Safe as Milk

The challenges of the foundation business development hire

For those who haven’t been paying attention, the GNOME Foundation is hiring. For the past few months (seems like years) we have been actively hunting for a director of business development – someone who will help us to open doors, do fundraising, and investigate partnerships that could generate revenues for the foundation.

It’s been a long road so far, and we’re still hunting. We don’t have the resources or the experience of the Mozilla Foundation (who are also hiring), and a big part of the job so far has been spreading the word and getting in contact with appropriate candidates for the role. As with any process, our requirements have varied over time.

One controversial element of the job is that since the Foundation is an American corporation, our director of bizdev should be able to work in the US. For posterity, here’s the current draft of the job description (which needs to be added to the foundation website somewhere, without doubt):

The GNOME Foundation is an organisation created to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software.

In that role, we are looking for an individual to join us and define, implement and manage our business activities and partnerships, and fundraising activities, with the aim of generating revenue which will allow us to invest in the GNOME project and its needs. These business activities should remain consistent with the core principles of the GNOME community.

The ideal candidate will have experience with the IT industry in a business development role, will have experience defining their own agenda and working in a decentralised environment, and will understand the underlying principles and needs of a free software development community.

Interested candidates should send a résumé to board@gnome.org

If anyone reading this can think of a great candidate that we might be interested in, then I’d love to hear about it. drop us a line.