Went to the Open Source Systems Conference. This was a very different academic group than TOS and HFOSS. Instead of professors using open source in their undergraduate curriculum, it was mostly professors and PhD students who are studying open source software projects. Not necessarily participating in them or teaching people how to participate but studying how they work, like this study of GIMP. There were quite a few people that had studied GNOME but several people mentioned that it is a hard project to study because it has so many subprojects. (I don’t think that’s a problem, except to researchers.) During my keynote people asked a lot about how GNOME works and several people asked how they could help from a research perspective. I said anything that told us more about our users! I also encouraged them all to blog – I said bits of information often would be more useful to the community than one research paper at the end.
Went all the way to Sweden and didn’t see Andreas Nilsson, Kalle Persson nor my high school friend that lives there.
Had a train ride and dinner with Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. I asked him how he would get GNOME more involved with governments and his advice was to start in Spain where the government is already heavily involved with open source and GNOME has strong ties.
Wrote press release for the keynote speakers at the Desktop Summit. (No immediate feedback from the Desktop Summit mailing list.) The platinum sponsor press release came back approved from the sponsoring company too. We need to schedule these this week.
Sent out Friends of GNOME survey to learn more about who our donors are, why they support the GNOME Foundation and what they’d like to see the Foundation do. Need to go through the data this week.
Put together Friends of GNOME May data and blog post. (Thanks to Jaap A. Haitsma for improving the spreadsheet and correcting the errors in the monthly calculations.) We’re doing really well on our annual goal ($16,000 of $20,000!) but I’d like to see much more of it from subscriptions as we can count on those monthly and make plans accordingly.
Pinged Desktop Summit sponsors about logos and company descriptions for the USB drives.
Participated in the “What do you expect from the Foundation” thread on the GNOME Foundation mailing list plus several off thread conversations.
Took over writing some of the invitation letters for the Desktop Summit from Agustin for people that need visas.
Heard back from travel agency about hotels that have meeting rooms (finally!) but they didn’t say what features the rooms had nor how much they cost – just the names of the hotels … (These are rooms for the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors meetings at GUADEC.)
Sent our attorney’s feedback on our 401K plan to the 401K plan provider, SocialK.
This week:
- Schedule one on one meetings with each of our sponsors to talk about their GUADEC plans, what they’d like to see at GUADEC and what their impressions have been over the last year (what we’ve done well and what we could improve on.)
- Schedule press releases for the Desktop Summit.
- Review accessibility contract that attorney reviewed/rewrote.
- GNOME Board Meeting.
- Get and analyze data from Friends of GNOME survey.
- Vote in the GNOME Foundation Directors election!
- Put these on the list to do sometime:
- Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop in mind.
- Think about how GNOME projects, committees like the travel committee and teams like the sys admin team work with the nonprofit workshop in mind.
- Get ready to be mostly offline for 10 days. (June 13th-June 23rd)
So you have been around! Check out your mail: we’d love to have you here in the Nordics again in late September, this time keynoting in Openmind!