Gnome on Stormy Peters

How Open Source Communities Work

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 19:35:22 -0700

Several happenings over the weekend are case studies in how open source software communities work.

The Dev Behind a Hugely Popular GNOME Extension Just Quit

While the news is about a developer quitting because it’s not “fun”. I think the message - or messages - are deeper than that.

Isn’t it awesome that are free software is developed by people that love doing it? Back when I started the OpenLogic Expert Community, I contacted many maintainers and offered to pay them to fix issues that our customers had. Some of them turned me down because they loved working on open source software and thought payment would change that. (That inspired my Would You Do It Again for Free? talk.) Some of them turned down payment because this was a hobby and if they got payment their family might view it and the time they spend on it differently. They took free tech goodies instead!
Wouldn’t it be great if when what you are working on no longer made sense, you could move on to something better suited for you at the moment? Working on something you love, because you love it, gives you the freedom to say it’s no longer your favorite thing to work on and to move on. You do still have responsibilities but in this case, it sounds like there was good backup.
Feedback. I do hope that the GNOME community takes this feedback as an opportunity to explore how things are going. They should survey other users and figure out if this is an individual problem or a systemic problem and how they might prevent it from happening in the future.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth makes peace with Ubuntu Linux community

7 reasons asynchronous communication is better than synchronous communication in open source

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 16:45:32 -0700

Traditionally, open source software has relied primarily on asynchronous communication. While there are probably quite a few synchronous conversations on irc, most project discussions and decisions will happen on asynchronous channels like mailing lists, bug tracking tools and blogs.

I think there’s another reason for this.Â Synchronous communication is difficult for an open source project. For any project where people are distributed. Synchronous conversations are:

Inconvenient. It’s hard to schedule synchronous meetings across time zones. Just try to pick a good time for Australia, Europe and California.
Logistically difficult. It’s hard to schedule a meeting for people that are working on a project at odd hours that might vary every day depending on when they can fit in their hobby or volunteer job.
Slower. If you have more than 2-3 people you need to get together every time you make a decision, things will move slower. I currently have a project right now that we are kicking off and the team wants to do everything in meetings. We had a meeting last week and one this week. Asynchronously we could have had several rounds of discussion by now.
Expensive for many people. When I first started at GNOME, it was hard to get some of our board members on a phone call. They couldn’t call international numbers, or couldn’t afford an international call and they didn’t have enough bandwidth for an internet voice call. We ended up using a conference call line from one of our sponsor companies. Now it’s video.
Logistically difficult. Mozilla does most of our meetings as video meetings. Video is still really hard for many people. Even with my pretty expensive, supposedly high end internet in a developed country, I often have bandwidth problems when participating in video calls. Now imagine I’m a volunteer from Nigeria. My electricity might not work all the time, much less my high speed internet.
Language. Open source software projects work primarily in English and most of the world does not speak English as their first language. Asynchronous communication gives them a chance to compose their messages, look up words and communicate more effectively.
Confusing. Discussions and decisions are often made by a subset of the project and unless the team members are veryÂ diligent the decisions and rationale are often not communicated out broadly or effectively. You lose the history behind decisions that way too.

There are some major benefits toÂ synchronous conversation:

How to have hallway conversations when you can't see the hallway

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:20:51 -0700

I recently listened to a talk by Michael Lopp about how to be a great manager.

During his talk, he stressed the importance of hallway conversations. Hallway conversations are informal conversations about projects, goals and status. As Shez says, they are great for bouncing ideas off people you might not normally interact with and just letting them know what you are up to.

Here’s how I do “hallway conversations” while working thousands of miles from my colleagues:

How to hire an Executive Director

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:04:19 -0700

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 again.Â At the Boston Summit, there was actually some discussion about whether they wanted another executive director or whether they could hire more specialized individuals for particular tasks. For numerous reasons, they opted to hire another executive director. (I was relieved - speaking as a current GNOME Foundation board member, it would be a lot of work for a volunteer board to manage more staff without an executive director.)

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

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:52:48 -0700

“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 moneyÂ solelyÂ 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 toÂ trulyÂ 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?

Putting all the Hackfest pieces together

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:54:50 -0700

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!

How does a free software project do marketing?

Sun, 16 May 2010 09:09:59 -0700

Typically free software projects have lots of very smart developers. Large projects like GNOME might also be lucky enough to have lots of great translators, designers, artists and writers working on the project.

However, marketing is not typically an area free software projects have worked much on. GNOME is changing that. Over the past couple of years we have really increased our marketing activity from fundraising to spreading the word about GNOME. One way we’ve done that is through the marketing mailing list. Another is by getting together at GUADEC and having marketing hackfests.

More Women in GNOME Now!

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:52:44 -0700

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.

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

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:36:22 -0700

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.

What's your vision of GNOME?

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:47:08 -0700

The GNOME Foundation’s mission is to provide a free desktop accessible to everyone. Accessible regardless of their ability to pay, their physical ability or the language they speak.

But I bet if you polled all 400 members of the GNOME Foundation and a few 1000 GNOME fans, you’d get a lot of different visions of what that means. And while I think that’s normal and I think that’s good, I thought it might be an interesting conversation to have.

GNOME Marketing Hackfest

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 07:17:08 -0700

Eight of us from the GNOME Marketing team got together in Chicago for a hackfest earlier this week. We had a lot of great discussions, came up with some good material for people manning a GNOME booth at conferences, a slogan and talking points for GNOME 3.0, presentation material for GNOME, ideas for mentoring GNOME marketing volunteers, conversations about recognizing GNOME contributors, fundraising, involving module maintainers in marketing, a plan for making GNOME videos and much more.

How to plan a hackfest

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:00:00 -0700

hackfest n. A meeting where developers gather together in person to work on a free software project.

Hackfests are one of the ways that things get done on free software projects like GNOME. They get lots of good work done, they energize teams and raise visibility of the project and its mission.

The free software community is great at getting things done in a virtual environment. Large projects can fix bugs, add new features and put out regular releases without ever meeting over the phone or in person. However, there are some things that can be done much more quickly in person, such as design discussions or future plans. For example, according to Seif Lotfy, at a recent meeting at the openSUSE conference, the Zeitgeist team accomplished in 4 hours what would have taken them several weeks to decide on mailing lists and IRC channels. A conversation around a whiteboard or even a piece of paper can clear up a lot of misunderstandings and get a lot of work done quickly.

Why you shouldn't do it all yourself

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:17:36 -0700

One of the hardest things to learn in management is how not to do it all yourself. People often call this a problem with “delegation”. But the problem isn’t with telling others what to do. The problem is learning how not to do it all yourself.

I talked earlier about how my style is to Trust and Empower, but I didn’t talk about why that’s hard or even why I chose that style.

Book Review: Managing the Nonprofit Organization

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:47:44 -0700

If you follow any of the links to Amazon in this post, any purchases you make will send a referral fee to the GNOME Foundation.

Peter Drucker’s Managing the Nonprofit Organization was full of good ideas. I started ripping off pieces of my bookmark to mark interesting pages and ended up with no bookmark!

Managing the Nonprofit Organization discusses mission, marketing, fund raising, performance, people, relationships and developing the leader.

Mission

According to Drucker, mission matters most in a nonprofit - much more than the leader’s charisma or talents. Non-profits exist to bring about change in individuals and society and focusing on the desired outcome is essential for defining plans, executing a strategy and putting the right people in the right roles.

The GNOME Foundation Is All About People

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:13:45 -0700

One of the most common questions I get asked, right after “What do you do?”, is “What does the GNOME Foundation do?” I wrote an article explaining what the GNOME Foundation does in the current issue of OSBR, Women in Open Source, guest edited by Rikki Kite. (And there are some really good articles by some amazing women like Cathy Malmrose, Angela Byron, Cat Allman, Selena Deckelman, Amanda McPherson, Emma Jane Hogbin, Audrey Eschright and Melanie Groves VonFange.)

What would you say about the State of GNOME?

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:22:07 -0700

Against my dad’s best advice, I’m going to admit that I don’t feel like I’m the best person to give a “State of GNOME” talk. I mean, it’s an open source project. I don’t run it, I don’t manage it and people not only don’t ask me for permission to do things, they don’t make a point of making sure I know everything. And that’s good! I find out most of my GNOME news the way everyone else does - through blogs, mailing lists and wiki’s. We are an effective open source software project and communication is good. That said, I’m happy to help spread the word of all the good things GNOME is up to. (And if you’d like to help too, please join the GNOME Marketing team!)

Open source enables companies to collaborate

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:37:26 -0700

*Dave Neary gave me his speaking slot at OSiM USA. I have two challenges, make a talk to fit his title and abstract (although you can almost always safely ignore the abstract) and give a good talk in 20 minutes of time. Here are some thoughts I have. (The title of the talk is Increasing Ecosystem Collaboration through Open Source but I’ll let Dave blog that talk.) *

Open source software has proved that collaboration between individuals, regardless of geography, time and management structures, can work really well. The open source software model works:

5 types of company open source relationships

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:19:14 -0700

Companies and communities is a topic I’ll speaking on at SCALE. I welcome any feedback or points to consider!

First off, there is no ideal company/community relationship. There are lots of different types of relationships between companies and the communities they work with (or don’t work with) - and no one way is perfect for everyone.

The goal should be for companies and individuals who use and support open source software to work effectively together. And part of working effectively together means making sure that the open source model is sustainable. Which means interacting for the good of the project, not just taking or using open source software.

What do I do as Executive Director of GNOME?

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:55:54 -0700

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 you ever asked your boss what they did, exactly?

Secondly, I have to admit that when I first got asked, that first day on the job at GUADEC, I wanted to go “I don’t know!! What do you think I should be doing?” (I did ask the “What do you think I should be doing part” of a few people and I’m always interested in hearing anyone’s answer to that question.)

Sneak preview of my talk next week: "GNOME as the computing platform for the future"

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:15:44 -0700

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 talk after you give it. However, any feedback I get between now and then can only make the talk better. Also, the real talk, in person, with voice, slides and a chance to ask questions is very different experience than reading it in a blog and commenting. So I think one does not compete with the other.

GNOME Marketing Interview

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:14:21 -0700

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!

What does a nonprofit board do?

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:09:59 -0700

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 her class materials. The slides looked like the discussion might have been interesting. The booklet she got (which she said they valued dearly and I checked, it sells for $20) was a good summary. It was less than 30 pages of content but it summarized the board of directors’ duties well. (And I’m happy to say I’ve seen the GNOME Foundation’s board doing all of these things!) There’s an even shorter online summary here, as well as a lot of good (free) articles on the BoardSource website. From the book Ten Basic Responsibilities of Nonprofit Boards:

Fundraising for a technical nonprofit

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:53:56 -0700

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 raising for technical nonprofits. And technical nonprofits really don’t fit the traditional nonprofit model. (Anybody up for a telephone drive where you call all your friends and relatives and explain what great things we’re doing and ask for donations? Not.)

Seven mentors!

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:03:33 -0700

So earlier I blogged that I had seven bosses. (It was mostly in reaction to the fact that I felt like I was getting way too much attention!) But I realized this morning that I really feel like I got seven mentors. What a way to start out a new job - with not one mentor but seven!

The GNOME board of directors has been great. They were very clear from the beginning that I should feel free to ask them any questions. When I expressed concerns that I was going to flood their mailboxes, they said, no, no don’t worry. (I think that was Vincent - I hope the rest of you agree. :) They did tell me not to necessarily expect verbose replies and that I might see a lot of “+1"s which means “I agree” or “me too”. So I’ve been sending them lots of mails, some important, some FYIs and some just downright trivial (who does x?) and they’ve replied quickly to all of them!