Category: gnome

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Stormy’s Update: Weeks of August 10th, 17th and 24th

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?

This update is actually for three weeks, the week of August 10th when I was at OpenSource World, the week of August 17th when I was on vacation and the week of August 24th when I caught up with all the email I got in the previous two weeks!

During the weeks of August 10th and August 24th, in no particular order:

I met with existing sponsor to discuss how to get payment for their GNOME Foundation dues.

I met with a potential new sponsor and pinged a potential sponsor that I've spoken to a couple of times.

Sent out the feedback from the interviews with the advisory board members. (Sent it out to the advisory board and to the GNOME Foundation.)

Attended OpenSource World, ran the Desktop track and spoke. The Desktop track was very well attended with 80-100 people at every session. I really enjoyed the fact that the participants were very engaged and every speaker got lots of questions during and after their session. The opening panel was all questions from the audience. I got a lot of GNOME questions that I have passed on to the right experts.

OSiM World arrangements. Arranged for company working with GNOME technologies to meet with Vincent Untz and Dave Neary while they are there. Several GNOME companies will have booths. Igalia offered to display GNOME Mobile information in their booth. Checking with the others.

Drafted mail with marketing team about raising advisory board fees.

Met
with one of the advisory board members who's offered to mentor us on
finances and got feedback on how to display our financial data. Worked
with Germán Póo-Caamaño to create a waterfall summary of our fiscal year 2009
finances. (Will share soon.)

Did a short interview on women in opensource with Rikki Kite for her series on women in open source – suggested some more GNOME women for her to interview too.

In general I've been working on attending and giving less talks myself and getting more GNOME folks involved. I've passed on several speaking opportunities to other GNOME people. If you are available to speak on GNOME topics please add yourself to GNOME speakers page so people can find you. (Feel free to nominate other people you think should be on that page – at least their name and what talk you saw them give.) If you are speaking about GNOME technologies or attending a talk on GNOME, please make sure it's in our calendars, both the wiki and the Google calendar.

GNOME press team was announced.

Took a week of vacation. We went camping for a few days (climbed the biggest sand hill ever and slid down it with my 9 year old), had my parents over for a few days (still trying to talk them into moving to Colorado), threw a couple of parties (a wine tasting party and a kid's birthday party – not at the same time), cleaned the fridge, freezer and bathroom cabinets, caught up on bills.

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Stormy’s Update: Week of August 3rd

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?

Worked on the quarterly report.Got 11 updates out of the 15 we'd like to include. (And if I forgot a team, please let me know!!) Working on two more with the team leads. Waiting on two additional ones. Editing them and working with Paul Cutler and Vinicius Depizzol on the layout.

Wrote final draft of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit press release. Vincent and Cornelius released it.

Met with the GNOME Asia Summit planning committee. Good stuff happening there but I'll wait for them to announce …

Recruited
Denise Walters to help with GNOME marketing, in particular the customer
success stories. I know Denise from HP where she worked on Linux and
open source marketing.

Summarized the information I got while
interviewing all the advisory board members and sent it out to the
advisory board members. Will send out to the GNOME Foundation list on Tuesday.

Created
a very rough place holder of a wiki page for the new GNOME press team
we'd like to create. (I realized I didn't really know what to put in
the page – hopefully people will ask questions which will make it
obvious to me what's missing.)

Had a short interview with Todd Wiess, a free lance reporter for an article he was writing about whether the economy is affecting free software projects.
What was interesting is that he thought laid off people would have less
time to work on free software while they looked for a job whereas I
would have thought they'd have more until they found a job. (While
looking for a job is a full time job, few people who like coding like
all the stuff involved with finding a job, so I'd think they'd need a
coding break!)

Finalized 401K plan! Sent signed documents off to SocialK folks.

Booked travel for Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference and Utah Open Source Conference – both events are covering my travel.

Sent a thank you note to all the Desktop Summit sponsors with links to press about the Desktop Summit. (Press links compiled by Dave Neary.)

Got the Zoom2's from Texas Instruments for our usability study! Talking to folks about how to move forward.

Sent thank you notes to those that donated through Friends of GNOME. Personalized them where I could.

What I'm planning on doing this week:

This week I'll be at OpenSource World, running the desktop track, moderating a panel and giving a talk the Desktop or the Browser: Is the Netbook Escalating the Issue? (Plus I still have to create the talk and slides.)

The following week (August 17th) between a camping trip and my parents coming into town, I will probably take some time off.

Here's my list of things I'll work on in between those events: (Things that are missing from the list have been passed on to somebody else or are in progress.)

  • Get the 2009 Q2 Quarterly report published!
  • Advisory board/sponsors work:
    • get feedback from advisory board members on advisory
      board meeting at GUADEC (I think I'm going to need to ping them
      individually.)
    • get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work
      Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME (Missing one signature –
      from the sys admin team.)
    • Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
    • send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
  • Marketing team stuff
    • Start marketing list thread about raising advisory board fees and the communication around that
    • Update GNOME marketing wiki
      pages with Paul Cutler
    • Get the press team created and started
    • find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
    • write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or
      find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to
      help with sponsors?)GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
  • blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
  • Partnerships:
    • Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
    • follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner
  • Recruit others to help:
    • Figure out how to get a team started to get GNOME working more closely with governments.
    • find someone who can help create a list of
      recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for
      enterprise customers
    • Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
    • Automate things. In past lives I've found the best way to get tedious tasks automated is to give them to someone who (a) finds them tedious and (b) has the skills to automate them. Tasks that I think could be improved somehow by automation: (Let me know if you fit (a) and (b) and would like to give them a try.
      • Getting Friends of GNOME names onto the website.
      • Sending thank you notes to Friends of GNOME. (Could be done by CRM.)
      • Getting Friends of GNOME data into gnucash. (One of the board members is looking at this.)
      • Scrubbing confidential Friends of GNOME data from gnucash so we can publish the gnucash file.
      • Reimbursing contributors whose travel we pay. (While the travel committee is helping with receipts and reminders, it still takes Rosanna 20 minutes per wire transfer to transfer money to someone. That means it takes her several weeks of work time to reimburse everyone for GUADEC travel. Every year.)
      • Putting feedback we get through Friends of GNOME onto a website.
  • follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM
    system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board,
    Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.) Dave Neary offered to install a CRM for us, so this might be more about picking the right one now.
  • follow up with the sys admin team on setting up
    better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans.
    (They are working on this one.)
  • follow up with International Cooperation group from
    the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work
    with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
  • Create policies for the GNOME Foundation to comply with new US nonprofit regulations. (Things like conflict of interest, travel, whistle blower, compensation and records retention.)
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Stormy’s Update: Week of July 27th

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?

The GNOME Accessibility team will be using some of their earmarked funds to have a booth at 2010 CSUN – set up by Eitan Isaacson. I think this is great as it's a way to reach users who may not already be using a free desktop. Accessibility is an area we are good at and an area our sponsors are willing to invest in, so we should leverage that strength to bring the benefits of the free desktop to more people.

Requested status reports from teams for the 2009 Q2 quarterly report and have 8 of 14 of them on time! With two more promised today. (Which considering this was the first time we've done this and I didn't give them very much warning at all, is awesome!) Got updates from the Bugsquad, localization team, GNOME Marketing, web team, usability team, GNOME Accessibility, documentation team and art team. Missing updates from the release team (promised), sysadmin team (promised), GNOME Mobile, local events, membership committee and finance. (Trying to get this one out by 8/15. In the future these should go out no later than one month after the quarter.)

Talked to Funambol about putting their GNOME related grants on the GNOME jobs wiki page and doing an interview about their experience with grants.

Worked on recruiting someone to lead case study activity.

Followed up with the GNOME Mobile member company looking to get more involved.

Apologized personally to the journalists whose travel we were offered to fund to GUADEC (through the Cabildo) but never actually bought their tickets. The board will also follow up.

Talked to one of our current sponsors about the benefit of GNOME Mobile to them.

Talked to a different sponsor about an issue they were concerned with and wanted our input on.

Presented/talked to the Colorado Springs Open Source group around businesses that can be created around free software. Used the GNOME ecosystem as an example. I met a lot of interesting people there including Michael Hammel who wrote a couple of GIMP books.

Found some GNOME folks to respond to an invitation to the 2nd International Symposium on Computers and Arabic Language forwarded by Richard Stallman. (Thanks to Dave Neary for the pointers to how to find the right people.)

Got first set of GUADEC 2008 finances this morning.

Met with Scott Weiss who is in charge of the Symbian UI. We talked about the challenges of having a UI and allowing partners to differentiate in the UI space. He had some interesting things they'd done to get UI feedback, like submissions that had to include a screenshot, posted unattributed to a Symbian UI blog under creative commons and all advertised over twitter. The UI council then picked the top 10 and they voted on those.

Chatted briefly with Peter Brown, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation about FSF and GNOME Foundation and ideas for future projects we could work together on.

Filled out the Google Adwords Grant Application – it could take six months to be approved. Thanks to Claus Schwarm who worked on the sample ads, keywords, audience and slogan!

Found companies for the Desktop panel I am chairing at OpenSource World – now need to identify individuals.

Figured out how to contribute to the new GNOME web pages thanks to an email from Paul Cutler but haven't actually contributed anything yet.

Started sending out personal thank you's to everyone who contributes to Friends of GNOME within 48 hours. (I read that after 48 hours people see the thank you as a new solicitation.)

Proposed a final draft for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit press release that will hopefully go out this week.

My priorities for this week: (Too many repeats. Hoping for bigger blocks of uninterrupted time this week to get some of them done.)

  • Meeting with GNOME Asia Summit planning committee.
  • Thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Dave Neary compiled a list of all the
    press     and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit!)
  • Continue to work on recruiting someone to lead case study activity:
    • Publish case studies/success stories from the
      foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and
      Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can
      use.)
    • ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
  • summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
  • summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
  • get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC (I think I'm going to need to ping them individually.)
  • create wiki page for GNOME press team
  • get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME (Missing one signature – from the sys admin team.)
  • finalize 401K plan with attorneys (pinged attorney again)
  • Start marketing list thread about raising advisory board fees and the communication around that

More stuff that needs to be done:

  • Meeting with Paul Cutler to talk about updating GNOME marketing wiki
    pages. (We didn't meet in person as his trip to Colorado was canceled.)
  • blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
  • follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
  • Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
  • GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
  • follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner (Dave Neary met with them at OSCON and followed up with an email)
  • Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
  • talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
  • figure out how to work with Spanish government
  • Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
  • continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
  • Finance stuff (We have a treasurer and vice-treasurer now!):
    • add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
    • Work on budget with new treasurer
  • Figure out how to get product news from News
    Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to
    press team when it is created)
  • find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
  • Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
  • write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or
    find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to
    help with sponsors?)
  • find someone who can help create a list of
    recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for
    enterprise customers
  • GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
  • follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM
    system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board,
    Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
  • follow up with the sys admin team on setting up
    better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans.
    (They are working on this one.)
  • follow up with International Cooperation group from
    the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work
    with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
  • send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
  • write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
  • Help Rosanna recruit someone to help automate some
    more of the Friends’ process – like getting Friends of GNOME donor
    names on the website as they come in
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Book Review: Managing the Nonprofit Organization

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.

A few specifics he had in this section were:

  • New ideas should be tried out separately – you shouldn’t try to convert the whole organization at once. “Babies don’t belong in the living room, they belong in the nursery.” I’m not sure I agree with the quote but I agreed with the idea that it’s often easiest to incubate an idea in part of an organization before you move it mainstream.
  • Focus on people’s strengths, not what they don’t have when hiring. He said in most interview processes people talk a lot about what each candidate is missing instead of the strengths they bring to the table. A criteria he really liked was asking the question: “Would I want one of my sons to work under that person? Would I want my son to look like this?”
  • Unlike for profit businesses, non-profits have lots of bottom lines, not just profit. Not just one constituent, one group they are trying to please.
  • Don’t forget to offer training for volunteers! Give them the tools they need and treat them not as volunteers but as nonpaid staff. (This idea comes up again and again in the book.)
  • Mistakes are part of education, as long as that person wants to try.
  • Measure leadership not by publicity but by how organization adjusts to change, how well does the organization deal with conflict, meet the needs of customers, etc?

He also talked a lot about the importance of understanding your mission and articulating it well. I paid attention in this section because a couple of the GNOME advisory board members have told me they couldn’t articulate GNOME’s mission. (It’s to provide a free desktop accessible to everyone regardless of ability, language spoken or financial status.)

His example of a mission that is often misunderstood is a hospital’s mission. Most people (even those working at the hospital) think that hospitals exist to keep people well. If that was the case, they’d focus on outreach to healthy people. A hospital’s mission is to help the sick. Knowing that changes how you work.

Marketing and Fundraising (He calls it “From Mission to Performance”.)

Marketing is not selling or advertising, as most people think.
Marketing is studying the market, segmenting it, targeting the right
groups, positioning yourself and creating a service to meet that
group’s needs.

What’s of value to your customer? Don’t start with
the product but with the satisfied customer. Companies typically learn
about their customers but they should focus on people that should be
their customers but aren’t.

On fundraising:

“Fundraising is going around with a begging bowl, asking for money because the need is so great. Fund development is creating a constituency which supports the organization because it deserves it.” I don’t think the term fund development has caught on but the point is a good one – you want people supporting the organization because they believe in the mission and how the organization is carrying it out, not because they feel sorry for all the people in the world that are starving.

This made me think we should change some of the GNOME goals from “hiring a system administrator” to being able to receive reports from users about problems in less than two minutes. Or something that shows how a system administrator will help with our mission.

He also pointed out you should make sure you tell your donors about the results you accomplish. “Educate donors so they can recognize and accept results” -” they don’t automatically understand what the organization is trying to do.”

Donors are customers – focus on what they need. Why are they supporting your mission?

Performance

Nonprofits have lots of people they need to perform for (unlike businesses.) Nonprofits need to satisfy employees, volunteers, donors, board, beneficiaries, …

He talked a lot about decisions:

  • Disagreement (but not fighting or bickering) is essential for good decision making. Fighting and bickering is a sign of a need of change – you’re probably set up to meet yesterday’s needs, not today’s. (Given the amount of back and forth I see on some mailing lists, I thought this was important. Perhaps those groups are showing that its time for a bigger change of mission or organization.)
  • If there’s consensus on a decision you probably haven’t decided much or people don’t really understand the issue. There should be discussion and disagreement.
  • No decision is made until someone is assigned to work on it. Some one accountable with a plan. And especially in nonprofits you need to think about what training and tools that person needs.
  • Make sure you really know what a decision is about – often the decision
    is a sign of a bigger problem and a bigger underlying decision that
    needs to be made.

I thought he had a couple of points that free software projects would agree with:

  • “Don’t tolerate discourtesy.” “One learns to be courteous – it is needed to enable different people who don’t necessarily like each other to work together.”
  • “Build an organization around information and communication instead of around hierarchy” People have to be responsible for educating their colleagues and bosses, for making sure they are understood.

And a few more points on managing performance:

  • Delegators rarely follow up with the people they delegated too but they should because they are still responsible for that work.
  • Never start out with the negative points in a review – you’ll never forget that part. Be sure to focus on the strengths – the things they can do well instead of the things they can’t do.
  • A big difference between businesses and nonprofits in his mind is that
    businesses are used to making mistakes but nonprofits think they have
    to be perfect. When mistakes are made, the focus should not be on whose
    fault but rather on who is going to fix this?

And one big one:

You have to be able to define what the results are – the results on the world, not the organization. I think this is one area nonprofits have a particularly hard  time with. Even when we define a result, we don’t know how to measure it. GNOME wants everyone to have access to desktop technologies. How do we measure that? How do we know if things are getting better? Is it when we have a complete free desktop? Or when more people in developing countries can access it? Or when it’s in more languages so that more people can use it? And if it’s all of the above, how do we measure it?

People

Drucker’s advice is to hire people with a proven track record not people with high aptitude for success. And to focus on strengths and the mission when placing someone.

He thought developing new leaders often takes more than just one mentor. He had example where a really successful leadership development program actually provided four “mentors” for each potential leader:

  1. a mentor to guide
  2. a teacher to help develop new skills
  3. a judge to evaluate progress
  4. an encourager to encourage them to try again when they made mistakes

I think some of my favorite managers were Peter Drucker fans, or at least they’d learned the same skills or had the same insights. He said something that I learned from my very first manager at HP.

“An executive’s first responsibility is to enable people who want to do the job, who are paid for doing the job, who supposedly have the skills to do the job, to be able to do it. Give them the tools they need, the information they need, and get rid of the things that trip them up, hamper them, slow them down. But the only way to find out what those things are is to ask. Don’t guess – to and ask.”

(My manager came up to me one day and asked me what I needed to do my job better. I came out ahead a new computer and a couple of meetings less. He was my hero! With more insight and experience now, I might ask for different things but the thought – that managers exist to help their employees get their work done – has stayed with me throughout my career.)

Some other tips from this section:

  • Build relationships with the people you serve. He had an example of a hospital that everyone loved even though it wasn’t the best hospital because the hospital always called a few weeks after a visit to follow up.
  • Treat volunteers as unpaid staff. Hold them to high standards. Give them responsibility, training, tools and hold them to it.
  • Make sure you don’t lose the top of your class, your best volunteers. Keep them inspired and everyone else will stay.
  • When working with a group of people (like the board), meet with them before hand, at least the key ones. You can’t change their minds in a meeting and even if you don’t change their mind, you will have set them up to understand what you are trying to do.
  • When building a team, start with what you are trying to do and then
    match skills with work. The purpose of a team is to “make the strengths
    of each person effective”.

He had a really good idea for meetings between leads and non-leads
that I’m going to try. Leads should say:

“This is what you are doing
that helps me. This is what you are doing that hampers me. And what do
I do that helps you? What do I do that hampers you.”

Developing yourself as a leader

This section started out with some excellent advice I wish I could get many of my friends to hear:

“The right decision is to quit if you are in the wrong place, if it is basically corrupt, or if your performance is not being recognized. Promotion itself is not the important thing. What is important is to be eligible, to be equally considered. If you are not in such a situation, you will all too soon begin to accept a second-rate opinion of yourself.”

I actually left a job because a promotion came up and my manager said that nobody that worked for him was ready for it. I could have understood if I wasn’t ready or a few of us weren’t, but we’d all worked for him for a long time. The thought that he hadn’t been working with us to make sure we were ready made me realize I wanted to work with someone who would provide more opportunities for learning and growth.

Some more advice in this section:

  • Change is necessarily to stimulate yourself. Burnout often just means you are bored. His solution to burnout is to work harder! But work harder at something a big different. Like volunteer at a different organization or arrange for a couple of visits to similar (but different) organizations. So when you are feeling burnout or stress, you should work harder! 
  • To learn from your work and life, write down what you expect to happen every time you launch a new activity. Then compare it to what did happen later.
  • Always answer the question “What do you want to be remembered for?” He points out that your answer should change as you get older and wiser!

I also learned some where along the way that the best job you could do is to work yourself out of a job – then the job was really done. (Note that some people get really nervous when you say this to them, especially when they are working for you! I always assure people that there’s plenty, plenty, plenty of work to be done out there.) The manager that taught me this must have also read Peter Drucker’s books:

“If I were to leave tomorrow, I don’t think it would make much difference. They would carry on.” That’s the proudest boast any executive can make, to have built the team that will perpetuate my work, my vision, my institution. That, in my experience, really distinguishes the true achiever.

So if you are interested in learning about management, Peter Drucker has some good insights.

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Stormy’s Update: Week of July 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?

Thanks to everyone who helped get things done this week!

I think we could have a bunch more roles in GNOME. We could have someone in charge of customer case studies, someone responsible for GNOME presentation materials (slide templates, business cards), someone in charge of potential sponsor identification, etc.  If anyone sees a common thread of tasks and thinks they are up to, suggest an appropriate title and let the Foundation know you are interested!

We now have a donate section on the right hand side of the GNOME home page thanks to Andreas Nillson, Paul Cutler and Andre Klapper.

Touched base with John Carr about how the system administration team is doing. They have a team formed that’s been hard at work and have posted minutes from their last meeting. New requests can be logged in bugzilla now.

I emailed Hackerthreads about our GNOME store plans but didn’t get a response. (I’ve never gotten a response from them about anything I’ve emailed them but they email Rosanna every once in a while and they send us a percentage of all the proceeds they get from GNOME merchandise.)

Added June numbers to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet and posted a Friends of GNOME update
to the Foundation blog. (June numbers weren’t great but it was good to see the subscription revenue hold steady. We are almost at our initial annual goal of $20,000! Thanks to all our Friends of GNOME!)

Asked all GNOME teams for Q2 results for the Q2 quarterly report that will come out in a couple of weeks.

Pinged a couple of times about GUADEC 2008 finances and heard that Baris is working on the tax situation in Turkey.

Prepared slides for my OSCON talk on the role of users in free software projects.

Paul Cutler set up a microblog@gnome.org email address so the identica/twitter team can post from email. (Let us know if you’d like to help identica/twitter or set up a plan for how best to do that.)

Went to OSCON in San Jose for two days.

  • Gave my talk on users in free software projects – it started some good discussions.
  • Met with potential GNOME partners like FOSSFA.
  • Met with a GNOME Mobile member who would like to get more involved.
  • Put lots of faces to names. Hopefully I can remember them all.
  • Attended Open Source for America launch party. The GNOME Foundation is a founding member!
  • Met Stefano Maffulli very briefly in person and discussed where to
    advertise Funambol sponsored GNOME related projects (that they are
    willing to pay for)
  • Interviewed with Paul Hudson from TuxRadar. He posted some snippets. Full interview to come later.

Met with another advisory board member to get their feedback. (And to encourage them to pay their way overdue advisory board fees.)

Met with a large financial company who is trying to move to GNOME/Linux desktops. Talked about ways to get their issues in front of GNOME developers for discussion. Look for blog interviews or GNOME Journal articles or something similar!

My priorities for this week:

  • thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Still hoping someone from the marketing team will help compile a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit.)
  • Identify someone to lead case study activity:
    • Publish case studies/success stories from the foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can use.)
    • ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
  • find someone to help Dave Richards with the usability hackfest he’d like to hold in the City of Largo (Lucas Rocha is helping to find someone.)
  • summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
  • summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
  • fill out Google Adwords Grant Application
  • apologize to invited journalists who didn’t make the Desktop Summit because there travel wasn’t booked
  • get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC
  • create wiki page for GNOME press team
  • get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME
  • Find speakers for the Desktop panel I am now chairing at OpenSource World. (In addition to my talk.)
  • Meeting with Paul Cutler in person to talk about updating GNOME marketing wiki pages.
  • Speaking at a Colorado Springs Linux User Group.

More stuff that needs to be done:

  • finalize 401K plan with attorneys (pinged attorney again – I know she’s been traveling as I saw her at OSCON. :)
  • blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
  • follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
  • Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
  • GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
  • follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner (Dave Neary met with them at OSCON and followed up with an email)
  • Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
  • talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
  • figure out how to work with Spanish government (Janjo Marin sent me some ideas.)
  • Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
  • continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
  • Finance stuff (waiting on a treasurer):
    • add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
    • Work on budget with new treasurer
  • Figure out how to get product news from News
    Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to
    press team when it is created)
  • find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
  • Find out how to review new gnome webpage content so I can help
  • Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
  • write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or
    find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to
    help with sponsors?)
  • find someone who can help create a list of
    recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for
    enterprise customers
  • GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
  • follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM
    system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board,
    Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
  • follow up with the sys admin team on setting up
    better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans.
    (They are working on this one.)
  • follow up with International Cooperation group from
    the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work
    with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
  • send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
  • Figure out who could attend a conference in Saudi Arabia to discuss potential financial support for adabizing programs
  • write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
  • Help Rosanna recruit someone to help automate some
    more of the Friends’ process – like getting Friends of GNOME donor
    names on the website as they come in
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Stormy’s Update: Week of July 13th

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?

First thing Monday morning I went to the doctor who determined that
I had a sinus infection. (For fellow travelers, if your cheekbones ache
and your teeth feel like they are going to fall out every time the
plane takes off and lands, you may have a sinus infection. Not only did
I have the scheduled 3 takeoffs and landings on my trip home from the
Desktop Summit but when our plane got hit by lightening, they threw in
a bonus landing and takeoff in Wyoming!)

Followed up on some Desktop Summit stuff:

  • Sent co-locating survey results to both KDE and GNOME boards.
    Attended GNOME Board decision meeting about co-locating in the future.
    (You’ll have to wait for them to say what the decision was …)
  • Pinged sponsor companies about banners that were left behind.
  • Helped draft co-located press release.

Pinged attorney about 401K plan. (Our attorney did meet with the plan’s attorney.)

Trying to help figure out a board meeting time – with seven board
members around the world with jobs and school, it’s hard to find a time
that works. Our current time doesn’t work very well for folks in India,
like Srini. (He did stay up until 3am last time though to dial in!)

Read the GNOME Annual Report 2008. Nice job, Lucas, writers and photographers! It was a good year for GNOME.

Created a Zazzle account for the new GNOME Store. (Got permission to have a 5 letter login and store name, gnome.)

Set up a press interview about my talk at OpenSource World.

Wrote my Friends of GNOME post cards. They went to Finland, Australia, Cyprus, and Canada as well as several US states! Sign up to support GNOME with a Friends of GNOME monthly subscription and get a postcard from your favorite hacker!

Created some Amazon affiliate accounts in US, UK, Canada and Germany
so that Jaap can set up stores and a Firefox widget that will enable
people to direct Amazon referral fees for their purchase to GNOME.

Talked to a couple of sponsors (Canonical, IBM) about things they’d like to see done and things they are willing to sponsor.

Met with Sally from HALO Worldwide. She
helps the Apache Foundation with their press and marketing and teaches
a class every year at ApacheCon. We talked about how she could help
with GNOME marketing and pres. I’d love to have a marketing hackfest
and have her come teach a press class.

Met with Paul Cutler about all the things we’d like to get going on
GNOME marketing, following up on all the conversations from the Desktop
Summit.

Went through all my email and notes from the Desktop Summit and created an enormous todo list.

For next week:

  • Create slides for my OSCON talk, the Role of Users in Open Source Projects. It will be based on [Correction] The Role of Consumers in an Open Source Community.
    Speaking of OSCON, I really like the system they have set up for
    identifying which talks you want to see, what other talks people
    interested in those talks are interested in and identifying who will be
    at the conference and who you’d like to meet. It would be great to have
    something like that for GUADEC.
  • Attending two days of OSCON. (Short trip this year to save on hotel
    stays and to minimize time away from home as I’ve already spent 10 days
    away from home this month.)
  • Tackling as many items from the rest of my todo list as possible.

The rest of my to do list. (Let me know if you’d like to help on any
of the projects!) These are not in any particular order here.

  • thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Hoping someone
    from the marketing team will help compile a list of all the press and
    blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit.)
  • finalize 401K plan with attorneys
  • blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
  • ask all teams for input on Q2 report
  • follow up with potential sponsor who was at GUADEC
  • follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
  • Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foudnation
  • GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
  • publish June Friends of GNOME data
  • Publish case studies/success stories from the
    foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and
    Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can
    use.)
  • ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
  • find people to help with the customer testimonials (case study article, quotes, slides, sidebar)
  • find someone to help Dave Richards with the usability hackfest he’d like to hold in the City of Largo
  • find sponsors for GNOME foundation booth in 2010 CSUN
  • apologize to invited journalists who didn’t make the Desktop Summit because their travel wasn’t booked
  • talk to OIN – they list GNOME as a partner
  • Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
  • summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
  • summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
  • fill out Google Adwords Grant Application
  • talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
  • figure out how to work with Spanish government (Janjo Marin sent me some ideas.)
  • Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
  • add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
  • continue to ping about GUADEC 2008 finances
  • continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
  • Work on budget with new treasurer
  • Figure out how to get product news from News
    Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to
    press team when it is created)
  • find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
  • get back to Funambol on where to advertise GNOME related projects that they are willing to pay for
  • Find out how to review new gnome webpage content so I can help
  • Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
  • write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) – for our website
  • find someone who can help create a list of
    recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for
    enterprise customers
  • GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
  • follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM
    system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board,
    Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
  • follow up with the sys admin team on setting up better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans.
  • follow up with International Cooperation group from
    the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work
    with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
  • get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC
  • send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
  • Figure out who could attend a conference in Saudi Arabia to discuss potential financial support for adabizing programs
  • write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
  • get identica@gnome.org email address so identica/twitter team can post from email
  • create wiki page for GNOME press team
  • get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME
  • Make sure we get donate button on gnome.org front page
  • Find speakers for the Desktop panel I am now chairing at OpenSource World. (In addition to my talk.)
Posted on

Stormy’s Update: Week of July 5th

Cross posted from the GNOME Foundation blog where you can find previous updates.

Spent the week at the Desktop Summit/GUADEC in Gran Canaria.

Met with a ton of people. Putting lots of faces to names. (Some
people need new hackergotchis, identi.ca and twitter icons. Me
included.) Managed to see a couple of talks too.
I have to admit I was most interested in the questions and discussions
that the presentations generated. I was very excited that many people
reported interesting KDE/GNOME conversations.

Realized that while this year I don’t have several hundred GNOME
people to meet for the first time, I suddenly have several hundred KDE
people to meet … I met quite a few at the Nokia party as I was one of
the first (if not the first) GNOME person to show up.

Igalia sponsored the GNOME party and didn’t forget our traditions:
ice cream death match and jam session. It was a great time! (The
whiskey thing happened another night. I decided it was wisest not to
attend that party.)

The board of advisors meeting went well. We had a round table in the
morning followed by a finance update and a call for help with
hackfests. (Almost all the sponsors would very much like to see us do
more hackfests we just have to figure out how to get the funding.) We
also got some great commitments to help with Friends of GNOME, GNOME
customer success stories and hackfests. After an excellent lunch in a
Persian restaurant that Rosanna, Owen and Blizzard found, we returned
for a discussion with the GNOME 3.0 projects. (All those projects
involved in GNOME 3.0.)

I had breakfast with some local government and university officials.
I sat next to Jose Miguel Santos Espino, the director of the computer
science department, and I happened to tell him about the GNOME and KDE
folks in Nigeria that couldn’t get visas to come. A couple of days
later he contacted me with an excellent proposal. He suggested that we
work with their International Cooperations Department to find ways to
bring free software to countries in Africa as well as Latin America and
Asia. We had a good conversation with Josefa de la Rosa Cantos and we
will work with them during their next conference of Spanish and African
universities.

I also got a chance to talk to Antonio Jose Saenz Albanes who is
working a project to deploy 2 million laptops to students in Andalucia.
His main problem is accessibility so I introduced him to the GNOME
accessibility team.

The GNOME Mobile BOF started out the same way that so many GNOME
Mobile BOFs do trying to define what is GNOME mobile but we actually
progressed during this one which was awesome. GNOME Mobile is a place
for people using GNOME Mobile technologies to collaborate. However,
we’ll build on the GNOME brand, not the GNOME Mobile brand. We also
brainstormed quite a few ideas, like inviting the maintainers for key
GNOME technologies to join the GNOME Mobile mailing list.

AGM – the GNOME Foundation annual meeting. The AGM went really well even though we competed with many
other attractions. All the teams gave an update. We’ll be posting
minutes and slides but in the meantime you can check out the GNOME
identi.ca feed where the AGM was broadcast live.

The marketing BOF was late Thursday afternoon in a really hot room but people had some great ideas. (We were hot!) We discussed things like marketing campaigns, audiences (existing GNOME
users, not developers), having regional presence on the to-be-formed
press team. and we decided we’d put together 4 case studies (GNOME
success stories) by the end of the month. Anne Ostergaard suggested the
Andalusian school project. Guy Lunardi provided a Novell customer
story. I took notes and we’ be publishing soon.

Survey. If you are part of the GNOME community and you haven’t already filled out the survey, please take the co-locating survey.
We’ll be deciding next week whether we are co-locating again or not
next year. One thing I’ve noticed about the respondents so far is that
of the people that collaborated with a KDE person, 95+% think the
co-located Desktop Summit was a success. Among those that didn’t
collaborate with a KDE person, only 35% think the Desktop Summit was a
success.

Starting the 20+ hour trip home tomorrow at 4am. Looking forward to seeing the family!

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The GNOME Foundation Is All About People

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.)

Open Source Business Review (OSBR) itself is edited by another amazing woman, Dru Lavigne. All of their articles are published under the CC-SA, so you can republish and use them to educate people on open source software as long as you give attribution.

Credit goes to Rikki and Dru for helping me write a much better article than I could have written on my own.

The GNOME Foundation Is All About People
by Stormy Peters originally published in OSBR

“Foundations offer a way to make open-source development more corporate (organized in such a way that commercial vendors can participate with fewer reservations) without becoming commercial, a turn-off for many would-be code contributors.” – Matt
Asay

As open source projects mature, they tend to join or create a foundation to manage the project’s financial and software assets, provide a marketing and legal entity, and help to set the direction of the project. As non-profit organizations, foundations have a specific structure defined by the jurisdiction in which they were formed. This structure typically includes a volunteer board of directors and sometimes paid staff such as a secretary or executive director.

As Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I am often asked “what do you do?”. This article will introduce the structure of the GNOME project and its Foundation, describe how the Foundation works to support the GNOME project, and discuss the roles of the people within the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME Structure

The GNOME project started out as an open source desktop. It has evolved into a complete, free and easy-to-use desktop environment which includes software for tasks like playing music, editing images, and working with documents. GNOME also provides a powerful application development framework for both desktop and mobile application developers. As part of the GNU Project, GNOME is free to use, modify, and distribute.

The GNOME Foundation exists to support the GNOME project’s mission of creating a free and open source desktop accessible to all people regardless of their ability to pay, physical ability, or the language they speak. The Foundation acts as the official voice of the GNOME project, communicating with press and other other organizations, coordinating releases of GNOME, determining which projects are part of GNOME, and planning events that support GNOME and its developers.

The GNOME Foundation is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with an elected Board of Directors, an appointed Board of Advisors, approximately 400 members, and two paid staff. The 400 members are all contributors to GNOME. A contributor is anyone who has made a significant contribution such as code, organizing a conference, writing documentation, or translating GNOME into other languages. GNOME contributors must renew their membership every two years.

The GNOME Foundation

The GNOME project is mostly self-managed by informally structured teams. The GNOME Foundation serves as the support or steward of the project. Any GNOME contributor can apply to the Foundation for membership. All members, 370 at current count, can vote. Typically there is one vote per year by the membership to see who serves on the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors is then authorized to make decisions on behalf of the entire body of GNOME Foundation members. The Board runs the Foundation’s day-to-day business, voting internally on financial decisions, legal issues and general policy. The Board of Directors is also authorized to hire staff that reports to them.

In addition to the membership, the Board of Directors and the Foundation staff, the GNOME Foundation also has a Board of Advisors. The Board of Advisors is a group of representatives from companies and non-profit organizations that work closely with GNOME. Many donate annually to the GNOME project and provide sponsorship for hiring staff, hackfests, events, and outreach programs.

GNOME Teams

While the GNOME project doesn’t provide an organizational chart, the project is definitely well organized. The project is run by contributors, loosely coupled into teams. Teams are rather informal and tend to be grouped around either projects, such as GTK+ or GStreamer, or around tasks like marketing, maintaining the website or providing system administration support. Teams meet in IRC and hold discussions on mailing lists. Each team often has its own wiki and web pages to use for collaboration.

There are teams that write code for each of the technologies in GNOME. Translation team members ensure that GNOME is available to people around the world in their native language from Tamil to Vietnamese to Finnish.

Many contributors begin their involvement by participating in the bug squad team, which tracks incoming bugs and ensures that major bugs get addressed quickly. Some dedicated hackers work on the release team, which makes sure a new release of GNOME goes out every six months. The release team decides which features will be included in the next release, works carefully with all of the projects to ensure their product is ready and tested, writes release notes, and keeps everyone moving towards the mutual goal of an on-time six month release cycle.

The accessibility team is one of GNOME’s core strengths. This team makes sure that GNOME is easy to use by people with accessibility needs while supporting GNOME’s core value to be accessible to all, regardless of physical ability or ability to pay. GNOME’s accessibility solutions cost a fraction of the cost of its non-open source competitors. When speaking of cost, GNOME software is free, but hardware sometimes needs to be purchased.

While we usually focus on people working on the project directly, the community also includes the companies and developers using GNOME technologies in their product solutions. GNOME technologies can be found in traditional desktops, mobile phones, breast cancer scanners, and GPS devices. Some of these companies sponsor the GNOME Foundation. Others participate in GNOME Mobile and still others sponsor GNOME events.

A small group of GNOME contributors run the membership committee, verifying that all members are GNOME contributors. On the infrastructure team, people with system administration skills keep the GNOME infrastructure running, fixing all sorts of issues in their spare time. Most of the hosting and infrastructure is donated to the GNOME Foundation by supporting companies such as Red Hat.

There are others who spend evenings and weekends discussing how the website could best be redesigned to recruit more developers and enable more people to begin using GNOME. Others volunteer to set up and staff the GNOME booth at a conference. Those with artistic talent create artwork including logos, brochures, and tshirts. Some contributors, both those with marketing talent and those with a strong desire to learn more about marketing, write and design brochures for potential sponsors. Some volunteers organize major GNOME events like GUADEC or GNOME.Asia. Many users are happy to answer questions for the person sitting next to them at the coffee shop.

Role of Board and Executive Director

In addition to all of the people working directly on GNOME, seven contributors each year are elected to serve on the Board of Directors. The Board itself does not make technical decisions, although many of the Directors also hold technical leadership roles. Rather, the Board is responsible for the stewardship of GNOME’s finances, trademark, press relations, staff, and legal issues. Board members ensure that the GNOME project is successful by organizing annual get-togethers from GUADEC to hackfests. They maintain relationships with corporate partners through the advisory board. The Board solicits corporate sponsorship and individual support, and prepares and manages the budget.

While the Board of Directors doesn’t make technical decisions, the Board is elected by the community to represent the project and Board members often get asked by members of the GNOME community for advice and direction.

The Board of Directors in turn hires the staff they see as necessary to run the GNOME Foundation effectively and in a way that supports all of GNOME. We’ve had an administrative assistant, Rosanna Yuen, for several years. She maintains the financial books, invoices corporate sponsors, reimburses community members for sponsored travel, sends out Friends of GNOME gifts and generally keeps things running day-to-day.

Last year the board hired an Executive Director to help grow the Foundation. The Executive Director is expected to be the “eyes and ears of the GNOME Foundation.” Many people approach me and say they are so glad there is an Executive Director as now they know who to ask a particular question about GNOME. I respond by connecting them to the right person in the project. It still surprises me when companies that use GNOME technologies have no idea when they do or do not understand what GNOME actually is. I assume it’s because open source tends to be introduced into corporations from the bottom up. In these cases, I educate management and help them understand how working more closely with the GNOME community can help them.

As Executive Director, I assist in marketing by making sure the project is reaching out to the right people. Other job duties include:

  • fundraising: for staff salaries, specific outreach projects, travel costs to bring developers together at conferences and hackfests, and a future paid system administrator

  • business development: finding new ways to make money as well as bringing in companies that aren’t traditionally seen as being part of the GNOME community

  • general housekeeping: ensure projects are carried through to completion, potential business deals are followed up, and meeting companies interested in working with GNOME

One of the vital things I do that doesn’t cost anything is saying “that’s a good idea”. GNOME has a great community of talented and motivated individuals. Often they bring an idea to me or to the Board and they just need confirmation or an introduction to the right person to start their plans.

How does GNOME Make Money?

A commonly asked question is “how does the GNOME project make money?”. The GNOME Foundation is supported financially by donations. Donations come in several forms which include:

  • regular donations from individuals who pledge $10/month to the GNOME Foundation through Friends of GNOME

  • one time donations from individuals or companies through Friends of GNOME

  • companies who pledge to support the GNOME Foundation with $10,000/year

  • companies that hire people to work on GNOME projects

  • companies that sponsor events like GUADEC, GNOME.Asia and hackfests

This financial support has given GNOME the ability to grow as a project. Being able to get most of the community together at our annual GUADEC conference as well as holding smaller local events and hackfests has enabled the community to work closely together, creating desktop technologies that adhere to strong values like freedom, internationalization, usability and accessibility.

What Will GNOME do Next?

GNOME 3.0 discussions are well under way with a preliminary roadmap outlining new technologies and user interfaces. GNOME’s challenge for the next couple of years will be figuring out what the “desktop” means to users who have a traditional computer, a netbook or a smartphone. GNOME is actively working on the best technologies and user interfaces to help users navigate these technologies.

The GNOME Foundation will support GNOME 3.0’s evolution by getting feedback from the community and sponsor companies, continuing to release GNOME every six months, and working out a plan to deprecate old code and provide an appropriate migration path for partners and users.

In addition to working with our existing community and partners, the Foundation will continue to grow. We’ll add new corporate sponsors, perhaps companies focused on mobile technology, chip design, netbook manufacture, and telecommunications carriers. We’ll add new community members, including developers and volunteers that work on planning new events and growing existing ones. We’ll see new teams in countries like Nigeria that are busy translating GNOME into local languages.

The desktop will continue to evolve as people work and interact with technology. We’ll see more devices from desktops to smartphones, more people in developing countries beginning to use technology and technology adapting to meet their needs. The GNOME project will continue to work to make a free desktop available to everyone regardless of their physical ability, financial status or the language they speak. Come join us!


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What do I do at work?

A couple of people have asked what I do. I blogged about it a while back, What do I do as Executive Director of GNOME, but I get the sense that people are looking for regular updates. You can find those on the Foundation blog, I post a weekly update there.

(And I think a lot of people have questions about what Executive Directors do. My post is now #3 in Google if you search for "executive director job description", #2 for "what does an executive director do" and #3 for "executive director do". So if you are an executive director, you should probably post what you do for your community, employees and shareholders … it looks like they'd like to know!)

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Talk about what’s important to you

IStock_000009185970XSmall One of the best ways you can help a cause you care about is by telling your friends about it.

Recommendations from family and friends are the number one reason people buy products, support causes or try out services. I don’t know if it’s because they trust their friends’ opinions or because they can see that their friends really use, but whatever it is, people are more likely to use something if their friends speak positively about it.

So the best thing you can do to support your favorite cause, whether it’s open source software in general, GNOME or your favorite local bookstore, is to use it and talk about it.

If it’s GNOME, the GNOME marketing team has created these cool badges to add to your website.

Become a Friend of GNOME

Thanks to Andreas Nilsson, Paul Cutler, Jaap Haitsma, Claus Schwarm and others who made this happen!

Spread the word!