I get asked a lot what I do, exactly, as executive director of the GNOME Foundation. First off, I want to say I’m really glad I work for an organization where people feel comfortable asking “what do you do?” It shows they care about the organization and are not afraid to ask tough questions. Have […]
What do I do as Executive Director of GNOME? Read More »
Next week I’m speaking at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference where the theme is “free software for innovative business.” If you are in the area, you should come – the conference is free and has good speakers and lots of interesting attendees. I know you are traditionally supposed to post the transcript of your
Sneak preview of my talk next week: “GNOME as the computing platform for the future” Read More »
According to Stephen Vaughan-Nichols there will be 2.4 million more Linux desktop users by the end of the year. And that's only counting Eee PC users. To be exact, according to Asustek, "The company shipped 2.5 million notebooks in the first half of this year, 1.7 million units in the third quarter and is expecting
2.4 million more open source desktop users Read More »
I get asked a lot about my “Would you do it again for free?” talk. (“Would you do it again for free” was about the question, if you take developers that are working on open source software for free and you pay them, if you stop paying them, will they still work on open source
Does money kill good motivations? Read More »
Sandro Groganz interviewed me at OSiM – his questions were all about GNOME Marketing. (I even got to show off the GNOME Annual Report.) If you find it interesting, please add your thoughts or, better yet, join the GNOME Marketing team!
GNOME Marketing Interview Read More »
I now work for a nonprofit board of directors, so when one of my friends told me that she just joined a nonprofit board and took a class on what it means to be on the board of directors, I got pretty excited. Over lunch, my friend (Serena) answered all my questions and brought me
What does a nonprofit board do? Read More »
Creating effective presentations is really hard. Here’s a short summary of my journey and the two books that helped me. (This started out as a book review and I realized that what I really wanted to write about was how I was learning to create presentations.) The number one thing that has helped me give
How I’m learning to create effective presentations Read More »
Social norms govern whether you are willing to help a friend move or cook dinner for your family. Market norms govern what you are willing to do for how much money. In an experiment to show how social norms vary from market norms, Dan Ariely created a computer task where volunteers had to drag circles
Social Norms vs Market Norms Read More »
501(c) organizations are US non profit organizations. 501(c) is actually the name of the IRS tax code that defines non profits. There are actually 28 kinds of 501(c)‘s. I’ll focus here on just two: 501(c) (3) – the GNOME Foundation is a 501(c) (3) 501(c) (6) – the Linux Foundation is a 501(c) (6) They
501(c): (3) versus (6) Read More »
The GNOME Foundation is a nonprofit organization, a 501(c)(3), and is funded by donations from individuals and companies. So as executive director of the GNOME Foundation I figured I should learn a bit more about fund raising. While there are a lot of books about fund raising, there’s very little information out there about fund
Fundraising for a technical nonprofit Read More »