Stormy’s Update: Week of July 27th.

The GNOME Accessibility team will be using some of their earmarked funds to have a booth at 2010 CSUN – set up by Eitan Isaacson. I think this is great as it’s a way to reach users who may not already be using a free desktop. Accessibility is an area we are good at and an area our sponsors are willing to invest in, so we should leverage that strength to bring the benefits of the free desktop to more people.

Requested status reports from teams for the 2009 Q2 quarterly report and have 8 of 14 of them on time! With two more promised today. (Which considering this was the first time we’ve done this and I didn’t give them very much warning at all, is awesome!) Got updates from the Bugsquad, localization team, GNOME Marketing, web team, usability team, GNOME Accessibility, documentation team and art team. Missing updates from the release team (promised), sysadmin team (promised), GNOME Mobile, local events, membership committee and finance. (Trying to get this one out by 8/15. In the future these should go out no later than one month after the quarter.)

Talked to Funambol about putting their GNOME related grants on the GNOME jobs wiki page and doing an interview about their experience with grants.

Worked on recruiting someone to lead case study activity.

Followed up with the GNOME Mobile member company looking to get more involved.

Apologized personally to the journalists whose travel we were offered to fund to GUADEC (through the Cabildo) but never actually bought their tickets. The board will also follow up.

Talked to one of our current sponsors about the benefit of GNOME Mobile to them.

Talked to a different sponsor about an issue they were concerned with and wanted our input on.

Presented/talked to the Colorado Springs Open Source group around businesses that can be created around free software. Used the GNOME ecosystem as an example. I met a lot of interesting people there including Michael Hammel who wrote a couple of GIMP books.

Found some GNOME folks to respond to an invitation to the 2nd International Symposium on Computers and Arabic Language forwarded by Richard Stallman. (Thanks to Dave Neary for the pointers to how to find the right people.)

Got first set of GUADEC 2008 finances this morning.

Met with Scott Weiss who is in charge of the Symbian UI. We talked about the challenges of having a UI and allowing partners to differentiate in the UI space. He had some interesting things they’d done to get UI feedback, like submissions that had to include a screenshot, posted unattributed to a Symbian UI blog under creative commons and all advertised over twitter. The UI council then picked the top 10 and they voted on those.

Chatted briefly with Peter Brown, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation about FSF and GNOME Foundation and ideas for future projects we could work together on.

Filled out the Google Adwords Grant Application – it could take six months to be approved. Thanks to Claus Schwarm who worked on the sample ads, keywords, audience and slogan!

Found companies for the Desktop panel I am chairing at OpenSource World – now need to identify individuals.

Figured out how to contribute to the new GNOME web pages thanks to an email from Paul Cutler but haven’t actually contributed anything yet.

Started sending out personal thank you’s to everyone who contributes to Friends of GNOME within 48 hours. (I read that after 48 hours people see the thank you as a new solicitation.)

Proposed a final draft for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit press release that will hopefully go out this week.

My priorities for this week: (Too many repeats. Hoping for bigger blocks of uninterrupted time this week to get some of them done.)

• Meeting with GNOME Asia Summit planning committee.
• Thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Dave Neary compiled a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit!)
• Continue to work on recruiting someone to lead case study activity:
  • Publish case studies/success stories from the foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can use.)
  • ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
• summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
• summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
• get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC (I think I’m going to need to ping them individually.)
• create wiki page for GNOME press team
• get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME (Missing one signature – from the sys admin team.)
• finalize 401K plan with attorneys (pinged attorney again)
• Start marketing list thread about raising advisory board fees and the communication around that

More stuff that needs to be done:

• Meeting with Paul Cutler to talk about updating GNOME marketing wiki pages. (We didn’t meet in person as his trip to Colorado was canceled.)
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
• Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
• GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
• follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner (Dave Neary met with them at OSCON and followed up with an email)
• Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
• talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
• figure out how to work with Spanish government
• Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
• continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
• Finance stuff (We have a treasurer and vice-treasurer now!):
  • add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
  • Work on budget with new treasurer
• Figure out how to get product news from News Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to press team when it is created)
• find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
• Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
• write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to help with sponsors?)
• find someone who can help create a list of recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for enterprise customers
• GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
• follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board, Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
• follow up with the sys admin team on setting up better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans. (They are working on this one.)
• follow up with International Cooperation group from the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
• send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
• Help Rosanna recruit someone to help automate some more of the Friends’ process – like getting Friends of GNOME donor names on the website as they come in