Some things I’ve been up to

speaking, stuffdone, thankyous 1 Comment

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

what I’ve been up to this week

stuffdone 1 Comment

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 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.