Safe as Milk

Busy December…

I’m going to have a busy busy month of December.

La Fête des Lumières

I’ve written about the Festival of Light in Lyon before, and it’s coming around again. I’m going to bring the boys into Lyon with over 1 million other people to walk around cold streets looking at light shows on some of Lyon’s best known landmarks. This year will be bigger than ever, with a €2 000 000 budget, and I have had a sneak preview of some of the installations from training runs on the riverbanks of the Rhône and in Parc de la Tête d’Or. The light shows are always interesting, sometimes a little arty, often spectacular. This year, I would like to bring everyone up to the top of Fourvière to have a view of the entire city.

MAPOS 08

First up, next week I’ll be in London to give a presentation at MAPOS (nothing to do with cartography), the Mobile Application Platforms in Open Source conference. My presentation is titled “Increasing Ecosystem Cooperation”, and will be at 15:30 on Tuesday afternoon.

I will talk about the need for companies building on free software to make mobile application platforms to work actively to develop that platform. I hope to get the message across that building on free software is not a client-supplier relationship, but is more like a research grant or R&D function.

Companies in this space are used to surveying the market, choosing the best solution, and then paying for it, so that some third party will keep improving it. The integrator model which many distributions use, of modifying the basic building blocks according to your needs, and sending changes up-stream after they have been developed, is an intermediate model, which has both positive and negative sides. But what we really need is an active co-development, with companies building on our platform investing R&D dollars into targeted co-operation across multiple companies, to address coherently a problem space (such as the needs of mobile platforms).

GNOME Foundation members are entitled to a 15% discount on registration, for those thinking of going.

Bibliothèque Municipal de Lyon

On the evening of the 12th, I will be participating with a panel including some people from Handicap International’s Centre icom which I visited a few weeks ago. I will be presenting GNOME’s accessibility capabilities to a seminar on Information Technology and Handicap both to show its power and also to advertise its freedom (philosophical and financial) compared to proprietary programs like Jaws.

Christmas run

On the 14th, I’ll be in Aix les Bains, running in the Corrida des Lumières with a bunch of my club-mates from the AAAL – since running 39’10 last month in a 10k, I’ve been hyped about running another competition. I’ve been training well, and Christmas runs are always fun with mulled wine & dinner afterwards.

GUADEC co-ordination

Along with Vincent Untz, I’ll be flying out to Las Palmas on the 15th (oh how life is hard) to meet with Alberto Ruiz (for GNOME), the Gran Canaria Cabildo (the local government), and the KDE eV board members co-ordinating the conference from their end. We’ll be testing out the cheaper hotel accommodation option for the conference (I hope there will also be a “very low budget” option like a youth hostel or a campsite), meeting with local volunteers, and resolving the major issues we need to work out before we ramp up the next phase of the organisation – gathering and scheduling conference content.

Judo

Thomas started Judo this year, and he loves it. I have stayed around after bringing him a couple of times, and the warm-up they do is certainly fun, but challenging. On the 17th of December, Thomas will be having his end-of-year competition, the first time he’ll be in a Judo competition. It’s a bit of fun, really – and yet I hope that introducing an aspect of competition into the activity doesn’t in some way ruin it for him.

Christmas skiing

As usual, Christmas will be on the 25th of December this year. Last year we were in Ireland, but this year we’re going to celebrate with just the family, and the kids will get to wake up in their own beds.  On the 27th, Anne, the kids and myself are going to go into the Alps to meet up with the rest of her family for a week. We’re hopefully going to get in some skiing, go walking in the woods, eat too much, drink too much, and be very merry indeed. It’ll be my second time celebrating the new year in the mountains, and with the cold & the snow it feels like Christmas in the films. I love it.

Go

When Lefty wrote about trying to get a particular type of brush in Japan,the intricacy of the detail of the story made me think of Go. Go is an ancient game with a small number of simple rules, which result in a game of deep complexity and beauty, and a handicap system which allows unevenly matched players to play competitive games.

It is a game steeped in the kind of tradition that Lefty talks about – professional Go tournaments are played on goban cut from a particular type of rare wood, with white stones made from the carved and polished shells of a specific type of clam, gathered on a single beach in Japan, and the black stones being made from slate mined in a single mine. The Go board is elongated, just enough to make it appear square when you are sitting in front of it, and the size of the black and white stones are slightly different, to compensate the visual impression of white stones appearing larger.

I’m back playing regularly (mostly, unfortunately, with GNU Go, who is more than a match for me on bigger boards) and have taught Thomas the basics. He’s caught on surprisingly rapidly – he’s up to the stage where he can beat me in a 9×9 game with 4 stones. Go is a very intuitive, rather than analytical, game, and some of the key concepts like influence, “good shape”, life and death are quite abstract, making it a game that children can “get” quicker than adults.

I’ve also found parallels between the ebb and flow of a Go game and free market economics. The core principle that the goal is not to kill your enemy, but simply to reduce his territory while protecting yours through strategically placing your stones to create influence and strength, matches closely my ideas of how markets work.

Phew! That’s a lot of “stuff”.

Handicap International Centre icom’

Friday afternoon I went along to Handicap International’s Centre icom’ here in Lyon, to see what they do first hand, to talk to the people there, and to figure out if there was any way that GNOME could be working better with people like them.

Handicap International, like all of the other groups I have talked to involved in bringing IT to people with disabilities – or indeed to anyone who doesn’t know computing very well – have a natural affinity with Free Software. First, for its price – equivalent proprietary software is expensive. But also for the philosophy of Universal Access that is so important to the GNOME project – that everyone should be able to access IT, regardless of their culture, or their physical or technical ability.

Handicap International Centre icom

We had a great afternoon, including role-playing. I played a deaf person who could lip-read, it was eye-opening to see how long it took for people to realise what my handicap was, when a few extra minutes taken at the start of the session would have helped a lot.  We got to try lots of AT, including a golf-cap with a metal tip for controlling the mouse with head movements, and a software face-tracker that worked with an ordinary webcam, both of which brought home just how hard using a computer is if you can’t use a mouse (we used both with dwell-clicking enabled).

It was surprising to see how little specific AT hardware there was – all the PCs were normal, and 90% of what the Centre does is set up preferences, and where necessary use specialised software.

One other thing was surprising – in spite of being aware of Dasher, there is no-one in the center that uses it – they prefer the on-screen keyboard. I wonder if there isn’t room for a dialogue there – and I would definitely like to hear from people using Dasher for actual data entry, to see in what situations it’s adopted.

Things to learn for GNOME?

Having made a donation previously to Medecins Sans Frontieres, I occasionally receive mail from them solliciting donations. After one year when I didn’t give anything, I received a letter asking if I was unhappy with MSF and the work they were doing, with a detailed presentation of their major actions, and today, just in time for the end of the year, I received another mailing asking if I wanted to give again this year.

The entire mailing fascinated me, especially their donation form.

Medecins sans Frontieres

There was a bunch of stuff I found interesting about this. The letter emphasised that MSF gets very little public funding, and that 99.6% of its funding comes from private benefactors. I got a small glossy newsletter highlighting some of the most important work the organisation has done over the year, and on the donation form itself, there is a suggested amount of €200, which I thought was a bit high. But beside it, they talk about what they can do with that, and how much the donation will really cost you if you pay taxes (and most people do) – in short, if you give €100 to MSF, you’re actually giving them €25 of your own money, and €75 which you would otherwise be paying in taxes.

In other words, they simultaneously speak to your heart and your pocket. Nice work. In addition, they include a postage-paid envelope for you to return your donation. It’s as easy as write a cheque, put it in an envelope, post, done. Having to address the envelope and search for a stamp are barriers to donations, so they take them away.

They also include a brochure for their line of Christmas cards – another money-maker which is also free viral marketing for them. Every occasion is good for raising money for a good cause.

While the GNOME Foundation and MSF are very different organisations, I think there are lessons to learn for the foundation across the board here. We need to keep track of former donors and remind them why they gave, what we’re doing, and ask them to give again. We need to make it as easy as possible, within our means, for them to give. And we need to elaborate the value proposition: what do we do with the money, what good work are you supporting?

These are all things which we’ve been doing, or have done partially, in the past, but seeing all of the steps put together in a simple, nice package really brought home to me how much we need to leverage our donors – they’re people who believe so much in us that they’ve given money, and they can be our best ambassadors.

Motorola and Google join the GNOME Foundation advisory board

Big news yesterday! Motorola and Google joined the GNOME Foundation advisory board.

Just let that sink in a little…

Google and Motorola are two huge companies, showing support for, and confidence in, the GNOME project. While it might be possible to dismiss Google’s participation as just helping us out, it’s interesting to see what Christy Wyatt has to say about GNOME and Motorola’s strategy: “For mobile Linux, Motorola believes in open standards and open source technologies”.

What this implies to me is that while Motorola may be trending towards Android for their next generation of smart phones, they’re going to be keeping the MotoMagx option open, even as they turn away from LiMo. Perhaps a small strategic skunkworks project, pottering away and keeping an eye on how things develop?

In any case, I welcome Motorola to the foundation, and I hope that we have a long and fruitful collaboration.

Call to release team: Open shop on GNOME 3.0 planning!

vuntz has blogged today about some of the brainstorming that has come out of the Summit this year – and that’s great. The Summit’s an important chance to get a lot of focussed work done.

It’s a start on the road to a GNOME 3.0, but it’s not enough. what I’d like to see happen now, if the Release Team (and indeed the GNOME community) is serious about implementing a two-step 4/4 beat in the project, where every 2 to 3 years we have a major version, and we continue with our 6 month drives, then we need to get serious about co-ordinating those major feature arcs.

I’ve discussed this a few times in private, but nothing’s been announced – so as I threatened to do at the JDLL, here’s what I think that the release team should do: Open a consultation period when the community proposes major themes/feature arcs for the desktop – proposals might be conservative or ambitious, it doesn’t matter. They should be realistic, but exciting and over-arching.

Some examples I can think of are “Integrate with web services where appropriate” – and give examples of the web services and applications in question – or “Make contacts first class objects” – and show the interface for this, how we start to depend on libsoylent, various applications that include presence, more than just throwing out an idea, getting concrete about what needs to be done for the feature arc.

After the (short) consultation period, the release team announces the theme for GNOME 3.0, consults with the various maintainers concerned to ensure we’re all on the same page, and that major features are added to the mid-term roadmaps of all the applications concerned. And then magic happens, code gets written, and we have a major new feature arc for our desktop in 1 to 2 years time.

Rinse, repeat, every 2 years or so – in the run-up to a major release, we pick a new major feature arc and drive for that. In the absence of this kind of co-ordination, we will continue to have the kind of piecemeal progress that we’ve seen over the past few years – all our apps are improving, the GNOME experience is better than ever, but we don’t have a story to tell.

GNOME at JDLL 2008

It’s been a quiet day in GNOMEland here in Lyon. Not too many people around the JDLLs this year – hopefully things will be more lively tomorrow, and some lessons will be learned for the organisation for next year.

I finally got some A1 & A2 posters printed up that look very nice, if I may say so myself – special credit to artists & contributors andreasn, mizmo & zagorskid for the material.

Fredp, looking zen, at JDLL 08 in Lyon

Along with some “Why choose GNOME?” hand-outs, a Nokia N810, Nokia N800, a couple of laptops, and fredix, Dodji fredp and myself, the stand is looking not too shabby – could be better, could be worse. Tomorrow Dodji will be gone, but vuntz will be here.

Last chance to vote in Maemo Community Council election

The Maemo community council election has been running for 5 days now, and voting closes at midnight Wednesday – I’ll be announcing the new council (subject to any contestations, protests, etc) on Thursday the 11th, one week before the Maemo community gets to meet in person in Berlin for the Maemo Summit.

If you think you should have a ballot, and you haven’t received one last Wednesday, please drop me a line.

If you have received a ballot and haven’t voted yet, please do so – there is only a little more than 2 days left to the election closing.

While I’m talking about the election, I’d like to thank GNOME for the election software we stole^Wborrowed and got working^W^Ware using for the election. I hope that the instructions which I wrote for the module are useful, and end up getting included in the foundation-web module.

Thanks also to Henri Bergius from Nemein, who got the software installed and has been my hands and eyes for the past few days on  a server to which I don’t have access.

Live from OSCON

OSCON has been pretty cool this year so far. It’s been really weird, since I haven’t been in North America too often in the past, and this is my first ORA conference, to be meeting people I’ve exchanged email with for years in the corridors, and bumping into people that I’ve been hearing about for ages. There’s also a decent scattering of people I already knew, too. Far too many to name individually without leaving people out & insulting somebody…

I arrived on Friday, and to help get over jet-lag, I decided to go out for an hour-long run. After losing all sense of orientation, and going North when I thought I was going East, that ended up being a 2 hour run.  Which was nice.

Over the weekend, the FLOSS Foundations group met, and we talked about lots of stuff – accounting, membership, CRM & donor management software that non-profits can use (there isn’t any that works well enough), merging foundations, and how umbrella foundations work (targeted funding, etc), best practices for dealing with donors (big and small), merchandising, CLAs, trademark policies, and a really interesting discussion on university outreach, the creation, aggregation & distribution of open course materials and university outreach.

All in all, a very valuable 2 days.

On Monday, I attended OMX, the first edition of the Open Mobile Exchange. Myself & Paul Cooper stepped in at the last minute to give a tag-team presentation on GNOME Mobile which went, to my mind, very well. Having 2 people was great, because it meant that all of the things we wanted to say got said (usually I end up being quite non-linear and saying “oh, earlier, I forgot to mention…”, with Paul that didn’t happen). There was a decent amount of GNOME Mobile presence in any case – Jim Zemlin had nice things to say about us, and Jenny Minor from Vernier and Lefty Schlessinger from Access gave presentations from the perspective of a device manufacturer and a platform developer.

Tuesday was a quiet day for me – finally got to have quality phone time with Anne, and attended the Maemo sprint meeting on IRC before eating with Stormy – we talked about a couple of cool things I’ve been working on for the past two days that I hope to be able to announce in the next few days.

All in all, a great conference, social & work merged, mixed, mashed, and with a spot of early-morning running & Tour de Francing.Happy happy joy joy.

Tonight: RedMonk beer tastes Good.

To stir or not to stir?

That is the question…

I am honoured to have become the latest GNOME personality to catch the eye of Sam Varghese.

Sam feels I was unfair in my characterisation of him as a “shock jock”. He may be right… he says himself that the definition of a shock jock is “a slang term used to describe a type of radio broadcaster (sometimes a disc jockey) who attracts attention using humor (sic) that a significant portion of the listening audience may find offensive.” Clearly, since Sam’s not funny, I was unfair. Sorry Sam.

I take issue with Sam’s massive leap (which reminds me of when my maths professors used to say “obviously it follows…” at the end of complicated theorems) when he says that I “have to fight the perception that any of [our] major sponsors is making nice noises to the other camp”.

First, as I have told Sam on numerous occasions when he contacts us for answers to leading questions, we do not think of KDE as “the other camp”. Second, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t exactly avoid a perception that he’s a fan of KDE. Later in the same article, he says that he thinks that KDE have got a nice rate of development going, and are driving innovation better than GNOME. He’s the first top-paying member of KDE eV, which is roughly the same amount of money annually as Canonical gives to GNOME.

And Mark’s not alone. Nokia are sponsors of both Akademy and GUADEC, as well as investing heavily in both GNOME (through Maemo) and QT (and paying the wages of some KDE developers).

What Sam has trouble understanding is that I have an issue with sloppy journalism. I like the KDE developers, we get on well, and I’ve done a lot of work bridging gaps between projects – whether it be through the organisation of Libre Graphics Meeting or FOSTEL, or my participation in the FLOSS Foundations group, or the numerous conversations I have with KDE board members about any number of subjects (including Akademy & GUADEC colocating).

So when Sam sets me up as a shill, or as someone who has a problem with KDE (or considers them competitors) he’s ignoring a body of evidence that suggests otherwise. But then, with Sam, that’s par for the course.

Off to OSCon

I only just got home Friday evening, and after a weekend with the family, and 3 working days this week, I’m off again to OSCon, for the first time. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing some familiar faces 🙂 I’m currently posting this blog entry (which I wrote on the airport) in room 640 of the Doubletree (anyone who’s reading this & wants to grab a bite tonight, ring me at +33 677 019 213).

On Saturday and Sunday, I’ll be helping run the FLOSS Foundations meeting, then on Monday I’ll be helping out a bit with the Open Mobile Exchange day. I may take Tuesday as a relaxing/working day before the conference proper, where I’ll be giving the State of GNOME lightning talk on Thursday morning.

My main reason for going to OSCon, though, is to meet people who might be interested in availing of my consulting services. As someone who’s recently set up shop, but who has worked with free software communities for many years, I feel I’m well positioned to help companies save money by working better with communities they depend on. It benefits everyone.

My services go from presentations to managers & directors, training of developers in the dynamics of a given community and how best to work with them, to on-site consulting on specific issues like free software governance, community management and integrating free software best practises into your development team.

The transition from closed shop to free software participant is complex, and often underestimated. I can help make it easier.

I don’t much like banging my own drum on my syndicated blog, but I figure that I don’t do it very often, so… if you need someone like this, drop me a line.