June 22, 2007
gnome
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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.
June 18, 2007
marketing, openwengo
3 Comments
I got back to Lyon on Saturday evening after 3 days in Martigues (sun, sea, sand) and a quick trip to the “Journées du Libre à Montpellier” 2007 – a local conference organised by the ALL (Association des Logiciels Libres).
It was a very nice conference – apart from the small detail that they forgot me. Well, all’s well that ends well.
I had a nice meal & conversation on Friday evening with some members of the association (lightning struck twice – I was forgotten again) and other invited guests (who weren’t forgotten).
I was especially impressed by the president of the association, who is a fan of martial arts – he is a 1st dan black belt in Aikido and Kendo (which is his favourite) as well as having skillz in jujitsu and judo.
So I forgave him for forgetting me.
I learned the difference between a “jitsu” (dangerous) and a “do” (less dangerous).
For example, “Kenjitsu” was the art of sabre fighting, “Kendo” is the art of fighting with bamboo sticks. “Jujitsu” is a vicious fighting style with kicks, punches, chokes & holds, and “judo” just keeps the holds.
On Saturday, I caught up with Frédéric Couchet and Pascal Chevreul, from APRIL and Mozilla respectively, and saw Richard Stallman give a presentation on free software in French.
I was also very pleased to meet Thierry Stoer from formats-ouverts.org for the first time, after several email conversations.
My presentation of the WengoPhone in the demo space attracted a nice crowd and went pretty well – VoIP is a big topic at the moment and lots of people wanted to know how to hook their home Asterisk up to the Wengo service, or how to make video calls. A nice feature people seemed interested in was the file transfer (which is funny, since it’s not one of those features I use a lot, or consider important) and having a real phone number for people to call you on your VoIP phone.
The presentation afterwards got a lot more attention that me – someone showed off all of the free software games that are available these days, from Neverball and X-Moto through FPS games and flight sims, and brought people up from the crowd to show off. Good fun.
After my presentation I gave a short interview with FreeNews and Divergence FM, media partners for the event. I’ll post links when they have it online.
June 13, 2007
General
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Many thanks to Pascal K. of ALL in Montpellier – they’re going to fit me in somewhere for the Journées du Libre on Saturday in the “Espace demo”. I don’t know where, but I’ll be there.
June 12, 2007
francais, marketing, openwengo, work
1 Comment
I was going to blog about my demo/presentation of OpenWengo at the Journées du Libre à Montpellier, but it seems like I’m not on the agenda, in spite of having had a session accepted.
I don’t know whether I’ll still go or not – but I’m a bit annoyed about being forgotten.
June 12, 2007
wengo, work
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My bosses at Wengo have organised a few days away for everyone in the company to relax together, get to know each other outside work, announce some news and generally pamper us a little – I’m not one to complain about a little pampering.
For these few days, I will not be reading my email. I’ll be back in the normal world with internet access on Saturday.
In the meantime, I’ve packed swimming togs, sports gear, sandals, … all I need now is a good storm & I’ll be set.
June 8, 2007
General, running
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I’m back running – made just over 48 minutes in the 10k run in Lyon, with a little pain, at the end of April, and I’m now able to do a 5k training session at a good speed with almost no pain at all. Just finishing up physio, and hopefully I’ll be able to ramp up to running 3 times a week for about 20km total in a few weeks. The day I run for an hour with no after effects, I’ll be a happy man.
For those interested, I saw a chiropractor who gave me some good training tips (don’t over-train, mix low-impact sports like swimming & cycling until you have more distance under your belt) and who thought that the root cause of my injury was probably the fact that I was wearing shoes which corrected against pronation, while it appears I don’t need them. So I also got a new pair of runners for €120 – the most expensive footwear I’ve ever bought.
