Some things I’ve been up to

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It’s been an exciting and busy couple of weeks. Here are a selection of things I’ve done, so that you can see what I’ve been up to!

  • worked with Chun-Hung Huang (sakanamax) and the GNOME.Asia committee to choose a bid for GNOME.Asia, get emails and announcements ready, etc. This year GNOME.Asia will be in Hong Kong!
  • worked with Walter Bender and the nice folks at MIT about reserving rooms for the Boston Summit. It won’t be official for a little while, but it’s looking good.
  • participated in our GUADEC organizing meeting. We definitely need some more good ideas for keynoters so let me know if you have any ideas!
  • worked on some interviews, followed up with journalists. I’ve been so happy that my LCA talk continued to get press, but I’ve been sad that it’s meant that I’ve had to turn down some speaking opportunities – I’ve just been doing way too much travel and need to stay put at least for a little bit to get some work done (I feel like I’m always playing catch up). The next public speaking I have lined up is a free culture panel at SXSW, which I’ll be taking some vacation to attend (it feels funny to be taking vacation to speak at yet another conference, but it’s work for QuestionCopyright not GNOME, and besides I can attend a lot of the music performances! The next GNOME related speaking I’ve got lined up is LibrePlanet2012!
  • worked with Rosanna on GNOME’s Form 990 (and asked a lot of questions of our accountant!)
  • started fundraising for the next OPW round with potential new sponsors
  • worked on the biannual report
  • contacted schools for the blind and deaf to see if we could develop any partnerships with our accessibility campaign. Worked with Juanjo Marin on another story for the FoG campaign (coming soon!)
  • worked with Aaron Williamson of SFLC about fixing a bug in GNOME’s bylaws.
  • did some research and looked into trademark implications of uses of logos in Boxes for Zeeshan
  • contacted Hylke Bons, who confirmed explicit permission to use the adorable robot logo he designed for GNOME 3
  • nagged various people about various things
  • thanked various people for various work. I’m always astounded by how awesome our volunteers are! We have to estimate the number of volunteers GNOME has for our afore mentioned Form 990 report, and it’s amazing how quickly the number adds up – thank you to volunteers who organize events around the world, who spend their time staffing the booths at those conferences, who compose our awesome sysadmin team, and our dedicated marketing team, who volunteer to be on our board, who run the outreach program for women and who mentor new contributors in all all out outreach programs, who write documentation, who contribute articles for our reports and press, and of course, who contribute on a volunteer basis to our code base!
  • recorded and published an oggcast on Ambjörn Elder’s talk from FOSDEM entitled Methods of FOSS Activism. I apologize for the crummy quality of my audio – I didn’t realize my gain was so high
  • helped coordinate getting GNOME Do their freenode channel, with SEJeff and Sri’s help!
  • communicated with a few advisory board members, and a potential advisory board member
  • followed up on overdue invoices to the GNOME Foundation

FOSDEM, part 1

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My day started out bright and early, meeting Tom Marble, Richard Fontana and Bradley Kuhn to get breakfast and prepare ourselves for the legal issues and policy devroom. I have to credit Tom, there really was a demand for the room and I thought we had some really interesting conversations. I did slip out throughout the day to get to various GNOME related things, but the devroom was my anchor, which was sometimes difficult when it was stuffed to the gills!

I held two sessions today. One was was an unexpected talk I gave with Bradley about fiscal sponsorship organizations when one of morning speakers let us know that he was stuck on a train and wasn’t going to make it. The second was moderating a panel on software patents, which is always interesting.

The whole track was good, but I have to admit that one of my favorite things was having Harald Welte in the room while Philippe Laurent described the German case law.

I also made it to the cross-desktop room to see a few talks including Dave Neary’s talk on mentorship and Allan Day’s talk on Every Detail Matters. The rest of the day was jam packed with intense conversations and meeting people, which was capped off with a really fun time at the GNOME beer event. I even met a few GNOME hackers I’d not met before. It was also great to hang out with my mentee, Emily Gonyer who not only is experiencing her first conference, but also manned the GNOME booth most of the day!

Must get some sleep to prepare myself for tomorrow’s FOSDEM craziness.

In Brussels!

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I’ve arrived safely and soundly in Brussels for FOSDEM, despite a weird back injury (I didn’t know you could get those from sneezing…) I’ve had a nice time talking to folks already, even if I’ve gotten a couple of rants about GNOME. There’s been some really great positive discussion too.

I’m excited for the Legal Issues devroom I’m cohosting with Tom, Bradley and Richard and also for the Crossdesktop devroom. I’ll also try to hang around the GNOME booth. Please come and say hi. See you there!

Apply for your GNOME membership!

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Many of you have probably already seen Alberto’s post that Planet GNOME will only include members going forward.

I wanted to take the time to urge all of you who have been putting it off or have been unsure – now’s the time to apply for membership!. It may seem intimidating (I actually put off applying for membership myself until I was already Executive Director – shameful!) but all kinds of contributions to GNOME can count towards membership and you don’t need to be a maintainer or super hacker. The rules say:

Any person who has made non-trivial contributions to the GNOME project and who submits a proper application to the Membership Committee will be approved for membership. A non-trivial contribution is any activity which contributes to the development of the project at a level significantly above that expected of a normal user or fan of GNOME.

Examples of non-trivial contributions include hacking, bugfixing, extensive testing, design, documentation, translation, administration or maintenance of project-wide resources, giving GNOME talks at conferences and community coordination such as bugzilla or release management. Any activity, such as advocacy or submitting bug reports, must substantially exceed the level of contribution expected of an ordinary user or fan of the project to qualify an individual for membership in the Foundation.

Not sure if you’ve contributed enough to get your membership already? Let’s have a mini membership hackfest! Email me or find me in IRC (I’m karenesq on GIMPNet) and I’ll try to help come up with good tasks you can work on in the next few weeks. We really have a lot going on right now that we can use help with. For example, we’re working to put together our annual report and could really use more articles and other content to make it good, which probably doesn’t require a large learning curve to get started. Being a member of the Foundation is important – not only do you get a say in who’s on the board, keep your blog on the planet, qualify for travel sponsorships and get a great @gnome.org email address, but you are showing your support for a great organization that’s making the world a better place.

Back from LCA!

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After a long series of flights this weekend, I’m finally home from my trip to linux.conf.au.

My time in Australia kicked off with AdaCamp in Melbourne over the weekend, which was fantastic and which I’ll give its own post in the coming days. I find conferences to be very intense and can never seem to find the time to blog while I’m there. I’m impressed with those who manage to pull it off.

LCA was a fantastic conference. I greatly enjoyed meeting people and catching up with old friends. It was great to be able to talk about GNOME with everyone. Many people didn’t know about extensions.gnome.org and others hadn’t actually seen GNOME3 and were impressed when I showed them my laptop. (And happily quite a number went away excited to try it.)

I gave two talks at the conference. The first was at the Business of Open Source Miniconf on Monday which was organized by Martin Michlmayr, where I talked about the nuts and bolts of nonprofit law. Since the talk was outside the United States, I kept the discussion mostly on a conceptual level, focusing on issues like governance and common pitfalls for nonprofit management. Usually I worry that these kinds of talks are very boring but perhaps this approach was better, as this time the audience seemed really engaged. I was the last talk of the day, and the Q&A session lasted well past the scheduled end time. Unfortunately, the talk wasn’t recorded but I’d be happy to send the slides on to anyone who is interested.

The keynote I gave on Thursday was my medical devices talk but longer and with more of a focus on GNOME – the thrust of the talk being that software has become critical to our lives and to our society and that since free and open source software is safer over time, we must make it usable so that we can build a bridge to ordinary users. I loved being able to talk about GNOME’s accessibility campaign in this context too. I hope that folks who listened to the talk will give to the campaign so we can make real headway on accessibility.

I was totally overwhelmed with the responses to my keynote. The twitter stream was amazing, but I especially loved the fact that folks were saying that they now want to hack on GNOME after my talk. GNOME developers should be proud about what they’re doing. They’re really making the world a better place. I’m so glad to be able to represent and support the community.

This point was underscored by Jacob Applebaum in his keynote (which was amazing but I think hasn’t been posted yet). He of course talked about security, our governments and ways that we can protect ourself against surveillance. He made great points and I learned quite a lot from his talk. In his conclusion, Jake made several calls for action, including hacking on GNOME (I was particularly proud that he quoted me as saying “the Guh in GNOME is for freedom”). He suggested we build Tor as a default into our desktop to promote more secure web use, and I think that’s a really fabulous idea. One of the problems that we have with improving security generally is getting ordinary people to understand why it’s important and how to implement it. GNOME could be the perfect place for this, as our community understands these issues and is skilled at making beautiful software that is accessible and easy to use.

It may be silly, but thanks to Jake and also Paul Fenwick who got all the crickets out of my room the night before my talk so I could prep and sleep!

I also met with a few reporters and will link to other articles if they wind up getting published.

Kudos to the LCA2012 team, especially Josh Stewart and Kathy Reid. The conference was well organized, interesting and fun. Thanks for bringing me to Australia!

what I’ve been up to this week

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With the holidays behind us, I was happy to get back in the full swing of things this week. In no particular order and among other things, this past week I…

  • sent interview questions to Daniel Siegel about GNOME participation in Google’s summer of code for our biannual report. I also have been working on my introduction for the report. Emily Gonyer and Juanjo Marin have been great about working on the report. Dave Neary and Marina Zhurakhinskaya have contributed content too!
  • sent some catch up emails to a few of GNOME’s advisory board members.
  • finalized my travel arrangements to Australia for AdaCamp Melbourne and linux.conf.au. I leave on Wednesday and I’m quite excited for both events! If you’re going to be at either event, come say hi – I’d love to see you. Now I just need to finish my talks…
  • evaluated and discussed proposals for the legal issues and policy devroom I’m helping to coordinate at FOSDEM with Tom Marble, “Bradley Kuhn and Richard Fontana. Tom in particular has really been doing a tremendous amount of work on making sure the day is well scheduled and goes off without a hitch! Also, it looks like we’re going to have a marketing meeting at FOSDEM as well. Let me know if you’re going to be there and would like to participate.
  • recorded an oggcast with Bradley for Free as In Freedom. We’ve just released the last episode in which we talk about the devroom. The one we recorded this week was inspired by my anticipation of AdaCamp (but you’ll have to wait until the amazing Dan Lynch puts the show together).
  • dealt with some trademark related things with Justin Colannino at SFLC. A thousand thanks to Justin for all of his hard work on GNOME matters as he transitions out of SFLC.
  • worked with Christy Eller and Juanjo on nominating GNOME for the Computerworld Honors program, which is great because we’re putting together materials that I hope can be turned into grant applications. I’ve loved how fun the #marketing channel has become!
  • talked with a couple of members of the a11y team, about the ongoing campaign and other things. I am so inspired by their commitment to accessibility.
  • helped Rosanna with updating the retirement plan that the Foundation has, mostly to fix a hilarious typo. It’s funny – the last time I looked at the legal documents for the plan I was at SFLC.
  • started working on my own six month report to the board. It’s great to think of my time at GNOME from a general perspective, and I think it will focus me on what’s important in the months to come.
  • did a bunch of pro bono work for Conservancy, as they’ve had a lot going on and are coming up on their audit deadline very soon.

Make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!

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I’m incredibly excited – today we launched a fundraising campaign for accessibility work on GNOME. Accessibility is so important, and it’s exactly the kind of software that must be free and open. It’s also the kind of group effort that is well suited for nonprofit free software development – truly making software for the public good. Check out the information about the campaign and especially read Robert Cole’s story.

I’ve been so moved by the dedication of the a11y team. I hope we raise a lot of money so they can tackle all of their goals to improve GNOME’s accessibility. Please donate to the campaign now and tell your friends! I can think of no better way to get into the holiday spirit!

My recent activities

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I’ve been a bit remiss at posting, due to my travel schedule (and more recently thanksgiving with relatives from out of town and the like). Last week I went to Latvia to keynote at the LATA conference in Riga. Perhaps not surprisingly to readers here, I spoke (in English) about software freedom and how the software that we should consider essential has expanded considerably. GNOME of course features into that prominently. You can see the video of the talk here. Thanks so much to Rūdolfs Mazurs, who in addition to filming the talk, sat next to me during most of the conference and translated from Latvian! He was such a good translator that I was even able to ask questions and feel fully engaged in the sessions. It was an exciting conference, and I was glad to hear folks who are active with free software in Latvia say in their talks that “GNOME Shell is the future”.

Not too long before LATA, I was able to attend UDS in Orlando. It was a very interesting conference, and I was sponsored by Canonical to attend. I had quite a number of productive meetings with GNOME and Canonical folks there and particularly enjoyed getting to know some of the Ubuntu community members who are not Canonical affiliated. I had a few thoughts that came out of attending UDS that I hope to give their own posts.

While at UDS, I interviewed Adam Dingle from Yorba for the Free as in Freedom oggcast. We talked about free software nonprofits, software freedom generally and the great work that Yorba is doing (you probably know them from their Shotwell photo manager software).

I also interviewed Stefano Zacchiroli, the DPL of Debian. That episode was just released today. We talked about Debian, GNOME and copyleft, and there’s a discussion about the interview with me and Bradley as well.

I’ve also been mentoring a few tasks for Google’s Code-in. I was happy to help GNOME get accepted to the program and now we’re starting to see the benefits. Thanks to Andre Klapper for all of his ongoing hard work!

While on the road I helped Marina to organize and get ready to announce the new round of participants in the Outreach Program for Women. We were able to include 12 participants this time, in a wide range of areas! I’m particularly excited, as I’m also a mentor for one of the participants. The actual work for the program begins in a couple of weeks, when you’ll start to see a lot of activity on the Planet from these ladies. It was a privilege to work with the sponsors of the program to solidify the announcement: A thousand thank yous to Google, Mozilla, Collabora, Red Hat and the GNOME Foundation itself.

I’m very happy to be home and not travelling for the next few weeks – there’s so much to be done! In particular, I’m looking forward to announcing a new Friends of GNOME program…

Sugar Labs Hackfest

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Walter Bender wrote me today to report that the Sugar Labs hackfest this weekend in Prague was a success. He says, “… while we are not finished, we made great headway on converting Sugar to GTK3 and PYGI. We are on track to make Sugar be GNOME 3.0 compatible in time for our next release.”

You can also read the three day report of the hackfest posted by rgs

Good work, Sugar Labs team!