I just got back from GNOME.Asia. Emily Chen (and a host of volunteers) put together GNOME.Asia to foster and grow the GNOME community in Asia. It was a great event – definitely the first in an annual tradition. What was the conference like? There was tremendous energy. There were lots of talks – keynotes in […]
GNOME.Asia was a tremendous success! Read More »
A couple of weeks ago I got to go to the Grace Hopper conference for women in computing. It was a great conference. My favorite talk was one I happened on by accident, "I’m an imposter," where some of the most successful women I’ve ever met in person got up and talked about how they
Women in open source panel at Grace Hopper Read More »
I learned about an interesting project at the Grace Hopper conference: the Humanitarian FOSS Project. The Humanitarian FOSS project is attracting new students to software development by appealing to them with open source humanitarian projects. They’ve had a lot of success over the past two years. They bring all the students together on a university
Humanitarian projects bring more students to open source software Read More »
At the Openismus party in Berlin a few weeks ago, I had some interesting conversations about what marketing for an open source project like GNOME should be. What’s our core message and who are we targeting? (I think the best ideas come from discussions with others who care about the subject. Luckily with open source,
Open source marketing is like manning an info desk Read More »
As open source software becomes more popular and is included in more commercial products, the open source software projects face more pressure to produce a “roadmapâ€. Projects like GNOME have successfully moved to a six month release model which has greatly aided the companies that depend on GNOME technologies. They know when the next release
What do you have: time, resources or features? Read More »
Ubiquity was officially announced this week. I installed it and I find myself using it all the time for really simple, but very useful, stuff. I use a calculator a lot. Now, when I’m in the middle of typing an email or reading a web page, I just hit two keys and type "calc 3256/3+2456"
Ubiquity: turning us all into power users Read More »
Social norms govern whether you are willing to help a friend move or cook dinner for your family. Market norms govern what you are willing to do for how much money. In an experiment to show how social norms vary from market norms, Dan Ariely created a computer task where volunteers had to drag circles
Social Norms vs Market Norms Read More »
The GNOME Foundation is a nonprofit organization, a 501(c)(3), and is funded by donations from individuals and companies. So as executive director of the GNOME Foundation I figured I should learn a bit more about fund raising. While there are a lot of books about fund raising, there’s very little information out there about fund
Fundraising for a technical nonprofit Read More »
As many of you know I’m fascinated not only with how the open source software model works but how companies are unintentionally influencing the model by injecting money. I’ve shared my research and thoughts in my “Would you do it again for free?” talk. So when I saw Volunteer staff are surprisingly committed, I was
Are volunteers more dedicated than paid staff? Read More »
In his LinuxWorld keynote, Bob Sutor said that open source hasn’t really reached the enterprise application space yet. I used to say that the top of the stack was proprietary and that open source enters into a space as it becomes commoditized. That was 2001. Now it’s 2008 and it’s time for open source software
Where will open source lead? Read More »