Stormy’s Update: September 29th-October 16th

I went to two conferences during the past couple of weeks:

• Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference in Tucson, Arizona. I went to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference on a Grace Hopper scholarship, i.e. they paid for travel. In addition to attending the conference, I participated on the open source software panel. There were a lot of students there that were very interested in learning more about how to get involved with free and open source software. The only place they could find out about free and open source software was at the panel I was on and at the Systers Codeathon. Given our push to recruit more women, it seems like a great opportunity. Next year I’d like to see better representation from free software projects like the GNOME Foundation and Apache as well as some representation by companies that hire free and open source software developers, like Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, Nokia, … I’ll be working on that.
• Utah Open Source conference in Salt Lake City. I gave the keynote on Friday, Would you do it again for free? and I hung out at the GNOME Booth that Christer Edwards put together. He had a lot of really good feedback for the Event Box (we need a banner! we need to tell people what’s important to point out at the booth!) and I passed some of it on to the marketing list. Christer got some great GNOME pictures with the booth webcam and told people about GNOME 3.0 and Friends of GNOME.

I had several one on one meetings with advisory board members. All of our sponsors have paid except for two – and rumor has it one of their checks is in our PO box or on Rosanna’s desk! The other one is actively working on getting us paid. (Although it seems like these payments are late, we are doing much better than previous years!) I also asked our partners to help out with lots of events. Novell, Collabora and Google all helped out with the Boston Summit. Igalia is hosting and sponsoring a WebKitGTK+ hackfest and Collabora is sponsoring it as well. Canonical and the TIS Innovation Park are sponsoring the Zeitgeist Hackfest. Say thanks to their employees if you see them!

We had our monthly GNOME Advisory Board meeting on October 13th. The main topic was our finances and how we’d like to raise advisory board fees. Germán did a great job of putting together 2009 results and a 2010 budget. The meeting was one of the more active discussions we’ve had all year and we got several compliments on how prepared we are. It’s also looking like most of our sponsors are amenable to raising the fees, which would be really good for our 2010 plans. (We had only one hackfest in the first half of 2009 because budgets were cut; we’re hoping to avoid that in the future.)

We had GNOME Board meetings on October 1st and October 15th. You can find the minutes on the wiki.

I had a one on one meeting with Brian Cameron to discuss progress and goals. He had lots of good suggestions. In particular we discussed things like how to get the GNOME partner companies more involved with marketing, how to work better with the FSF and how to get more women involved in GNOME. (Marina has been hard at work on our new GNOME Women’s Outreach!)

I talked to the President of system76, Carl Richell. They make servers, desktops and laptops with Ubuntu installed. He works with a lot of the upstream projects and was very interested in how he could work more with us. He’d like to give us some of their new hardware to play with and test. (Some of the new laptops/netbooks he was talking about made me want to start coding so I could get one to play with!)

I pulled together the Friends of GNOME September data. We have raised $23,415 this year! September saw a 40% increase over August, probably because of the release of GNOME 2.28. We have a goal of 10 new Friends of GNOME subscribers a month so sign up and tell your friends! The more subscribers we have, the sooner we’ll hire a system administrator and the more hackfests we can do. I sent out thank you’s to people who donated through Friend of GNOME.

Traded some ideas with Paul Cutler who is planning a Marketing Hackfest in Chicago for November 10-11th.  Novell and Google are sponsoring it. Say thanks to them!

GNOME Asia planning is coming along well and we are looking for sponsors. They will be announcing location (Vietnam) and dates (November 20-22) and putting out a call for papers any minute now!

Got a query from a professor about how students could contribute to FOSS projects – passed them on to the GSOC GNOME mentors list. I also got an invite to the annual HFOSS conference. Let me know if you are interested in attending and representing GNOME.

Gave feedback to the board on a bid for GUADEC 2010. Hopefully we will be announcing when we’ll be (deciding and) announcing the 2010 location soon.

Continued to push for press release to announce our new advisory board member …

Booked travel for Latinoware where I’ll be giving a keynote next week, attending the GNOME Day and the GNOME Women talk! Tried to go to Encuentro Linux during the same trip but the conferences are at the same time and quite a ways away travel wise if not miles wise. Started working on my presentation for the keynote.

Took some time off this past week to deal with non work stuff.

Worked on getting the GNOME Q3 2009 quarterly report out. We’re almost ready! – just waiting on a few teams to submit their write-ups.

This week:

• Latinoware in Brazil!
• (And hopefully sending out the Q3 report if everyone’s writeups come in.)