Safe as Milk

Mad Props Eitan and Brad

During SCALE, Eitan Isaacson and Brad Taylor were demo animals on the GNOME stand (photo shamelessly linked from Scott Ruecker’s LXer article series) – I failed miserably to make good on my promise to spend at least a half-day on the stand – in the end, I was there for about an hour showing off the N800’s Jingle video call capability with Eitan, and demoing Dasher’s text input reasonably successfully.

At the end of Sunday, I was caught up jabbering away to people, and didn’t even get a chance to clean up the stand & say goodbye.

So – thanks Eitan and Brad, and goodbye 🙂 See you both next year?

Update: I found a nicer picture (with me in it) from Celeste Paul of KDE-usability – we had a nice chat and messed about with the Nokia N800s we had quite a bit. Yes, I know I need a haircut, no need to remind me.

Help us budget for user groups!

I just sent a request for proposals from user groups to the gugmasters mailing list. The board needs to know how much help user groups need for the year to budget properly, and although we will leave some slack for ad hoc last minute requests, having lots of info up-front will be very useful.

Anyone working with a user group who would like to make a proposal should sign up to the gugmasters list today, and help us out. Thank you!

Free Software World Conference, Badajoz, Extremadura, 7 – 9 February 2007

Without much ado, the Free Software World Conference has been getting itself together for next year. The conference will take place in Badajoz (updated) in Extremadura (the home of LinEx) on the border with Portugal. The dates are set for the 7th to the 9th of February.

It might be a hard place to get to, but the conference got such a good review last year and the year before that I’m hoping to go. But with SCALE happening on the 10th and the 11th, that might be hard to pull off.

The Call for Papers is open (but only available in Spanish at the moment) until the 15th of January. It would be really great to have some GNOME oriented presentations there. I have no doubt that José Angel is already on the case 😉

Brasil – first impressions

It’s my first visit to Brasil, I’m still in Sao Paolo airport, and my first impressions are not yet made.

My first impressions of airports have been made for years, though, and nothing here changes any of my experience-driven broad generalisations.

“Duty Free” booze in Paris was more expensive than the same stuff in the superstore – they made up for it by having a good range of €100 – €500 collector bottles. Meh.

I bought a beer here in Sao Paolo airport, and paid twice what I would outside the airport (6 reals), and have spent 40 reals on international call cards and 20 reals on 2 hours wifi.

The exchange rate is somewhere between 2.30 and 3.00 reals per euro, depending on how badly you’re getting fleeced by the bureau de change, and whether you’re buying or selling euros. So taking 2.50 and a rough rate, that’s 8 euros for 2 hours wifi – which is expensive anywhere, never mind in Brasil. And I can’t figure out how to find an SMTP server I can send mail through.

Am I the only one who finds the mentality of fleecing international air travelers at every opportunity is really counter-productive? Surely places would like to make a good first impression? How about doing away with airport surcharges for taxis, and making an airport discount for anyone coming off an international flight?

I just found out that because of a last-minute conference rescheduling, I’ll be giving a keynote at Latinoware – talk about adding pressure. I tested the new laptop (a Dell D420, which does indeed rock once you get the widescreen sorted) with a CRT behind it, and it didn’t work too well – I’m hoping that by stopping the 915resolution hack at boot and constraining it to 1024×768 the projector will work. If not, I have not yet completely removed windows, dual boot to the rescue.

Latinoware 2006

Next week, I will be in Foz do Iguaçu in Brasil, to attend Latinoware 2006. I will be giving a conference on how and why we do free software – not so much from a technical point of view, but from a human perspective. It will be pretty similar to the presentation I gave last month in Lyon at les Journées du Logiciels Libres in Lyon, France.

This will be my first time in Brasil, and I am very excited about it – I hope I get a chance to go and see the falls – I’ve heard great things about the Devil’s Throat. I’d also love to get a chance (but I don’t think I’ll have time) to take in Itaipu, the world’s second largest hydro-electric power station after the Three Gorges in China, and a big GNOME user.

Mozilla marketing (follow-up)

I got some interesting responses to my post yesterday, most of which missed my point.

Talking about freedom, choice and community does not equate to preaching. Nor does it necessarily equate to talking about Open Source or Free software. When I say we should be talking about freedom & choice, I’m talking about the *user’s* freedom & choice, not the developer’s.

My favourite Firefox Flicks entry was “Daredevil”. Whee was fun, all the ones talking about spyware and privacy or viruses were OK, but the one that got me was the one that concentrated on a value – user freedom.

Think of all the car ads which associate their product with freedom. Even Microsoft use the concept of freedom with their “realize your potential” ad campaign.

Ignoring such a powerful concept, which we *own*, seems to me like suicide. “We’re the nicer browser to use” will work for a while, but one day that may well not be the case (especially since it’s a subjective question, and Microsoft has a bigger marketing budget). And when that day comes, Mozilla will start losing share, unless people have established an emotional link with Firefox.

Are we really not smart enough to come up with a good way to make a free software user feel free? Or to present ourselves as the champions of choice? Is there really no value in trying to make a Firefox user feel like part of a greater community?

"The Message: Practicality and Usability more important than Open Source"

Mozilla Firefox 2 marketing will focus on functionality and the chase for market share, rather than the fact that it’s free software.

I am not the only one who is disturbed by this strategy. That’s not because I’m a free software zealot, but because I think it’s a losing game.

To win this battle, we need to speak to people’s souls – if we only concentrate on the surface, then Microsoft will win – they will add more functionality, make IE more usable, build a better browser the way they did in 1997 and 1998. Mozilla can always cry the pyrrhic victory – “we restored choice on the internet” – but once their market share starts to go down, they will have lost – because that’s how they’ve chosen to play the game.

If, on the other hand, we concentrate on values that Microsoft don’t have, and can’t compete on, then we will capture hearts, and market share will follow. Freedom, choice, open standards, community – these values will generate passion. Will they disturb some people? Sure. But you can’t win ’em all. An ounce of passion is worth more than a pound of mediocrity.

550

There’s nothing like lots of new people tasting freedom for the first time to get your day started. DAM brings us the story of a migration of part of a French group to GNOME-based thin-clients. 550 clients being served by 10 servers.

And thanks to the wonderful work that has been done recently to make free software applications cross-platform, even the people who have to use Windows on their laptops get to join in the fun, using Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.

Getting up and running with a CRM

We have lots of contacts we need to organise – friends of GNOME, journalists, distributions, user groups, governments, deployments, ISDs, ourselves, and people whose paths we cross from time to time – people from other projects, or employees of big GNOME users, or previous keynote invitees.

I’ve worked out the main usecases for a CRM system for GNOME – using it for anything outside this would be excessive.

• Adding a new CRM administrator or user
• Importing an address-book, and filtering GNOME contacts from non-GNOME contacts
• Adding a new contact
• Associating a new event (IM conversation or mail) with a contact
• Receiving a notification when a contact you’re related to has some new content added (being able to watch people or groups of people)
• Associate people with events (centralise information about user-group participation in events)

There may be others I haven’t thought of – that’s what blog comments are for 😉

So far, the feedback I’ve received says “don’t use SugarCRM if you value your sanity, CiviCRM is where it’s at”. As a non-connaisseur, I’m going to probably take that advice, unless there are othr recommendations that people might have that I should consider.

I would love something which had a possibility to integrate with desktop apps (mail, contacts, IM) via a web service API, but that’s not a requirement.

A problem I’ve thought a bit about is what the default level of visibility for a non-privileged user should be. I would like to have 3 levels of security – anonymous users see some stuff (names & events, but not email addresses, for example), authentified users can add contacts and events, and see everything, and administrators can add new users. Anything more than that seems overly complex.

Anyone have experiences with CiviCRM – or anything else – which they’d like to share? Is there anything we’d like to do which isn’t available?

The Marketing BOF – summary

I finally got around to writing up my notes from the marketing BOF during GUADEC – they’re pretty scattered, and not an exact transcription of my notes. I started off with a from-memory outline of the main things we talked about, loosely organised, and then fleshed bits out from my notes when they needed it.

I would greatly appreciate feedback on this, as well as volunteers for some of the tasks suggested in there (such as setting up a CRM for contact management, and teaching enough people how to use it that it reaches critical mass – bonus points if it integrates with Evo and Thunderbird).

On a related note, there are a few biggish conferences coming up in the US in coming months where a GNOME presence is either confirmed or desirable – Ohio Linuxfest, SIGGRAPH, LinuxWorld San Francisco and OSCon. For the moment, we don’t have volunteers to organise a stand for Ohio, SF or Portland, and we need volunteers for SIGGRAPH (particularly if you’re a talented GIMP artist who can do a snazzy 15 minute demo). So come on down, GNOME marketing needs you.

Update: Ohio Linuxfest is taken care of thanks to Patrick Wagstrom, our man in Columbus (Patrick, why aren’t you on the GNOME map yet?).