Stormy’s Update: Week of July 20th

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation, reprinted from the GNOME Foundation blog. 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?

Thanks to everyone who helped get things done this week!

I think we could have a bunch more roles in GNOME. We could have someone in charge of customer case studies, someone responsible for GNOME presentation materials (slide templates, business cards), someone in charge of potential sponsor identification, etc.  If anyone sees a common thread of tasks and thinks they are up to, suggest an appropriate title and let the Foundation know you are interested!

We now have a donate section on the right hand side of the GNOME home page thanks to Andreas Nillson, Paul Cutler and Andre Klapper.

Touched base with John Carr about how the system administration team is doing. They have a team formed that’s been hard at work and have posted minutes from their last meeting. New requests can be logged in bugzilla now.

I emailed Hackerthreads about our GNOME store plans but didn’t get a response. (I’ve never gotten a response from them about anything I’ve emailed them but they email Rosanna every once in a while and they send us a percentage of all the proceeds they get from GNOME merchandise.)

Added June numbers to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet and posted a Friends of GNOME update
to the Foundation blog. (June numbers weren’t great but it was good to see the subscription revenue hold steady. We are almost at our initial annual goal of $20,000! Thanks to all our Friends of GNOME!)

Asked all GNOME teams for Q2 results for the Q2 quarterly report that will come out in a couple of weeks.

Pinged a couple of times about GUADEC 2008 finances and heard that Baris is working on the tax situation in Turkey.

Prepared slides for my OSCON talk on the role of users in free software projects.

Paul Cutler set up a microblog@gnome.org email address so the identica/twitter team can post from email. (Let us know if you’d like to help identica/twitter or set up a plan for how best to do that.)

Went to OSCON in San Jose for two days.

• Gave my talk on users in free software projects – it started some good discussions.
• Met with potential GNOME partners like FOSSFA.
• Met with a GNOME Mobile member who would like to get more involved.
• Put lots of faces to names. Hopefully I can remember them all.
• Attended Open Source for America launch party. The GNOME Foundation is a founding member!
• Met Stefano Maffulli very briefly in person and discussed where to
  advertise Funambol sponsored GNOME related projects (that they are
  willing to pay for)
• Interviewed with Paul Hudson from TuxRadar. He posted some snippets. Full interview to come later.

Met with another advisory board member to get their feedback. (And to encourage them to pay their way overdue advisory board fees.)

Met with a large financial company who is trying to move to GNOME/Linux desktops. Talked about ways to get their issues in front of GNOME developers for discussion. Look for blog interviews or GNOME Journal articles or something similar!

My priorities for this week:

• thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Still hoping someone from the marketing team will help compile a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit.)
• Identify someone to lead case study activity:
  • Publish case studies/success stories from the foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can use.)
  • ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
• find someone to help Dave Richards with the usability hackfest he’d like to hold in the City of Largo (Lucas Rocha is helping to find someone.)
• summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
• summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
• fill out Google Adwords Grant Application
• apologize to invited journalists who didn’t make the Desktop Summit because there travel wasn’t booked
• get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC
• create wiki page for GNOME press team
• get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME
• Find speakers for the Desktop panel I am now chairing at OpenSource World. (In addition to my talk.)
• Meeting with Paul Cutler in person to talk about updating GNOME marketing wiki pages.
• Speaking at a Colorado Springs Linux User Group.

More stuff that needs to be done:

• finalize 401K plan with attorneys (pinged attorney again – I know she’s been traveling as I saw her at OSCON.
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
• Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
• GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
• follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner (Dave Neary met with them at OSCON and followed up with an email)
• Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
• talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
• figure out how to work with Spanish government (Janjo Marin sent me some ideas.)
• Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
• continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
• Finance stuff (waiting on a treasurer):
  • add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
  • Work on budget with new treasurer
• Figure out how to get product news from News
  Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to
  press team when it is created)
• find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
• Find out how to review new gnome webpage content so I can help
• Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
• write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or
  find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to
  help with sponsors?)
• find someone who can help create a list of
  recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for
  enterprise customers
• GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
• follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM
  system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board,
  Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
• follow up with the sys admin team on setting up
  better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans.
  (They are working on this one.)
• follow up with International Cooperation group from
  the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work
  with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
• send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• Figure out who could attend a conference in Saudi Arabia to discuss potential financial support for adabizing programs
• write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
• Help Rosanna recruit someone to help automate some
  more of the Friends’ process – like getting Friends of GNOME donor
  names on the website as they come in