netbooks and tablets – and because it didn’t seem like a step away from GNOME but a step forward with GNOME. Canonical’s move with Unity is similar. Except that they aren’t starting from scratch, they are moving from a traditional GNOME desktop to Unity. So we feel the change more.

Changing Open Source Ecosystem

I’d also say we are seeing a change in the open source ecosystem here.

On one hand, we are getting more companies joining us that know very little about open source or who have interacted very little with open source communities – device manufacturers for example. We have been actively working on how best to get them involved in the our community in order to improve our project and in order to ensure that they have a good experience with open source software. We want to be sure that they use it in a way that doesn’t require them to do lots of rework every time we update our product.

On the other hand, we have companies that have been using open source for a long time and are developing their own ideas for what works. We aren’t always going to agree with them. For example, Canonical believes copyright assignments will benefit open source software. The GNOME community feels copyright assignments are potentially detrimental to free software projects. But while we don’t agree, we need to find a way to best work together.

What’s next?

Canonical has a lot of work to do, but I assume they know that and I won’t presume to tell them how to do it other than to encourage them to continue to work with us on the GNOME technologies they use. I do wish them the best of luck. As one of GNOME’s partners and as a company that gets open source software into the hands of users, I hope they succeed.

In GNOME’s case, I think we need to understand what companies are looking for from us and how we want to position and brand ourselves.

What do we call projects that use GNOME technologies but aren’t a GNOME desktop? What if it’s a device that has no screen? Or a small device like a smartphone? Or a full desktop distribution? Do we want them to be GNOME branded? If so, how do we want them to be GNOME branded?

What do we want to focus on? Awesome technologies that can be used and pieced together independently? Or an awesome desktop that solves a particular problem? Or a set of user interfaces that solves a set of problems? Right now I think we are working on one awesome desktop that we hope solves lots of problems. But it’s unlikely that one desktop is going to work for a huge set of diverse people. For example you might have a developer with two 24″ screens or a student with an 8″ netbook or a mom with her smartphone. Either GNOME needs to develop solutions for all of those or they need to enable others to do so. And we need to figure out what that means for the project and how we want to brand ourselves.

We also need to continue to work on better integration between the desktop and the web. While both GNOME Shell and Unity say they are addressing the way people work today with the web, there’s still a huge gap between the applications I run on the web and the ones I run on my desktop. They don’t seemlessly integrate. Email is the best example of how things could work. Most web email services and most desktop email clients integrate very well these days. But calendars, contacts, banking systems, recipe management systems, etc. all have a ways to go.

We are doing the groundwork to enable that integration between the desktop and the web in projects like GNOME Shell and WebKitGTK+ and many other projects. There’s still work to be done to maximize the entire user flow including the 7 applications they have open on their desktop and the 15 tabs the currently have open in their browser. Fortunately we have many smart people working on it.

Over 106 companies have contributed to GNOME and over 3500 individuals have made contributions. While we may have lost a distribution channel for GNOME Shell, Canonical will still be using and building with many GNOME technologies and working with the GNOME Foundation. And we still have all of our substantial technical resources working on GNOME Shell and other GNOME technologies.

Time, and our strategy, will determine what the free and open source software user interfaces of the future look like.

56 Comments »

Forking an open source project: regaining internal motivation

September 22nd, 2010 in Business, open source, PlanetGNOME, Would you do it again for free?

Can forking a free software project enable you to regain your internal motivation to work on a project? My current theory is that if you work on free software, then you get paid to work on it and then you get laid off, that you would work on a different project. Because the first one is no longer good enough to get paid, then it must not be good enough to work on for free.

If my theory is correct, then I think there’s a great trend going on. Ex-employees are getting around this mental block by blaming the failure (the fact that they can’t get paid to work on it anymore) on the company’s strategy and forking the project to create a new one that they can then justify working on.

One of the strengths of open source software licenses has been that you can fork the project. If at some point in the future, you don’t like what the project is doing, you can take your copy of the code and go do your own thing. Many have argued that it’s that right to leave that makes people work hard to get along. Nobody wants to fork a project is the theory.

Recently most of the forks we’ve seen have come from ex-employees who are unhappy with the direction their previous employer is taking the project.

For example, take Mandriva/Mageia. Part of the Mandriva community, including ex-employees of the company, is forking Mandriva and creating Mageia, a new Linux distribution.

Their website doesn’t say exactly why they are forking but says they no longer trust the company’s motivations. The move seems to be prompted by layoffs:

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don’t think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Certainly I can see how people who have been laid off would no longer trust the company.

It does look like Mandriva is restructuring to give more power to their community. However, I doubt they will reverse their decision to move the desktop development to Brazil. In addition to having lots of great free software developers in Brazil, I bet development costs are much cheaper in Brazil.

In the mean time, the ex-Mandriva employees have created a project worth working on for free, Mageia. Something they care about and can invest in, an independent, community run distribution with a community and an associated nonprofit organization.

I wish Mageia the best of luck with their project and I wish Mandriva the best of luck with their company. I think they will both solve different problems in different ways. And I’m really glad that the Mageia will continue working on what they love even if they are not currently getting paid to do that. Their project is worth it.

1 Comment »

How do I raise enough money to work on my project full time?

September 14th, 2010 in Business, Career, gnome, open source, PlanetGNOME

“How do I raise enough money to be able to spend all my time working on my favorite free software project?” is a question I hear often.

I have a few ideas and I’m very interested in hearing others as I think the world would be a better place if we all could afford to do work we loved and thought useful.

Focus on the difference you’d make. First off, I wouldn’t approach it as “I need to raise money to pay myself.” Unless you are raising money solely from people that love you, whether or not you get paid is probably not going to sway them one way or the other. You need to tell them what $100,000 a year would do. How would your project be great then? Who would it help? How would it make the world a better place? How would it help this particular type of sponsor?
Believe it. You need to truly believe your project would benefit from the money and your work. If you aren’t convinced, you won’t convince anyone else.
Figure out how much you need. It helps to have a goal. Would you quit your day job if you had $20,000 in funding? $100,000? $200,000? (Don’t forget costs like health care, vacation time, etc.)
Identify different types of sponsors. Are you going to raise money from developers? Or software companies? Or philanthropic grant givers? Also think about how much money that type of sponsor is likely to give. Be realistic. Maybe they gave a project $100,000 once but they gave five other projects $10,000. You are probably going to get $10,000 if you get anything. Then figure out how many sponsors you’ll need. Figure out where those people are and how you are going to get introduced to them.
Create a pitch. You need a really good web page, a good email, an elevator pitch and unfortunately, you probably need a slide deck too.
Tell the world. Don’t ask everyone for money. But tell everyone about your project and what your goals are. (Hint: your goal is not to raise money but to make your project better. The money is a means to an end.) Use your elevator pitch. Listen carefully to their questions, their skepticism, their ideas. Evolve. Make your pitch better. Figure out how to pitch it to different types of people.
Sell your project. Don’t forget to talk about your project. You aren’t just asking for money, you are selling the potential of your project.
Collect stories. Studies have proven that people are willing to give more money to save one child identified by name and ailment than they are to save 100 kids. Personal stories are moving. Find a couple of stories of how your project has made a difference.
Learn about them. You are not going to get any money from someone whom you don’t understand. Know them, know their business, know what they care about, know how they view you.
Work with an organization that can help. For example, maybe you want money to work on your favorite project and you found companies that are willing to sponsor it but they don’t want to manage it. Would they be willing to funnel the money to you through a nonprofit organization that also supports your type of project?
Ask. Talk to lots of potential sponsors, ask them for money, apply for grants, look for opportunities. If you don’t ask for the money, you will never get it.

What else would you recommend?

P.S. If you are looking to raise money to work on GNOME, please consider the GNOME Foundation your ally.

10 Comments »

Putting all the Hackfest pieces together

August 26th, 2010 in gnome, open source, PlanetGNOME

Planning a hackfest is not an easy process. You need an:

organizer – someone willing to put some time into making the whole thing happen
topic – what are you going to be hacking on, what do you hope to accomplish
attendees – this is usually a particular group of people that work on a specific project or team
date – have you ever tried to schedule a multi-day meeting with multiple people? Agreeing on a week can be really hard.
place – a place with affordable lodging and food with a comfortable place to hack with great internet. Preferably some place easy and cheap to travel to.
sponsors – flying a group of people to the same place often costs quite a bit of money

Luckily we’ve had people and companies willing to invest the time and resources to make this happen. During the past year we’ve had a record number of very productive hackfests and we have even more coming up!

Accessibility during AEGIS conference, Seville (Spain), October
GTK+ Hackfest, A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), October 18th-22th
Development Documentation and Tools Hackfest, Berlin (Germany), December 2nd-5th 2010
WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, A Coruña (Galicia, Spain), December 5th-12th

And we have more opportunities! Not only are a lot of teams looking to have hackfests in the near future but we have people offering up venues!

Dave Richards from the City of Largo is interested in hosting a hackfest. Many of you know Dave from his participation in the Boston Summit. The City of Largo is a big GNOME fan – they use a lot of thin client solutions.
Daniel Siegel has once again offered up Bolzano and the Free Software Center of South Tyrol as a GNOME hackfest location in conjunction with their annual event in November. It’s a beautiful location and we’ve had several successful GNOME hackfests there over the years like the Zeitgeist one. This year all of the groups that I’ve contacted can’t make the dates work, so if you know of a team looking for a venue, this might be right for you!

So if you are interested in organizing a hackfest, please let us know. The GNOME Foundation is here to help – we can help find sponsors, venues, mentors, checklists, etc. The Board of Directors have even offered to act as mentors for any one planning a hackfest!

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Words are important – just not always the way you think

June 2nd, 2010 in open source, PlanetGNOME

Recently I met someone who insisted on describing every department in his organization, all the acronyms and what they stood for. By the time he got around to describing how this whole thing related to me, he had lost my interest. (And I tried hard to hang in there!) He had given me too many irrelevant terms that didn’t relate to me.

We focus a lot in the free software community about what words we use: free software, open source software, free and open source software, …

When using words we should think not only about the meaning of our words but also about our audience. And what we want to teach them.

You don’t teach kids about magenta, mauve, carmine, you teach them about red. Then later you teach them the shades. And, unless you’re my grandfather, you are unlikely to teach them about magenta, mauve and carmine unless it comes up in a scene, in a story.

I’ve been talking about “web services” for a while and people often immediately tell me I’m using the term too generally and start defining web services versus SaaS versus online applications versus … While I think that’s important in some conversations, I think if your audience is only vaguely familiar with the term “web service” and has never heard of “SaaS”, you’ll lose them before you start if you insist on defining and using a whole bunch of new terms. (But I do agree that you should use each term appropriately.)

When you talk to someone who has said “open source software” for the past 10 years, and you use the term “free software”, they will likely think you are talking about something else. Something that is not open source software nor free software as you think of it. If you really want to teach, focus on telling your story rather than teaching a vocabulary lesson.

If you start out by defining terms, you’ll lose your audience. You need to explain meaning by either showing or telling stories.

So if free software versus open source software is important to you, tell as a story where the difference is clear. If web services versus SaaS is important, tell a story or give examples where the two are obviously different.

Tell stories, don’t lecture. (And yes, this post could use a few more stories and bit less lecture!)

1 Comment »

10 skills to master to get things done online

May 14th, 2010 in Career, open source, PlanetGNOME, tech changing society

I’ve recently watched a few people struggle to get things done in online projects. I’ve written and spoken on 12 tips for getting things done in the open source community but now I see that people also need to learn how to work with mailing lists and virtual teams.

Skills you should master if you plan on working in a virtual environment. I’m interested in any other skills you’d add to the list.

Master your email. You will get a lot of email. There are few in person meetings and there’s a large group to coordinate, so email is the most popular method of communication. Email will become a knowledge base. You need to be able to handle hundreds of emails a day without complaining that they are too many. (You don’t want to be cut off from the knowledge base do you?)
There are lots of ways to master managing your email. Here are a few of the most common:
- Touch each email once. If you read it, think about what you need to do with it and do it right then. If it’s something that requires action outside of email, add an action item to your todo list and then tag the email or file it in a special folder. Get it out of your inbox.
- Use a threaded email client. It’s much easier to catch up on conversations if you can read the whole thread easily at once.
- Use filters. Many people filter mail from different lists or about different topics to folders. (I personally do not do this. I find I never look at them if I do this.)
- Dedicate certain time periods to checking email. I spend the first couple hours of every day responding to email. I don’t look at it as “doing email” but rather as communicating and following up with people.
- Research and try. There are lots of methods and tips for dealing with incoming email. Try a few of them and figure out what works for you.
Learn online tools. You should know how to use mailing lists, IRC, Skype, Twitter, IM, wikis, etc. Each team will use a different set of tools, but you should know the basics of most of them. That way if someone says, let’s have an IRC meeting in a hour, you won’t be googling “IRC” to figure out how to join at the last minute. Or looking for a headset in order to join a Skype call.
Know where to find things. People that work online usually deal with a lot of information. Learn how to search your email archives effectively, how to search the mailing list archives, where the project stores documents or information online and how to search. If you need to ask for information, also ask how the person found it. Often they are simply searching for it. Do not ask for information that you can find easily yourself. Above all, do not ask for the same information twice! If you asked for it and got it, you should be able to find it again. Feel free to ask someone how they found the answer to your question. I learn a lot that way.
Observe how things get done. Every virtual or online team is different. Watch how things get done. Do people present ideas before they are done? Wait for consensus? Present final products for review? If nobody ever responds to your email, it’s likely you are not following the project’s culture.
Be prompt. With people working in different timezones and with different priorities, it’s important to respond to emails and to finish action items promptly. Each delay seems to multiply across the project.
Keep the group informed. If you have a discussion off list, be sure to let the rest of the list know. Don’t be afraid to have the discussion on the list. If you make decisions or agree to something on the group’s behalf, be sure to let the rest of the group know.
Know when to take it off list. Sometimes it’s best to have a discussion offlist first and then tell the group the outcome. For example, if you think your idea is controversial or too vague, you might want to run it by a few trusted people first. But remember, to get buyin and build consensus, some of the discussion has to happen on the list – it can’t be all polished decisions!
Rethink conference calls. If you have conference calls, make sure everyone has access to good technology and make sure everyone is on the phone, not just some people. I think Nat’s Everyone Dials In policy is an excellent one. Also be aware that conference calls are particularly difficult for people that have to dial an international number to join and for people who’s first language isn’t English. While you may think conference calls are the most effective way to get things done, if half the team can’t hear or communicate well, IRC may be a much better choice.
Learn how to read silence. Sometimes you’ll post a great idea or a question to the mailing list and nobody responds. Does that mean nobody liked your idea? Or that they couldn’t understand it? Or that they are all busy on the release that’s going out the day after tomorrow? In the absence of body language, you will have to be more aware of everything else that is going on.
Know what’s been done. When you join a project you should spend some time observing, asking questions and reading the archives. If you suggest a multitude of projects that already exist or have already been proposed, people are going to think you aren’t willing to learn the project.
What else would you add?

For suggestions on how to get things done in virtual teams, see 12 tips for getting things done in the open source community.

3 Comments »

10 free apps I wish were open source

April 6th, 2010 in open source, PlanetGNOME, webapps

When it comes to web applications, I think free and open source software fans are settling for “free” instead of looking for the freedom they would get from open source.

Here are some free applications that I wish had open source software equivalents. I am not unhappy with these applications. I just wish I had open source software alternatives that were as good!

Here are 10 of the good web applications that I use daily that don’t have good enough open source software equivalents.

Gmail. How many free software developers use Gmail as their primary email interface?
Remember the Milk. I want a way to sync tasks across multiple computers, tag them, date them, prioritize them and share them with other users.
TripIt. I forward any reservation to it and it adds it to my itinerary. I can also share with friends to coordinate travel plans or just to share where we are.
Facebook. There’s Identica as an alternative to Twitter but there’s no open source software alternative to Facebook.
Delicio.us/Diigo. Mozilla is working on tools to help me synchronize my bookmarks across multiple machines. I also want to share and search them.
Kayak.com. The best way to find cheap airfare with all the options you need.
Doodle. Ever tried to schedule a meeting with lots of busy people in different time zones?
Google calendar. I can manage my calendar from any where and invite others to meetings. All synced on the web, not dependent on any particular machine I’m on.
Google reader. Judging from how many open source software users share items with me in Google reader, a lot of us are using this RSS reader to follow our favorite websites.
Dropbox. Dropbox and UbuntuOne have become the default way for users to access files across multiple machines, remotely and to share them. Why don’t we have an open source software option yet?

Why hasn’t open source software kept up with the web application space? What needs to happen for us to have open source software web applications in these spaces?

What other spaces are also missing open source software options?

41 Comments »

How does Malaysia encourage so many women in software?

February 24th, 2010 in open source, PlanetGNOME, Travel, women

In 2003 I gave a talk in Malaysia. What I noticed immediately is that my audience was well over half women. This was really noticeable because they were all wearing brightly colored hijabs. Usually I scan the room and count how many women I can find – usually on my fingers even in a room of hundreds. Yet here were hundreds of women attending a talk about the economics of open source software!

I've wondered ever since what they do so differently in Malaysia that they get so many more women involved in software. Is it something we could do as well?

A recent study offers a theory:

in Malaysia jobs in technology
are seen as appropriate for women: Men do not perceive indoor work as
masculine and much of society stigmatizes women who work outdoors as
lower class. Computing and programming are seen as “women-friendly”
professions, with opportunities opening up since men are not
interested in competing for these types of jobs. “It’s a woman’s world
in that respect,” said Mellstrom.

So women that work in software are higher class. Where as in my experience it's often been insinuated in the US that if you are attractive or social, there are better careers for you. "You're a programmer?? You don't look like one!"

6 Comments »

More Women in GNOME Now!

February 10th, 2010 in gnome, open source, women

The GNOME community is extremely diverse when it comes to nationality. But we don't have many women working on GNOME.

We want to make sure that women interested in working on GNOME know they are welcome, so we have announced the

GNOME Outreach Program for Women!

The goal is to encourage women to participate in GNOME and to provide internship opportunities in the summer.

We noticed a problem back in 2006. We had 181 submissions for Google’s Summer of Code – and not one was from a woman. So Hanna Wallach and Chris Ball launched the Women's Summer Outreach Program. We received a 100 applications from women that summer and were able to accept 6 – six women were paid to work on GNOME and mentored by GNOME developers. (Sponsored primarily with a grant from Google.) Recently Marina Zhurakhinskaya followed up with those women and decided we should do it again and expand on the program.

So we are once again doing a GNOME Outreach Program for Women.

How can you help?

Encourage women to apply to the program!
Mentor a woman in the program.
Contribute financially to help pay the stipends.
Convince a company to sponsor the program.
Encourage your company to hire a female intern to work on GNOME.

Please help! Spread the word! Encourage women to join GNOME!

9 Comments »

Should you ask developers for money? And other interesting fundraising dilemnas.

February 9th, 2010 in Finance, gnome, open source, Social Networking

Chris Blizzard introduced me to Clay Johnson. I had such an interesting time talking to him about social networking, free and open source software, governments and fundraising that I asked if he’d share some of his points in a blog interview.

Meet Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs!

Hi Clay, you have a lot of experience with online social networking. Where’d you get that experience?

It’s weird– I started out with social networking before social networking was called “social networking.” In college, back in the early days of the web, my Dad would always ask me to look things up on the Internet for him. I began to get tired of answering questions, so I built a service that would let people ask questions and answer them online– that way, I figured, he could have a whole community of people answering his questions. That was KnowPost.com, the first “social network” I built on my own.

A few years later, I found myself working on the same kind of project with some friends called ZeroDegrees.com, which was a social networking service built into Outlook. And shortly thereafter, the Howard Dean Campaign hired me to be their lead programmer and build Dean Link, a privately branded social network. Then quickly found myself starting the company that created My.BarackObama.com– yet
another social network.

It isn’t intentional, I swear! I find both socialness, and networking exhausting …

You now work at Sunlight Labs on “opening” the American government.
What’s that about? How can we help?

Our mission is to use technology to make government more open, accessible and accountable to its citizens. We’re now a community of about 1400 developers at SunlightLabs.com. Last year our community built out about 100 different open source applications based on making government more open accountable, accessible and open.

The apps range from things like Congrelate.com–which allows you to sort and view information about Congress, to TransparencyCorps.org– our own Open Source Mechanical Turk, to ThisWeKnow.org which takes data from the federal government and makes it relevant to your area and GovPulse.us– a site that takes the Federal Register (the official Journal of the Federal Government) and turns it into something people can actually read.

Our hope is that our work will result in economic opportunity (GPS, Weather Data, the Human Genome– all built on government data!), a more accountable government, and more rational political debate as people have more access to facts. The fact that there’s more data on Manny Ramirez and his job performance than Nancy Pelosi’s is kind of crazy and we hope to change that.

I’ve heard you say you should never ask a developer for money. Most free and open source software projects turn to those they know best, developers, when they need funds. Why do you think that’s a bad idea?

Let me hedge here a little and say you shouldn’t ask a volunteer for money. For the same reason the folks at
Habitat for Humanity don’t come and ask you for money while you’re putting up drywall in one of their houses. There’s a spectrum when it comes to open source software. One one side there are projects that are

driven out of the hope for a larger good– I’d call these traditional volunteer projects– where people are donating their time to help make the world a better place. Then there’s the other hand: stuff that’s driven out of necessity. Obviously this is a spectrum and projects move within it. When you have stuff on the ideological side– stuff built genuinely not out of the desire to solve a specific problem, but to make the world a better place, then those developers are likely already donating to your project with their time. They’re being altruistic already. When you have a developer giving their time out of
necessity, they’re getting a return on their investment– usually a more efficient workplace, better software for them to use, or some other personal need filled. It’s entirely appropriate to ask them for money as well– as their return on investment will be even greater.

How do you think free software projects can effectively engage with donors?

Now if I had the secret to make all open source software economically sustainable and as well funded as

commercial software every time– well, I’d have told everyone by now, and we’d all be rich working on projects we believe in. In the political world there’s a lot of best practices, but the one I like the most is to maintain long-term relationships with people via email and social media, and to make specific asks from them. So, for instance instead of saying “Donate to keep this project sustainable,” one could say “We need to build out XYZ, can you pay for ONE line of code to go to that project? Our estimate is that it’ll take X lines of code.”

Another thing you can do is look at what the clean energy community is doing– what if you created a code offset like we have carbon offsets now? What if an organization set up a website where folks could estimate the amount of free software they use and buy free software offsets on an annual basis, and make investments in free software projects? This works great because it helps donors alleviate their guilt for not contributing their time to open source projects, and makes it easy. I’d gladly put an open source offset sticker on my laptop to match my carbon offset sticker in my car.

How can we get donors participating in the project?

Allow donors to fund the projects they care about. Give them a voice in the project. Don’t just enable their participation but expect it. Build an email list and talk to them about what it is they want. Don’t send newsletters, send real emails asking them to help out. Give them a meaningful way to participate and what’ll happen is unusual: they’ll participate.

Do you have any fundraising tips for us?

Here’s what’s amazing: when you give users an active role in your community. They’ll participate more. So find ways to get them involved. For something like GNOME, come up with some principles, and get your users to sign on to them and you’ll find that if you ask them to help fundraise, they’ll do it.

What’s the single most important thing you think free software projects
could do to improve their fundraising efforts?

Start reading emails from organizations like MoveOn.org and BarackObama.com and start emulating them and their tactics. You don’t have to agree with them politically to see how they’re doing what they’re doing.

A lot of people are going to call me crazy, but look: I’d argue that GNOME has as much if not more installations than the number of people that are subscribed to MoveOn.org’s email list. And unlike MoveOn.org, a lot of these users are interacting with your software every day, not just when an email pops up in their inbox or when something happens in Washington.

What is Sunlight labs going to do next? What can we expect to see in open government?

We’re focused on launching a new contest a few short weeks. It’ll be a design contest. We want to make it so that by 2011, people who can come to SunlightLabs.com and find the team they need to open their government. Developers are a part of that, but designers are too.