Stormy’s update: Week of November 30th

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? or my earlier updates.

LiMo Foundation. Met with Andrew Savory, Mal Minhas and Gyanee Dewnarain at the LiMo London offices. We talked about LiMo, GNOME Mobile, the work LiMo member companies are doing with GNOME technologies, our foundations and how we can work more closely together. Good conversations and I expect we'll continue to work together and hopefully announce more later.

Canonical design, user experience and usability team. Met with Charline Poirier, Ivanka Majic and Iain Farrell at their London offices. Talked about usability studies on GNOME technologies, a GNOME usability hackfest and studying how to disseminate usability study results into free and open source software community. I'll be introducing more GNOME folks into the conversation and hopefully the conversations will make their way to the GNOME usability list and into some concrete plans to get more GNOME usability info into the hands of folks working on GNOME.

Met with Lucas Rocha for lunch to discuss GNOME stuff and then had a quick peek at a Litl webbook! It's a very elegantly designed device. While the software is of course great (it's designed by great people using some terrific free and open source software technologies 🙂 what really struck me was the hardware. The keyboard is very "clean" and easy to use without lots of random extra keys and when you swing the screen all the way around to set it up like a picture frame, it feels very sturdy. It was fun to see.

OSS Watch. Went out to Oxford to meet the OSS Watch team and participate in the OSS Watch advisory board meeting. (This was the reason for my trip to the UK.) OSS Watch is helping educational institutions in the UK use open source software. Or help them to the next step in their plans, like building community around the projects they've developed. Lots of interesting discussions. (And some great but brief sightseeing.)

Invited GNOME event planners to GNOME Advisory Board meeting next Tuesday which will be about events and copyright assignments.

One on one meeting with Brian Cameron to talk about status. Brian will be sharing my past year's goals and achievements as the board of directors determined them. I'll be sharing my next year's goals as part of the process of figuring out what they should be.

Did an interview about Women in Linux with Anton Borisov who is writing for Linux+DVD magazine

The US event box is going to be maintained by Larry Cafiero. (Thanks to Zonker for nominating Larry.) We've been looking for a west coast home for the event box and so I'm excited Larry will be helping us out.

Emailed press, journalist and blogger contacts about our GUADEC 2010 announcement on Monday.

Spent approximately 40 hours travelling. Not counting all the trains in London.