When I told the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors that I was leaving my job as executive director, I told them my number one priority was to hire my replacement. Before I was hired, the GNOME Foundation went through a long period without an executive director and I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen […]
How to hire an Executive Director Read More »
I hear a lot of people worrying about getting more visibility. While I think visibility is important, I think worrying about visibility is the wrong way to go about it. Worrying about visibility makes people do weird, self-centered things. If you want to be more visible, talk more about other people! Meet people, listen to
How to get more visibility Read More »
High context cultures value personal relationships over process. You have to know someone before you can trust them and work with them. They also tend to be less explicit and rely more on tone of voice, gestures and even status to communicate. Typically Asian countries are more high context than Western countries. Think Korea and
Does open source exclude high context cultures? Read More »
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about why we have so few women in open source and web development and how to encourage more women to join. (I even got to spend an awesome afternoon with a bunch of girls. I was supposed to be mentoring them but they
The secret to my success in a field of men? All my friends. My guy friends. Read More »
So now that I work at Mozilla, I figured it was time to develop a “web app” just to make sure I understood it all. And since my team is working on educational resources for web developers, I wanted to see what it was like to learn how to use some of them using resources
Learning to write JavaScript Read More »
Kids on Computers folks have been busy, especially Hermes and Thomas and others in Oaxaca. In the past few months we’ve set up labs in a school for kids with disabilities and a boarding school for girls – both in small towns in Oaxaca, Mexico. The lab for the kids with disabilities will also help
Kids on Computers sets up more labs in schools Read More »
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
Forking an open source project: regaining internal motivation Read More »
“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
How do I raise enough money to work on my project full time? Read More »
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
Putting all the Hackfest pieces together Read More »
I got back from GUADEC and was ecstatic to find a letter from the IRS saying that Kids on Computers is officially a US federal 501(c)(3) organization!!! It’s retroactive to February 25, 2009. (We have been a Colorado nonprofit since our start but this gives us federal status.) Having 501(c)(3) status will enable us to
Kids on Computers is officially a 501(c)(3)! Read More »