Stormy’s Update: Week of May 18th

What are these updates?

Here are some of the things I worked on during the week of May 18th in no particular order of importance.  I’m focusing more on just letting people know what I’m working on in these updates than giving a complete update on any issue – that happens in the different forums I’m working on. A few things don’t make it to this list for confidentiality reasons.

If you have questions, please ask them in the comments!

So what did I work on?

Had an email discussion with a few people from FOSSFA. We will meet at OSCON to discuss how the GNOME Foundation and FOSSFA might collaborate.

Helped promote Friends of GNOME badges. Marketing list came up with a schedule for people to help promote it on a regular basis via blogs.

Had lunch with Jonathan Corbet from LWN. I asked him how projects like GNOME could work best with him. He’d love to get more regular updates of future plans – technical, product plans. It’s really hard to follow all the project related lists to keep up on what’s going on. They are also willing to pay people to write articles on GNOME. (But if you are willing to write articles on GNOME, please also remember GNOME Journal!!)

Worked on my GNOME Journal article – an interview with Laszlo Peter from Sun on how Sun works with upstream GNOME. We’re on the final touches.

Started a discussion on the agenda  for the GUADEC Advisory Board meeting. We’ll be focusing on GNOME 3.0. We’ll want community members to come talk about GNOME 3.0 roadmap, marketing and projects like Zeitgeist and GNOME Shell. We’ll also have time for the advisory board members to update us and each other on their GNOME plan.

Google adsense vs adwords. We had a discussion on the GNOME Marketing list about adding ads to gnome.org. (A discussion, not a proposal nor a plan!) I followed up with a conversation with Google and discovered that Google has an AdWords grant program. If we get it we get $300/day worth of free ads. (And we can’t have an adsense account which I don’t believe we really wanted anyway. If we ever do ads, we’d want to work closely with the company and approve the ad itself.)

Booked travel for GUADEC. Staying at the Hotel Fataga with hopes of being close to board of directors and board of advisors. (If you are at GUADEC, please remember that some of the board of advisors members are new to our community and include them in your happy hour and dinner plans as appropriate!)

Attended great nonprofit seminar. Tuesday I went to a local nonprofit seminar and learned about board of directors responsibilities, subcommittees, marketing and finances. I will share in the appropriate lists and on my blog as I digest the information and make it useful. (For example, this week I plan to add some info/graphs to the 2009 budget to make it easier to read based on some of the things I learned in the finance talk.)

Discussed sponsorship levels for companies – active discussion on the marketing list. Things like should we have more granulation based on company size? Should we have different levels of sponsorship with different benefits?

Signed up another corporate sponsor for the Desktop Summit. A couple of more to finalize!

Created a survey for Friends of GNOME donors. Will test this week with marketing list. I really would like to know why they donated, what they appreciate about what the Foundation is doing, what they’d like to see in the future, and what GNOME products do they use.

Pinged about website ruler for Friends of GNOME. There’s a ruler in progress to track Friends of GNOME donations and goals we have for that money.

Pinged about analytics for website. Not an urgent issue but something I’d like to see added to the (very long already) sys admin to do list. We could do much better marketing, fundraising and *meeting people’s needs* if we knew why they came to our website and what they looked at. We have some data now but it’s not nearly as much nor as useful as it could be.

Made appointment to talk to attorney this week about pending issues. Yeah!

Discussing GNOME Mobile plans at OSiM 2009. Several people have been working on GNOME Mobile plans for OSiM and we are now talking together about them.

Finalized OSBR article about GNOME Foundation. The goal of the article was to tell people what open source related foundations/organizations look like – or rather tell them how the GNOME Foundation works as an example of what they might look like. (And it’s in an issue with all women authors which is how I ended up writing it. I was recruited to write an article because I was a women in open source and I choose to write it on the GNOME Foundation.)

Looking for a desktop deployment cases study (and presenter) for OpenSource Word.

Agreed to keynote at UTOSC (they are paying travel even though I can only go for one day – it’s a very short flight from my home) and asked for volunteers to run a GNOME booth. Christer Edwards expressed interest.

SFScon 2009 would like to know if we’d like to have another hackfest there. It’s being discussed with last year’s planners and the board.

Sent a few GNOME related announcements through identica/twitter GNOME account. If you’d like to help twitter, let me know!

Had a few discussions (seperately) with projects, companies and the board about how people might use our Amazon Affiliate account. If it’s built in to a project and the proceeds go to the GNOME Foundation, how much credit or control could or should go to the project or to the maintainers of that project? That type of conversation.

Had a discussion with the OpenLogic CEO about recommending some GNOME desktop applications to add to their library. If you’d like to help decide on a short list of enterprise ready desktop applications, let me know. (These would not be supported applications at first. OpenLogic would add them to the library and eventually certify them. If/when added, their customers could download them and use them.)

There’s probably a few other threads in my email that I missed but I think that’s a most of what I did last week.

Plans for this week:

  • Test Friends of GNOME survey with marketing list.
  • Contribute to levels of sponsorship discussion on marketing list.
  • Talk to attorney. Hopefully wrap up three outstanding legal projects.
  • Ping several of our existing sponsors on open issues. (One is very behind on advisory board fee payments.)
  • Prepare talk for keynote at Open Source Systems confernece next week. (They are paying for travel. Still a long trip but a good chance to talk to unversity folks about GNOME and many of our contributors start in university.)
  • Wrap up as many issues, projects and conversations as possible.
  • Get remaining pending Desktop Summit sponsors agreed upon and invoiced.
  • Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop in mind.
  • Think about how GNOME projects, committees like the travel committee and teams like the sys admin team work with the nonprofit workshop in mind.
  • Apply for Google Adwords Grant program.
  • Board of Directors meeting.

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