Safe as Milk

Foundations summit

Tomorrow morning, I will be flying to Amsterdam for the foundations summit – a meeting of representatives of a bunch of free software based non-profits. So far, the Motley Bunch of organisations who will be represented are:

• GNOME Foundation
• The Perl Foundation
• Blender Foundation
• ObjectWeb
• Classpath
• Plone Foundation
• YAPC Europe
• OSI
• Web 2.0 (OK, Chris, you’re not a non-profit, but we love you anyway)
• Creative Commons International
• Mozilla Foundation
• Stichting NLnet
• Benetech
• Python Software Foundation
• KDE e.V.
• ASF

This is something I’ve been working on for a while now, and we deliberately kept it low-key to build up trust to talk about sensitive and confidential issues, and also to avoid a low SNR early on. But after a good start, and after over 6 months of good communication, the list is a really useful ressource, and word has started to get out – which is great.

We have a wiki, a mailing list with a growing membership, and this will be the second summit of its kind (I wasn’t at the last one).

We plan to talk about stuff which is essential to most non-profits, and which we all suck at mostly – governance, trademarks, legal frameworks, making sure the foundation fits into the community, and doesn’t try to dominate it. And also areas where we can better co-operate – on infrastructure, legal and accounting problems, for example.

Having a network of people in various organisations who are all friends and know what’s going on, and who can help solve each other’s problems, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I also plan to pop in to Bar Camp and see what those guys are up to. It should be lots of fun.

Nokia 770

I joined the growing club of people who received their Nokia 770 today. Woohoo!

I didn’t manage to get the bluetooth to work with the mac, and I don’t have wifi set up on my freebox, so for the moment there’s not much I can do with it, but that’s not going to stop me from playing.

Before and after

Before: GNOME stand 2004

After: GNOME stand 2005

What a difference a year makes.

Almost there

The petition for a referendum on board size is up to 33 signatories, just 4 shy of the 37 needed to call a referendum.

As Bill Hanneman and others pointed out on foundation-list, signing the petition doesn’t necessarily mean that you favour the change. It does mean that you feel this is an issue that should be discussed and voted by the foundation membership.

For those still wondering why this is a good idea, please have a read of the posts by Luis Villa and myself on foundation-list. Between them, they summarise a lot of the reasons why I think this will be a net positive for the foundation.

Update 11 Oct: The petition now has 43 foundation member signatories and 4 people who aren’t (yet?) members. I’ve asked Vincent Untz to put the process in motion, and we should have a calendar for this referendum this week. Thanks to all those who signed up. I will post the full list to foundation-list for completeness later today.

A recent arrival

A few days ago I got a big package in the mail…

There was a lot of stuff inside.

Here’s what the cover looks like.

And there’s two, four, six, eight, ten, eleven! whole pages dedicated to the best free software desktop experience around.

Many thanks to Fleur Brosseau at Linux Pratique for providing us with the magazines, and 50 LiveCDs that we will be giving out on the GNOME-fr stand at the JDLLs, to Marcus Bauer and Luis Villa for the huge amount of work they put into the Live CD, to Davyd Madeley for his rocking summary of the new stuff in GNOME 2.12 and to Ken Vandine and Laurent Richard for writing and translating Audio CD ripping and burning in GNOME.

Welcome, OpenedHand, Imendio, Fluendo

I’m happy today.

OpenedHand, Imendio and Fluendo have all announced that they’ve joined the GNOME Foundation advisory board.

As well as bringing new blood into that group, and with luck revitalising our communication with companies supporting GNOME, these are 3 companies which have grown out of our community – founded by GNOME hackers, thriving developing free software for and with GNOME (and, in the case of Fluendo, infrastructure for a whole platform).

In other news, Vincent Untz sent out a release announcing the creation of gnome-fr, a French non-profit to promote GNOME among French speakers. The association has massive potential. There is a really cool and vibrant community of GNOME French speakers, and I wish them (us) well.

For both these reasons, which show what’s great about the GNOME community, I’m happy today.

Keeping the rough edges

I just read this article on the “Creating Passionate Users” blog (a worthwhile read in general), and it seemed relevant to our current discussions on board size.

When people aren’t brave enough for one reason or another, ideas are morphed and the sharp edges are worn away until there’s little left but a completely palatable, utterly unlovable lump.

The most interesting thing to come out of the article is not that groups are bad (they aren’t), but that successful groups work by empowering individuals in areas where they’re strongest.

Foundation board size

For those of you who aren’t regular readers of foundation-list, I have started a petition to have a referendum on reducing the size of the board. If you agree that reworking how the board works is important, please add your name, or send me an e-mail expressing your support if you’re uncomfortable using the wiki, and I’ll add it for you.

Why is this issue important?

I believe that having 11 people on the board, with no established structure for decisions and delegation, is death to momentum. The board gets its head up its own ass regularly about very small issues – we end up discussing issues, deciding that we’ll explore the issue, and after exploration, deciding that maybe we’ll wait a while before we make a decision.

Or worse, someone mails the board with a question, and because there are so many of us, everyone things “someone else will answer that one”, and the issue drops through the cracks. In fact, I was told last night that asking for help on board-list was a bad idea, since “asking for a volunteer in a large group of people isn’t usually effective”. My point exactly.

For the foundation, and the board, to be effective, we have to be fast-moving, sleek, panther-like. So people don’t have time to do board stuff – OK, then they shouldn’t run, or we shouldn’t elect them.

Being on the board is (or should be) about disseminating information, and delegating authority. The board is there only to answer questions that no-one else can answer (“Yes, we will spend money on this”, or “No, this is not a reasonable use of our trademark”). So I think that reducing board size, and having a group of people who actually take responsibility for that, is a good thing.

Trademark issues

Was it inspiration or coincidence that Luis’s take on the conflict between trademark protection and the free software ethos should come out the day after Branden Robinson’s description of Debian’s trademark problems?