Safe as Milk

The GNOME Foundation is hiring

October 17, 2006 1:35 pm Dave Neary gnome

I announced a couple of days ago the availability of a position working for the GNOME Foundation. It’s an interesting position, I think, and worth explaining a bit further.

The foundation’s director of business development is the person who will generate revenues for the foundation. For the past few years, the foundation’s budget have been languishing around $150,000 to $200,000, which is enough to pay the wages and expenses of the executive director, and to organise GUADEC.

This year, we’ve made some progress, and the accounts for 2005/2006 should be close to $300,000 – thanks to some new advisory board members, a couple of very generous donations, and a very successful sponsorship drive for GUADEC.

This means that we’re able to move from one employee to one and a half – a part-time position to deal with administrative issues, and a full-time position to concentrate on further developing our budget, and managing that budget.

Some of the ideas that I have had for things we could do with more money are:

• Hire a systems administrator
• Hire a bugmaster to co-ordinate with downstream distributions
• Hire a community facilitator to co-ordinate the work of user groups and ensure communication between groups and companies
• Get GNOME documentation professionally edited and published
• Invest heavily in GNOME t-shirts, merchandising, posters and hand-out printing for GNOME conference presence

Note that none of these positions generate code – it is my opinion that it’s not appropriate for the GNOME Foundation to hire coders. However, hiring people who help make our coders more productive, and makes our community a nicer place to be, is a good investment.

The types of avenues that I hope our director of bizdev will be exploring are government grants, partnerships with companies using and developing on GNOME, and relationships with public sector organisations worldwide.

The GNOME brand itself isn’t very visible to end-users, but it is of strategic importance to all major desktop distributors, and has a great reputation and a cult following. The director of business development will help us build on that reputation, and will give us the tools necessary to make the GNOME platform great for ISDs, and the desktop great for everyone from the public sector to the free software hacker.