Category: gnome

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Awesome community of volunteers … all types of volunteers

The GNOME Asia Summit has an awesome group of Vietnamese volunteers this year – over 50 of them! What distinguishes them from most free software events is that they are mostly women and mostly business students! They are also extremely enthusiastic, full of laughter and always eager to help or ask questions to learn more.

These students have been working hard to get the event ready, they show up at 7:30 every morning, they spend all day interpreting for the speakers and the foreign attendees and they are planning a party for speakers and volunteers this evening. They've been doing a great job of interpreting – especially given that they aren't familiar with free software and technical terms and given that most of us speakers are not used to working with interpreters and speak way too quickly and long. And they still have time to ask lots of questions, make the speakers feel welcome and to laugh a lot.

The GNOME community is a richer one, and GNOME Asia is a great event, because of them.

(As soon as Emily Chen or Andy Fitzsimmon's load their pictures of the volunteer meeting to Flickr, I'll add a picture of them.)

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Deploying open source software is like hitting your head on a rock

On my first day of GNOME Asia, I was most impressed by the Vietnamese culture and people – I think it is one that meshes well with the open source community culture. One of those cultural traits is honesty and openness.

During the opening talks, the deputy director of the ICT Ho Chi Minh City government was very honest about the difficulties of switching to free and open source software. He talked about how he's spent the last five years trying to encourage more free software usage and has had a budget of $20 million. My favorite quote was "Trying to deploy open source software is like hitting your head on a rock. We hope the rock breaks soon." I sat next to him at lunch to learn more and hope to follow up further via email. During lunch I learned about the incubator program they have for startups and how those companies think it's safer to use .NET applications. However, after they are out of the incubator stage they have a hard time supporting their company off of support revenue.

Hopefully we can help them break the rock by showing them successful business models around free software and helping develop their pool of expertise by encouraging more students to learn and participate in free and open source software.

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Stormy’s update: October 19th-November 20th

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.

Not as much detail as normal as I'm covering a much longer time frame … I'll be returning to weekly updates now.

Marketing hackfest. Helped plan and attended the first ever GNOME Marketing hackfest. It went well and we will be doing more. Thanks to Paul Cutler for putting it together. Thanks to the travel committee for getting everyone there. Thanks to Novell and Google for sponsoring it. Thanks very much to all the people that showed up to work hard on GNOME marketing!

GNOME Journal. Added a bunch of ideas for GNOME Journal articles. (Now we just need people to write them! Feel free to add ideas or write articles.) Recruited authors for the Women in GNOME Journal edition. Interviewed a woman GNOME advisory board member for it. Helped edit a couple of articles.

Published the GNOME Q3 report. Thanks to all the teams who submitted updates!

Attended the first OSS Watch advisory board meeting via phone. Will attend the first in person one in a couple of weeks.

Agustín Benito put me in touch with La Laguna College and we exchanged a couple of emails. They are interested in helping recruit more women to free software.

Forwarded several journalist requests to the appropriate people – most went to the release team with questions about GNOME 3.0.

Played around with several different views and methods of looking at my goals. Trying to find a better way to align goals to individual task items and to visualize how we are doing on larger goals. Plan to work on this further.

Got sponsors for hackfests (like the marketing one) and the Boston Summit. Wrote up a sponsorship agreement at the request of one of the sponsors. I plan to tweak it a bit make a sponsorship agreement that we can use for all GNOME events.

Attended free software women's group meeting.

Let the Teaching Open Source mailing list group that GNOME has people willing to speak about GNOME in their classes. Set Willie Walker up with RPI.

Talked to most of the advisory board members about raising advisory board fees for next year both at an advisory board meeting and one on one. Touched base with them in general.

Talked to Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Foundation. Got some interesting insights into fundraising and volunteers. I hope to interview him later about fundraising and post on my blog. He's planning the Great American Hackathon to develop free and open source applications for open government.

Sent information to Claudia to help her wrap up finances for the Desktop Summit. We are just waiting on one sponsor to pay us so we can close the books.

Spent 30 hours travelling to Vietnam. But it's been worth it! I'm currently attending the 2nd annual GNOME Asia Summit! They have an awesome team of volunteers. They recruited business and international trade students to help interpret for all of the foreign speakers. They are all very enthusiastic and having a great time! I've had a chance so far to speak to a city government official, local companies using and developing open source and lots of enthusiastic students!

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GNOME Marketing Hackfest

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.

A marketing hackfest is a bit different than traditional hackfests as there isn't a single product that we are working on but rather a large project "GNOME marketing". We narrowed it down to marketing to end users (as opposed to developers or distirbutions) and GNOME 3.0.

We had a great cross representation of people. Paul Cutler (marketing team lead, documentation team member), Shaun McCance (documentation team lead), Jason Clinton (GNOME Games module maintainer), Denise Walters (marketing team), Brian Cameron (marketing team, director), Bryen Yunashko (OpenSUSE, GNOME a11y team), Vinicius Depizzol (art team) and myself. Kevin Harriss joined us one night for dinner.

To give you an idea of how it worked, the morning of the first day we worked on our event presence. We talked about what people willing to host the GNOME booth at a conference need. We have event boxes. In addition to what is currently in the event box we decided we needed to add a banner (which Vinicius worked on), tshirts for the booth staff (like Rosanna put in last time), stickers and a brochure about GNOME. Then we focused most of our effort on the text for the brochure (which will also be printed in Braille for the CSUN GNOME booth) and other material for the booth hosts like GNOME 3.0 talking points and an FAQ. We worked out an outline on the whiteboards and then we edited the documents in Gobby so we could all edit (and see each others edits) in real time. Occasionally side conversations would break out or we'd go to the white board to work out a major point.

As we had way more to do than we had time, we continued our agenda over into dinner. We had good dinner conversations about things like how to mentor new members on the marketing team and recognize all GNOME contributors.

We have lots of follow up to do now – everyone left with action items. When I expressed frustration that we still had so much to do, several people suggested we should have scheduled three days! We got a lot of great work done. Look for lots more help and materials for GNOME people representing GNOME to the greater community as well as new ways to reach out like through videos.

Thanks to Novell and Google for sponsoring the GNOME Marketing hackfest!

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Stormy’s update: September 28th-October 16th

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.

I went to two conferences during the past couple of weeks:

  • Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference in Tucson, Arizona. I went to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference on a Grace Hopper scholarship, i.e. they paid for travel. In addition to attending the conference, I participated on the open source software panel. There were a lot of students there that were very interested in learning more about how to get involved with free and open source software. The only place they could find out about free and open source software was at the panel I was on and at the Systers Codeathon. Given our push to recruit more women, it seems like a great opportunity. Next year I'd like to see better representation from free software projects like the GNOME Foundation and Apache as well as some representation by companies that hire free and open source software developers, like Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, Nokia, … I'll be working on that.
  • Utah Open Source conference in Salt Lake City. (They paid for my travel as well.) I gave the keynote on Friday, Would you do it again for free? and I hung out at the GNOME Booth that Christer Edwards put together. He had a lot of really good feedback for the Event Box (we need a banner! we need to tell people what's important to point out at the booth!) and I passed some of it on to the marketing list. Christer got some great GNOME pictures with the booth webcam and told people about GNOME 3.0 and Friends of GNOME.

I had several one on one meetings with advisory board members. All of our sponsors have paid except for two – and rumor has it one of their checks is in our PO box or on Rosanna's desk! The other one is actively working on getting us paid. (Although it seems like these payments are late, we are doing much better than previous years!) I also asked our partners to help out with lots of events. Novell, Collabora and Google all helped out with the Boston Summit. Igalia is hosting and sponsoring a WebKitGTK+ hackfest and Collabora is sponsoring it as well. Canonical and the TIS Innovation Park are sponsoring the Zeitgeist Hackfest. Say thanks to their employees if you see them!

We had our monthly GNOME Advisory Board meeting on October 13th. The main topic was our finances and how we'd like to raise advisory board fees. Germán did a great job of putting together 2009 results and a 2010 budget. The meeting was one of the more active discussions we've had all year and we got several compliments on how prepared we are. It's also looking like most of our sponsors are amenable to raising the fees, which would be really good for our 2010 plans. (We had only one hackfest in the first half of 2009 because budgets were cut; we're hoping to avoid that in the future.) 

We had GNOME Board meetings on October 1st and October 15th. You can find the minutes on the wiki.

I had a one on one meeting with Brian Cameron to discuss progress and goals. He had lots of good suggestions. In particular we discussed things like how to get the GNOME partner companies more involved with marketing, how to work better with the FSF and how to get more women involved in GNOME. (Marina has been hard at work on our new GNOME Women's Outreach!)

I talked to the President of system76, Carl Richell. They make servers, desktops and laptops with Ubuntu installed. He works with a lot of the upstream
projects and was very interested in how he could work more with us. He'd like to give us some of their new hardware to play with and test. (Some of the new laptops/netbooks he was talking about made me want to start coding so I could get one to play with!)

I pulled together the Friends of GNOME September data. We have raised $23,415 this year! September saw a 40% increase over August, probably because of the release of GNOME 2.28. We have a goal of 10 new Friends of GNOME subscribers a month so sign up and tell your friends! The more subscribers we have, the sooner we'll hire a system administrator and the more hackfests we can do. I sent out thank you's to people who donated through Friend of GNOME.

Traded some ideas with Paul Cutler who is planning a Marketing Hackfest in Chicago for November 10-11th.  Novell and Google are sponsoring it. Say thanks to them!

GNOME Asia planning is coming along well and we are looking for sponsors. They will be announcing location (Vietnam) and dates (November 20-22) and putting out a call for papers any minute now!

Got a query from a professor about how students could contribute to FOSS projects – passed them on to the GSOC GNOME mentors list. I also got an invite to the annual HFOSS conference. Let me know if you are interested in attending and representing GNOME.

Gave feedback to the board on a bid for GUADEC 2010. Hopefully we will be announcing when we'll be (deciding and) announcing the 2010 location soon.

Continued to push for press release to announce our new advisory board member …

Booked travel for Latinoware where I'll be giving a keynote next week, attending the GNOME Day and the GNOME Women talk! Tried to go to Encuentro Linux during the same trip but the conferences are at the same time and quite a ways away travel wise if not miles wise. Started working on my presentation for the keynote.

Took some time off this past week to deal with non work stuff.

Worked on getting the GNOME Q3 2009 quarterly report out. We're almost ready! – just waiting on a few teams to submit their write-ups.

This week:

  • Latinoware in Brazil!
  • (And hopefully sending out the Q3 report if everyone's writeups come in.)
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How to plan a hackfest

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.

In addition, at hackfests having everyone together for a week means that everyone is working on the project full time for the week (not just a few hours after work) and the project is energized. On average, a lot more work gets done in the weeks after the hackfest.

Hackfests are planned

If you are interested in a hackfest or think your project would benefit from one, it’s up to you to plan it. As people who have planned hackfests have pointed out me, organizing a hackfest isn’t easy. It takes time. Daniel Siegel, who has organized several hackfests, recommends you think about the following points:

  • Local. You should have local people! It’s very hard to plan a hackfest if you don’t have someone there to check out the hotel, venue and places to eat.
  • Experience. It always helps to get some help from others who have organized hackfests in the past, especially if it’s your first time.
  • Teams. You don’t have to do it all yourself. A hackfest can be coordinated by a team of people.

Steps to planning a hackfest

Here are the general steps to planning a hackfest. Some of the steps can be done at the same time, some can be done in different order.

  1. Identify a project or theme. GNOME has had productive hackfests on things from GTK+ to documentation to usability. Pick a project you care about that could use a boost of time and energy.
  2. Identify what you’d like to get done on that project during a hackfest. What’s the benefit? What are you looking to accomplish? This is key to making sure you get the right people and that you can find sponsorship.
  3. Who should be at the hackfest? Think not only the maintainers for the project but also related people. Does it make sense for someone from the usability team to attend your GNOME Shell hackfest? Someone from the accessibility team?
  4. Coordinate times. Find out if the people you are interested in invited can come and find out what dates would work for them. Some people might be able to get work time to come, but others might need to take vacation in order to attend. A good hackfest has anywhere from 4-20 people. Smaller hackfests tend to be more effective unless you can easily break your group up into productive subgroups.
  5. Identify a location. Next find a location to have your hackfest. Hackfests are usually held at universities or companies. But not always. The GTK+ hackfest was held in an apartment building that was rented out for the hackfest. People lived, ate and wrote code in the same building for the week. Often companies are willing to host a hackfest in a conference room. (Google is providing a room and food for the marketing hackfest.) Conference organizers have also provided space for hackfests during the conference. Don’t forget to think about travel – are most of your participants in Europe? Then you might want to hold it in Europe. Having your hackfest near a major airport minimizes travel time and costs and maximizes hackfest time.
  6. Pick a date. Your date will depend both on participants’ availability as well as when your location is available. The project can also play a role – we are doing a marketing hackfest in November to
    prepare for GNOME 3.0 marketing. The further in advance you pick a date, the easier it will be to coordinate travel and sponsorships.
  7. Get specific. Make sure your plans are specific. Once you’ve picked a project, goals, times, location and figured out your costs, be sure to make those plans public and make sure you are detailed about what and how you are trying to accomplish.
  8. Notify the GNOME Foundation. You will need to let the Board of Directors and the travel committee know your plans. You’ll need to let the travel committee know how much money you have for travel. They will then take travel sponsorship applications and make sure the money is used as effectively as possible. You can follow the new hackfest guidelines. Germán Póo-Caamaño from the GNOME travel committee says:
    • It helps if you can give the travel committee advance notice – it may take up to a month to process applications and let attendees know how much funding they can get.
    • Buying tickets early usually means saving money.
    • Encourage your attendees to be frugal, to search for cheap airfares and accommodation as it enables more people to receive travel assistance.
  9. Publicize. Let everyone know about your hackfest! This will help you get sponsorships and might also recruit additional participants that you may have not considered inviting. Good ways to publicize are blogs, posting on relevant mailing lists and direct mail to people you think could help out with publicity. You can also ask the GNOME press team for help. Although you are responsible for the budget, the board of directors, the press team and the marketing team can help publicize and look for sponsors.
  10. Travel. There are several parts to travel:
    • Housing. Having everyone stay in one spot not only saves money but also makes for a better hackfest as people tend to continue talking, designing and working into the evening. Good options are hostels and budget hotels. Some very successful hackfests have managed to rent furnished apartments that served not only as housing but as the place to hack during the day.
    • Food. Typically people are on their own dime for eating at GNOME events, but during a hackfest you may want to budget for pizza for a late night hacking session or coffee and donuts to get things going. Or sodas and chips to keep people happy while productively coding. Note that the GNOME Foundation only sponsors travel and accommodation costs. However, some times a company is willing to sponsor  food.
    • Providing travel assistance. Hackfests are most successful if you can help pay for the participant’s travel costs. Once you have a budget, let the travel committee know how much money you have and who you’d really like to have at the hackfest. The participants can then
      apply to the travel committee for travel assistance. If you are having them book their own hotel, that can be part of their application.
    • Getting people to the event. You should let everyone book their own travel to the event. They should pay it themselves. If they got a travel sponsorship from the GNOME Foundation, then reimbursement will happen afterwards. (Although the sponsorship amount should be agreed to before hand.)
    • Note that often companies will pay for employees to travel to hackfests or sometimes give them paid time off to attend the hackfest. Individuals should ask their company directly. You can provide a letter of invitation if necessary. (Ask the travel committee for help.)
  11. Sponsorship. Typically hackfests are sponsored by one or more companies with an interest in that project. Companies can sponsor by providing space, food, employee time, employee travel or money. Money is usually used for travel. In fiscal year 2010 the GNOME Foundation also has money budgeted for hackfests. Hopefully funds will be matched by corporate donations so we can fit in as many sponsorships as possible. Stormy and the Board of Directors can help you approach
    companies for sponsorships.

You can see a list of GNOME hackfests, past and future.

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Stormy’s update: Week of September 14th and 21st

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.

I spent a lot of my last week communicating with lots of people. (At one point I had three IM windows open in addition to my email conversations and IRC and the phone rang!) I've captured the results of some of those conversations below. Hopefully the other conversations will also prove as productive soon.

Two one on one meetings with Brian Cameron who is the board member who works most closely with me on goal planning and results. (This is to alleviate any confusion from having seven bosses, to make sure things move quickly and to keep me from filling their email boxes any more than I already do!) In one meeting we went over the last six months and year's results. In the other we talked about current issues and plans for the next couple of weeks.

Board of Directors meeting. We held our regular board of directors meeting, you can find the minutes online.

Women's mini-summit. I attended the FSF's Mini-Summit for Women in Free Software. Unfortunately I was on the phone instead of there in person but there were several other GNOME women in the room like Marina
Zhurakhinskaya, Mairin Duffy and Leslie Hawthorn. We came out with some concrete plans for the future and a mailing list for everyone interested that's already active.

Interviewed with Bruce Byfield about the women's minisummit.

Had a conversation with an advisory board member who is not happy with us. (Working on the follow up to that.) Followed up with several advisory board members on payments. Four haven't paid 2009 fees. Two are in process. I'm worried about two. (But over all our last year of income/donations looks very good!)

Talked to several advisory board members about a new initiative one of them would like to fund through the GNOME Foundation. (We also got a proposal for a hackfest from an advisory board member!)

Reviewed German's excellent written summary and explanation of the 2010 budget. It's all ready to send out.

Got list of patents from OIN. Also got advice that it's not in our best interests to review them.

I attended and was interviewed on Linux Link Tech show.

Joined the Planetaria FOSS Women Planet that James Vasile set up. (I think it's an awesome idea. FYI, he modeled it after Planet GNOME.)

Worked on getting quotes for new advisory board member press release. (Quotes are never easy to get approved at big companies.)

Wrote Software Freedom Day press release.

Reviewed GNOME Travel Policy.

Had a couple of follow ups with Dave Neary and Vincent Untz about OSiM. Thanks to both of them for representing GNOME there. Thanks for Vinicius for making a GNOME Mobile member sign and to our GNOME partners that displayed them in their booths, Igalia and Codethink.

Proposed a marketing hackfest. There is interest, now we just have to figure out a time and a place we can all meet.

Proposed and got enough takers to do a women's issue of GNOME Journal. An issue written all by women about what they are working on in GNOME or about things they find interesting in GNOME. It'll come out in November.

Proposed that the a11y team branch out to non software conferences to spread the word about GNOME and how it can help people with accessibility needs.

Did some twittering on behalf of GNOME.

Proposed CiviCRM for a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation.

Followed up on 401K plan. Only step left is a signed document and a check from Rosanna.

Attended the GUADEC IRC planning meeting that Srinivasa Ragavan put together. Thanks to all the previous GUADEC organizers that attended – there was some really good information shared during that 2.5 hour meeting! Srini is going to post the logs.

Was disappointed that the invitation to GNOME to attend the 2nd International Symposium on Computers and Arabic Language fell through. Khaled Hosney, Seif Lotfy and others were working to make sure that GNOME was represented. It sounds like they are no longer interested in funding free software projects though. I think it still might be worth having someone from GNOME attend though.

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Sent thank you's to everyone who donated to GNOME.

Helped with the promotion plan for GNOME 2.28.

And although I didn't do it, I think it certainly worth mentioning that GNOME 2.28 released!

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Stormy’s update: Week of September 7th

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.

Monday was a US holiday.

Met with a company interested in using Linux and GNOME. (Actually using it but not as much as they'd like.) They had a lot of feedback for us and we talked about ways that they could get that type of feedback directly to the projects. One of the main issues was knowing where to submit bugs. They submitted a lot of bugs to the Linux distributions. Then they'd be told to resubmit the GNOME ones to the GNOME project … it would help if we could just forward them along to the right place.

Talked about upcoming events at the GNOME Advisory Board meeting. Mario Behling and Emily Chen talked about the GNOME.Asia Summit. Daniel Siegel and Seif Lotfy talked about the Zeitgeist hackfest and John Palmieri talked about the Boston Summit.

Worked on 2009 waterfall chart and 2010 budget with German. It is now ready to share with the board of directors and then board of advisors and the Foundation list.

Talked to several people about OIN's announcement about purchasing 22 patents from Microsoft. OIN is supposed to post the actual patent numbers.

Talked to Willie Walker about GNOME accessibility.

Met with Ruthe Farmer from the National Center for Women & Information Technology. They do studies about women in technology and publish best practices for how to encourage more women to take technology jobs and to stay in them. They would like to do a study around women in free software. They have recently written a study about the Culture of Open Source Computing (pdf) that points to a lot of resources about women in open source and developer motivations in open source and you can find their reports online.

Sent thank you letters to people who donated to the GNOME Foundation during the week.

Started studying Ford Foundation website to understand what types of programs they give grants for and how we might find a good fit for GNOME projects.

Followed up with an advisory board member who hasn't paid 2009 fees yet.

For this week. This is not the list of all the things I have to do but rather what I want to do this week.

  • Board of Directors meeting
  • 1:1 with Brian Cameron about my goals and results
  • Send finances out to advisory board. (All ready to go – waiting on Board of Directors feedback.)
  • Work on requirements for a CRM system so that sys admin team can install one.
  • Follow up with potential sponsors.
  • Follow up on 401K plan.
  • Follow up with International Cooperation, the group in Gran Canaria working with developing countries.
  • Fill out (draft for) form for applying for a Ford Foundation grant and run by appropriate GNOME mailing list.
  • Make sure that plans are in place to have a new US event box and get it to Utah Open Source Conference.
  • Finish following up with advisory board members whose 2009 payments haven't come in yet.
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Why you shouldn’t do it all yourself

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.

Why is it hard not to do it yourself?

  • Satisfaction.You do it well and it's always satisfying to do something well.
  • Kudos. It's hard to give up kudos. People have always told you how well you do it, and now you are supposed to let someone else do it. And you won't get credit. (Actually, I think managers do get credit for what their teams do.
    Their job is to make sure their team actually gets the credit.)
  • Quality. If you were the expert, it might be a while before someone else on your team learns to do it as well.
  • Speed. It might take a while for someone else to learn how to do it. And they might do it slowly for a while.
  • Urgency. The issue might not seem as urgent to the person you delegated to. You might have to remind them a lot, which takes time. (They might also be slow because they are afraid to start, don't have the right tools, etc.)
  • Your way. When you give it to someone else to do, they might decide to do it differently. It might not be the way you've always done it. The way you know is right. (And you might be right. Or they might come up with something even better. Who knows?)
  • Your time. Sometimes giving it to someone else to do can take longer than if you'd just done it yourself. (Coaching, helping, reminding, …)

Sometimes I feel like people think I should do more and encourage others less. The reason I don't do more (even though there are times I'd really love to just do it myself) is:

  • Growing the team. If I do it all myself (write all the press releases, lead all the projects, make all the decisions) then we will be constrained by what I, one person, can do. (And just getting information from everyone and passing it on to the right people would mean that'd I'd spend all day sending emails or in meetings.) By delegating, or recruiting others, and empowering them, we grow the team to be much more than me.
  • Better results. If I do it all myself people are less likely to give me feedback. If we do it together, we get more people involved, more skills, more feedback and we end up with a better result. (And I have no doubts we already have an amazing team that can do not only more work than I can, but lots of things that I don't know how to do.)
  • More results. Don't break what already works. For example, GUADEC is an excellent all volunteer run conference. There is no reason for me to step in. It's better for me to let others continue to do a great job and I can help with other things that may not be working so well. (I did offer to work with sponsors as the sponsoring companies had told me that it's confusing to be approached by multiple people throughout the year for different events. That's something I can help with and hopefully build into a process that is less time intensive … see the next point.)
  • Success. If I do it all myself, the GNOME Foundation will always need me. I hope to be part of the GNOME community for a long time but I think you do the best job you can when you work yourself out of a job whether it's because you solved the original problem or you automate everything. There's always more work to do, more problems to solve. You shouldn't be solving the same problems year after year.

Encouraging, empowering (and reminding) people takes a lot of time. The more you work to get
others involved, the less time you have left to just do it yourself. But in the
end, you end up with more done overall. And an excited, motivated, knowledgeable team that can do way more than you could ever do by yourself.

So Trust and Empower. And encourage and remind.

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Stormy’s update: Week of August 31st

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.

If you measure productivity based on what gets done (as opposed to how hard you work), this was a frustrating week.

What I got done:

  • Got a new advisory board member invoiced. (Well, Rosanna invoiced them, not me, but I helped make it happen.) Working on quotes for press release. (Didn't actually get any yet.)
  • Got some feedback on financial waterfall.
  • Followed up with end user looking to use GNOME and GNU/Linux and running into problems.
  • Continued to push for Q3 quarterly report to be done.
  • Pinged sponsors and potential sponsors.
  • Pinged people holding up 401K setup.
  • Pinged press team to get started.
  • Met with Denise to talk about how the customer success stories are going. 
  • Met with Keith from the Open Invention Network to talk about how OIN and GNOME could work more closely together. He's looking for the community to help find prior art and to be advocates for them.
  • Posted Friends of GNOME August results.
  • Blogged about Funambol grants.
  • Attended Board of Directors meeting.
  • Planned Board of Advisors meetings. Meetings will most likely be:
    • September – events (Boston Summit, GNOME Asia, Zeitgeist hackfest)
    • October – finances
    • November – updates from advisory board members on things they are working on (list to come later)
    • December – update on how the Oct/Nov events went and future events

Things to be done (and this is a short week due to the Labor Day holiday): (Feel free to suggest other things or to help.)

  • Work on 2010 budget with treasurers. (More urgent than it sounds as our fiscal year starts in October and companies are planning their budgets now.)
  • Send finances out to advisory board.
  • Make sure press team takes off and starts working on some tasks.
  • Work on requirements for a CRM system so that sys admin team can install one.
  • Follow up with adboard members who are missing payments.
  • Follow up with potential sponsors.
  • Follow up on 401K plan.
  • Follow up with International Cooperation, the group in Gran Canaria working with developing countries.
  • Fill out form for applying for a Ford Foundation grant.
  • … and a bunch more stuff that will have to wait until next week.

Thoughts?