List of things the Foundation has supported/done this year

October 16, 2006 4:06 pm Dave Neary gnome

A common complaint about the GNOME Foundation and the foundation board is that people really have no idea what kind of foundation-related stuff is going on. Information comes in drips and drabs, and if you link together a series of minutes from the board meetings, you can see an outline of what we’re doing.

Much of what the board does happens on the mailing list, and we haven’t been very good at communicating that kind of activity.

A lot of what happens around the foundation doesn’t even involve the board, but comes from initiatives by foundation members or subcommittees.

So in an attempt to rectify this, here is a rough list of some of the things that the foundation has been involved with over the past year. Some of them might be surprising, others are probably taken for granted. I’m hoping that seeing the list written down will give people a better idea of what we do (which is mostly delegation).

  • GUADEC: support the GUADEC team, provide organisational infrastructure, fundraising (raised over €100,000)
  • Spent €40,000 bringing hackers to Barcelona
  • Foundation administration: Hired Zana Yuen as part-time administrator
  • Supervised Andrew Case’s public service (the first time, to my knowledge, that working on free software has been recognised as public service)
  • Co-funded a Blender/GNOME stand at SIGGRAPH
  • Funded one European and one American event box for conference participation
  • Ensured a presence in a number of free software events around the world
  • Supported local GNOME events around the world
  • Supported travel expenses for participation of GNOME hackers in some events like OSDL desktop architects summit
  • Finally got approval for the GNOME trademark
  • Create a legal working group to avoid the kind of delays we’ve seen handling legal issues in the past
  • Improve the operation of the membership committee, and get some new members on there
  • Increased the advisory board from 7 members to 14, including Nokia, Intel and Canonical
  • Finally have a decent GNOME brand book thanks to Mairin Duffy, and working towards improving GNOME’s community trademark usage guidelines
  • Organise a couple of summits
  • Contract Shaun McCance to write some documentation for ISVs
  • Launch the GNOME Mobile and Embedded initiative
  • Joined a number of new initiatives, including OSDL’s desktop architects, OSSI, the Open Source Consortium and COPU in China
  • Improve frequency and quality of interraction with the advisory board
  • Finally get a handle on the foundation’s finances
  • Establish a budget for marketing
  • Improve financial transparency
  • Start organising local user groups

Not to mention a number of other initiatives which are currently in progress, which were initiated by the foundation, or by the foundation board.

  • Contacted O’Reilly & Associates about the possibility of publishing a GNOME book for ISVs based on existing technical docs
  • Contacted merchandising companies about the creation of a GNOME store (or many GNOME stores)
  • Finally getting the website updated and streamlined
  • Working on a proposal for improved technical governance in the project
  • Initiate hire of foundation director of business development (in progress)

One Response

  1. Lefty Says:
    October 22nd, 2006 at 4:57 am

    In my six months of interactions with the Foundation and associated groups, I’ve been very impressed at the energy and vision that people are putting into this effort.

    This is a great rundown of what the Foundation’s accomplished. The Mobile/Embedded Initiative had a well-attended and productive second meeting in Boston, a lot of new and helpful attendees.

    Keep up the good work!