Category: gnome

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. 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.

Started out my week late as it turns out that Amtrak can randomly cancel trains – like for a whole weekend.

We had a GNOME Advisory Board meeting about GNOME Foundation 2010 goals. We got a lot of good feedback. After adding another level of detail, I think we are ready to send them out. Look for them soon from the board. (My goals and the Foundation goals are very much aligned at this point, so I am looking forward to getting everyone's feedback on them.)

Attended a Women in Free Software IRC meeting about our day long event at the Libre Planet event in March.

GNOME Q4 Report. Got some of the write-ups for the Q4 report – still need to ping some people.

Worked with a couple of the advisory board members on how best to help them support us this year. Agreed on amounts and dates, divided some of the payments up, filled out some paperwork, …

Sent out request for funding for things like GUADEC, the accessibility hackfest and the other machine that the sys admin team would like to have.

Had a few conversations around GUADEC. If you'd like to help with GUADEC this year, please send an email to gmc@sonologic.nl.

Looking for people to represent GNOME at the Texas Linux Fest, FOSS Nigeria, Grace Hopper, Educational Technology Day at Ithaca College. Let me know if you are interested!

Pinged to find out why I/we are not being included in Open Source for America conversations. (Being an advisor is a lot of work if you'd like information.)

Our Google Grants application was approved! Google Grants allows us to advertise through Google AdWords. It's basically like a grant of advertising money. Now I have to figure out how we can best use Google Adwords.

KDE sent a transfer over for the Desktop Summit so we could close the books. All looks good!

Participated in the very long thread about free software, open source software, proprietary software, GNOME and companies on the Foundation list. Had a lot of side conversations about it too.

Attended the GNOME marketing IRC meeting which was very well attended and generated lots of good ideas which people signed up to follow up on.

Worked with James Vasile from SFLC and another organization on some agreements.

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.

• Worked a bit on CiviCRM. Could really use some more volunteers. (A big thanks to Jeff Schroeder, Dave Greenberg and Donald Lobo.) Put in sponsoring companies, adboard members, (Dave Neary also added some contacts), put in tasks, added Rosanna and we can track things including sent invoices, added the board so we can all track todo items. (Although todo items may sound like a simple thing it's really nice to be able to see who owns it, who's involved and what artifacts are associated with it. So if I'm curious if we've invoiced a company for an event, I can open that company's record, the event record or Rosanna's and I can see a copy of the invoice attached if she's invoiced them. So now we have a shared record of paperwork too.) Next big step is to import all data from Paypal and set it to track all of our donors.
• Had a meeting with Project:possibility to talk about the option of them including GNOME projects in one of their weekend code contests for university students. It would require us to find the right size projects (for teams of 4-6 people for a weekend) and provide mentors. The goal is to introduce university students to free software projects for people with disabilities.
• Zonker is now leading the GNOME press team! Zonker has a lot of experience working with the press (and being the press :). He's also already been doing the role of press team lead – he coordinated and wrote the GUADEC 2010 press release and is working on another one as we speak. He's interested in re-establishing our regional press contacts, getting more people involved and planning for GNOME 3.0!
• Worked on goals and vision. The next advisory board meeting will also discuss GNOME Foundation 2010 goals and we should be starting a discussion on the Foundation list soon to discuss the Foundation's goals and my own goals.
• Sent some thank you's for both donations and help.
• Pinged people about things. 
• Answered a whole bunch of email and got myself back down to my normal Inbox. (And then went offline this weekend and I now have twice as many as I did last week …)
• Accepted an invitation to attend the 2010 Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). Booked travel.
• Scott Reeves joined the GNOME Advisory Board, replacing JP Rosevear. Scott and Zonker will now be representing Novell. Scott works on openSUSE desktop
  related areas such as the gnome-main-menu and PackageKit. We're happy to have Scott on the board! (Although we'll miss JP!)
• Met with a GNOME Foundation partner to discuss how we could work more closely together.
• Sent out call for Q4 Quarterly Report.

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.

Pinged some people to help with GUADEC by mentoring or creating timelines.

Had a great conversation with Sara Crouse from Wikimedia about how they find, apply and manage grants, like ones from the Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Looking forward to implementing some of that at the GNOME Foundation.

Spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on the threads that started on the Foundation list and the side conversations that came out of it. Assuming that even a fraction of the people involved spent that much time and energy, we need to figure out a more effective way to have those conversations. Obviously we could use some more self moderating earlier in the thread. Perhaps other forums, like the all hands IRC meeting we discussed in the past could also help.

Took some time off to deal with a personal crisis. (And no, it wasn't Christmas shopping – I haven't done that yet!)

Provided a quote for OpenDesktop.org and OpenSuSE build press release.

Pushed a number of things and projects along from missing payments to projects with no activity to potential partnerships. Hopefully they'll all be moving forward soon and I'll be able to report on their success.

Posted a couple of blog posts. I really hope GNOME is able to set an example for how free software projects can transition to the web services world. And I think we all need to keep not copyright law in mind, but the fact that we are representing GNOME in public in mind as we post to public forums. Quite a few press folks and journalists picked up on the Foundation list threads and we certainly didn't look like we were following our own Code of Conduct.

Had a really good weekend with the family.

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.

Answered a lot of emails and had a lot of discussions. As for things I actually crossed off my todo list:

• Updated CiviCRM requirements document with a few more process like the travel committee. Met with Dave Greenberg from CiviCRM. He gave me a lot of pointers on how to get started. I'll be working on getting CiviCRM set up for the GNOME Foundation over the next couple of weeks.
• Sent out email about the GNOME Foundation changing advisory board fees with the support of the advisory board.
• Spoke to the Northern Colorado Linux User Group. Gave my "Would you do it again for free?" talk and had a very interesting and involved discussion. Someone from the first team I ever worked on at HP held up a "I heart ObAM" sign. ObAM is the user interface programming interface for HPUX tools. It sat on top of Motif when I first joined the team. (I actually had to read the sign twice to see that it said ObAM and not Obama which is a sign of how my world of acronyms and names has changed.)
• Did all my expense reports for the last three trips. (I can't believe people griped about the semi-automated HP/Amex system. I personally would love to have it now.)
• Attended GNOME Board of Directors meeting.
• Worked with Rosanna to invoice a couple of advisory board members, including one that is funding a new  program.
• Had a meeting with Rosanna over IRC. Trying to help balance out her workload. (I've created a lot more work. Since I've joined we've had a lot more events, invoicing, new programs, more Friends of GNOME, etc.)
• Had a great GNOME Advisory Board meeting about events and copyright assignments. The copyright assignment discussion in particular was very dynamic.
• Published November Friends of GNOME data.

Focus for this week:

• My goals. Finishing a draft we can share so everyone can comment.
• CiviCRM. Getting it set up. Starting first with Board of Advisors information and then Friends of GNOME.

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.

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.

Attended (and gave several planned and several impromptu talks at) the GNOME Asia Summit November 20-22nd. It was great to see GNOME Asia successfully transition to a an annual conference. The GNOME Asia committee did a great job last year and they managed to transition that success to another country and a new team this year. While there were some things that could have gone better (more lead time, more sponsorships), the conference was great and added a few unique nice touches like using local business students to interpret and handing out volunteer certificates to all 115 volunteers! GNOME Asia faces an additional hurdle that conferences in the US and Europe don't face. Not only do they have to educate attendees on GNOME but also on free software! 

Met with Erwann Ch̩ned̩ and Leontine Binchy from Sun Рit's always good to have a chance to meet companies and people involved in GNOME in person!

Spent 30 hours travelling home from Vietnam.

Worked with next year's local organizers, board and press on the GUADEC press release. (Zonker wrote the press release.) You'll see it Monday morning.

Set up plan and agenda for my trip to London for the OSS Watch advisory board meeting. (Also meeting with LiMo and Canonical.)

Got 401K plan set up for GNOME Foundation. Now we just have to set it up with our payroll company to roll deductions over to the 401K plan.

Got invited to speak at Open Mobility conference, Fort Collins Linux user group and the FOSS 2010 Research workshop. Accepted the Fort Collins user group. Waiting for GNOME Mobile group to figure out plan for Open Mobility. Thinking about the FOSS 2010 workshop.

Attended GNOME Board meeting.

Worked on CRM data structures and work flows, i.e. I wrote up what we need in the CRM system so that I can get help setting it up. (Jeff Schroeder installed CiviCRM on GNOME systems!)

Thursday and Friday were US holidays – Thanksgiving! I'm thankful for all the great people I get to work with in the GNOME community.