Safe as Milk

Non-technical GNOMEys

There has been some debate recently on how the project can attract more people outside of the male geek group. Shaun McCance made the point that non-technical posts in general are typically under-represented in GNOME.

This echoes closely what Mitchell Baker has been saying about Mozilla:

[…] filling [non-technical] roles often means bringing in people who haven’t “come up through the project.” These folks who are new to the Mozilla project need to be accepted by the development community in order to be effective. Status as a Mozilla Corporation employee isn’t enough.

and

If one’s skillset is something other than code, then proving oneself through understanding the intricacies of our code is at best inefficient and probably a blocker for many people. So the challenges are to find mechanisms for people in non-code roles to demonstrate they share the values of the Mozilla project and can make contributions that people want to support.

Conclusion?

Integrating non-engineering contributors takes a lot of trust and feeling our way gently. Those people joining us in non-engineering roles must trust that the technical contributors will give them a fair chance to participate, add value, become respected and gain influence and leadership. The engineering community must trust that these people who may be new to the Mozilla community and don’t have deep technical expertise are worth listening to and giving a fair shake.

In other words: Be excellent to each other.

But more than that, we need to start recognising when there is a skills deficiency in the project, and actively recruit people with those skills, drawing them the map of how the project works, and helping them become great contributors. There are a number of examples of non-technical people coming into the project and making an impact – Quim Gil, John Williams, Telsa Gwynne – but there are probably more examples of people who passed close by, felt the water, and went on their merry way without ever engaging, or being engaged by, the GNOME community.

So during the marketing BOF at GUADEC this year, I would like to focus on this – how can we make non-technical people interested in marketing GNOME feel like their work makes a difference.

Marketing is not just promotion – real marketing is a two-way dialog between the project and the market, with us saying what we do and why, and the market telling us how we can do better, or what they need that we’re not doing. And GNOME marketers will feel like a part of the project from the moment where something we do changes the project for the better.

Sun and the Cluetrain

Quite a few people around the GNOME community are still suspicious of companies who invest in free software – do they really get it? Is their investment fickle, or are they in it for the duration?

When I see Sun’s CEO announcing initiatives like this, it’s hard for me not to get excited about the company. I like what Sun are doing, I like the blogging CEO who answers personal emails himself, I like their investment in free software, I’m confident that Java will follow the lead of JDS and OpenSolaris. Sun are on the cluetrain, in a big way.

Lightning Talks

We will be having Lightning Talks again this year at GUADEC!

For those who missed last year’s talks, we got wowed by (Dave Reveman?)’s wobbly windows and cubic workspaces, Jonathan Blandford’s demo of Evince, J5 showing off his worth on session management, and Sebastien Tricaud showing off Gscore, the first application to fully use Cairo for its rendering, among others.

This year, we already have some interesting candidates – for example, a GStreamer based media center, desktop tagging with Leaftag and a demo of the Pitivi non-linear video editor.

Sign up on the wiki to stake your claim for a lightning talk spot – there is no lower limit on the amount of time that you take, but talks are limited to 5 minutes including set-up time. It’s fast & furious, and a great way to get wider attention for your project or idea – pique our curiosity – people can always spend the rest of the conference hasseling you for details, show us why your work is great.

Some tips on lightning talks from perl.com will help you make a killer presentation:

• Prepare. Don’t stand up without an idea of what you want to say.
• Avoid slides. You’ll spend precious time setting up your laptop. If you use them, have everything set up, and test with the projector before your talk.
• Get to the point. Introduction is fine, but if you’re not into the meat of what you want to say after 30 seconds, you’ll run out of time.

Update: Thanks to Daniel Glassey for letting me know he wasn’t the wobbly cubey guy. I’d like to know who it was though…

Welcome to our newest board member

For the benefit of those not subscribed to foundation-list and foundation-announce, I’d like to make a board announcement on here:

When Luis announced to the board that he wanted to resign a couple of weeks ago, the board discussed our options – referendum or co-option. We felt that co-opting a new member onto the board, on the basis of the election results last December, was the best way to select the newest member of the board. Our decision was made easy by the fact that since the election, this person has gone on to become a heavyweight in the GNOME community in very short order.

So without further ado, I’d like to announce that the board has decided to co-opt Quim Gil onto the board into the vacant position left by Luis Villa, effective immediately. We’re all sorry to see Luis leave the board, but I have a feeling that this means we’ll be hearing even more from him in the future. I’d like to wish him all the best in his budding legal career.

Fantasy World Cup

So – a world-changing event collides with a world-stopping event at the end of the month, when GUADEC is happening right in the middle of the FIFA World Cup (TM) (hope I don’t get sued for saying World Cup (TM) or Germany 2006 (TM)).

I have signed up for Channel 4’s fantasy world cup competition – it’s just for fun. The idea is simple – you make your dream international team by picking 11 players in a 1-4-4-2 formation with no more than 2 players coming from any given country. Your players get points for appearances, saving penalties, keeping clean sheets, scoring goals or making key passes. They lose points for goals conceded and cards.

And I’ve created a friend’s league – the idea is to have a bunch of people sign up their teams and then join the league, and we can find out who’s got the best team as time goes on. The end of phase 1 is the first cut-off point of the competition, and it falls right at the start of GUADEC, just before our football competition. So head on over, sign up a team, and we’ll have a little friendly competition to see who’s the besty judge of football in Villanova.

Once you’ve signed up, the league PIN is 8992 (you’ll need that to join the league).

Quote on DRM

Yann Zitouni, présentateur Couleur3: “Le problème avec des protections anti-piratage, c’est que ça emmerde surtout ceux qui achètent la musique”

Planet GIMP

I happened across the GIMP user frappr map today – I was thinking of creating one, in fact, when I found out that there were two – http://www.frappr.com/thegimp exists as well!

It would be great to merge these, and have a really good map of GIMP users and developers around the world. So, get to it! And if you’re on neither, well, add yourself to http://www.frappr.com/gimp straight away. Tell them Dave sent you, you get a 20% discount.

Address hunt 2

Excuses pour l’interlude commercial.

Pour ceux qui cherchent un appartement à Lyon, j’ai une affaire à vous proposer… nous vendons le notre, un T3 de 80m^2, avec salon, cuisine équipé séparé, deux grands chambres, hall d’entrée, à proximité de Place Rouget de l’Isle dans le 3ème arrondissement. Il y a également une place dans un parking fermé, et une cave de 6.5 m^2.

Les rendez-vous sont par téléphone (06.07.62.23.06) ou par e-mail à moi-même (comme toutes les spammeurs de la planète peuvent attester, ce n’est pas difficile à trouver).

Address hunt

O lazyweb, O lazyweb… can anyone tell me where I could find the postal addresses of Vicente Fox, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Néstor Kirchner, Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez? These guys are heads of state, so it couldn’t be too hard to figure out where they live, but I have not found a postal address for any of them after a good while dossing off work^W^W^Wsearching on the internet.

Trademark exploitation agreement

I sent a mail to foundation-list yesterday with a template for a trademark agreement intended for use in merchandising agreements.

It would be great to get some comments on it from legally-minded people, even if they’re from IANAL, before we propose this to companies like Killermundi.