Month: January 2010

Finally wrapped up the very long thread on the Foundation list and most of the side conversations.

Met with a couple of advisory board members (via phone, email and IRC) to discuss funding and GUADEC.

We are partnering with Project::Possibility! Look for updates from the GNOME accessibility folks.

Got all the GNOME Q4 report updates in the report and edited except for one … actively waiting on that one!

Read all the Google Grants instructions, set up an Adwords account, set up campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords. Was ready to submit and the checklist says we need at least two ads per adgroup, so going back to fill in today. (Also got a login on our Piwik account from Jaap Haitsma to see gnome.org web page traffic to help evaluate our adwords usage.)

Sent out requests for sponsorship for the usability hackfest.

Attended GNOME board meeting.

Met with Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation. Briefly discussed Collaboration Summit, GNOME participation, mobile, Moblin and fundraising/memberships.

Sent out thank you’s for Friends of GNOME.

Worked with Grace Hopper (a women in computing conference) on FOSS (free and open source) plans for the conference. They were already working on it and they’ve added me to the group discussing the plans. It’s looking promising.

Attended Snowy (Tomboy Online) IRC meeting.

Talked to Gregoire Gentil from Always Innovating. Their Touch Book uses GNOME technologies. They’d love to see better touch screen support for GNOME. (Right now you have to use a stylus instead of fingers.) Set up tentative plans to meet in person at the Collaboration Summit.

Helped with a couple of things (panel, lightening talks, schedule) for OSCON and for the Women in Open Source miniconference at SCALE.

Luis de Bethencourt is going to represent GNOME at FOSS Nigeria. Thanks to Agustín Benito Bethencourt for recruiting him.

Chuck Payne and Zonker will represent GNOME at the Texas Linux Fest.

Worked on planning my travel for the year. I’d love to see more people officially representing GNOME at events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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