Upcoming GNOME Foundation IRC Meeting: July 10th

It’s been a few months since our last Foundation IRC meeting (especially after I got the time zone wrong last time!) and we’ve scheduled our next meeting:

  • When: Saturday, July 10th, from 14:00 to 15:00 UTC
  • Where: irc.gnome.org

Please add topics you would like to see discussed to http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MembersAgenda.

These topics will automatically appear on the meeting page at http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MeetingAgenda.

The meeting minutes from our last meeting are available at http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20100130.

See you there!

GNOME Speaker Guidelines

Several months ago, people raised the issues of some inappropriate comments made during various talks. The board worked on resolving those issues, and then proposed the creation of guidelines to have better ways to limit such inappropriate comments, as well as to answer similar issues that would be raised in the future.

The result is a document listing a set of guidelines to help speakers avoid offending the audience, in order to have the talks enjoyed by as
many people as possible: http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/SpeakerGuidelines

We would like to encourage everybody who will deliver a talk at a GNOME event, or who will represent GNOME with a GNOME talk at other events, to go read those guidelines!

Many thanks to Matthew Garrett for his initial work on this, and to the community for the feedback sent after we’ve published a draft of this document.

Stormy’s Update: Week of June 7, 2010

Attended LinuxTag. Met with many people (some much more briefly than others). Claudia Rauch and Frank Karlitschek from KDE with Vincent Untz to talk about the Desktop Summit 2011. Ivanka Majic from the Canonical design team. Andrew Savory from the LiMo Foundation. Many of the Openismus folks. Ekaterina Gerasimova. David King. The new interns. Andre Klapper. Johannes Schmid and Vincent Untz about GNOME mobile and encouraging applications. Mario Behling who planned GNOME.Asia last year – he planned a barbeque for GNOME and many other free software folks at LinuxTag. Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical. Chris DiBona from Google. Dirk Hohndel very briefly. Jos Poortvliet. Jonathan Corbet from LWN. And many, many others. We had several GNOME talks during the Desktop track. (Mine was first on Saturday morning – not the best time for a talk!) And Frank Karlischek interviwed Vincent Untz and I for RadioTux.

Worked on Annual Report letter.

Worked on proposal to get more apps on GNOME Mobile.

Attended Board of Directors meeting.

Spent a lot of time with my bottom in an airplane seat.

Voted in the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors elections!

Sugar Learning Platform and GNOME Desktop Now Shipping on the One Laptop per Child XO-1.5

ASUNCIÓN, June 14, 2010 – Sugar Labs, the GNOME Free Desktop Project, and One Laptop per Child (OLPC) have announced an update to the software offered on the OLPC XO-1.5. The 1.5 million children already using Sugar on the original XO-1 can also benefit from the update, since Paraguay Educa has backported the software.

The Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through child-friendly Activities that encourage critical thinking. The GNOME free desktop is a hallmark of all major GNU/Linux distributions, suitable for older children and grownups. Switching between the two environments takes only a single click. With GNOME on the XO laptop, the door is opened to thousands of additional educational and productivity applications.

The XO-1.5 has the same industrial design as the original XO-1. Based on a VIA processor, it provides 2× the speed of the XO-1, 4× DRAM memory, and 4× FLASH memory. OLPC has announced the availability of a high-school edition of the XO-1.5, the XO-HS, with a newly designed keyboard, more comfortable for older students. The first deployment of the XO-HS is set to begin in Uruguay under the highly successful Plan Ceibal in September.

Children familiar with the XO-1 will naturally grow into the XO-1.5 with its expanded functionality. “One Laptop per Child promotes open-source software so that it can grow and adapt to the needs of the child. The Sugar platform on the XO is key to our educational mission because it gives students a unique and intuitive learning software environment,” said OLPC Association CEO Rodrigo Arboleda.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said, “We’re really excited to be working with Sugar and OLPC to provide desktop software to children of all ages. GNOME’s mission is to provide a free desktop accessible to everyone. Children from Uruguay to Ghana will be able to use their XOs to learn and to show their friends and families how to use Sugar and GNOME.”

Walter Bender, Executive Director of Sugar Labs, said “the fluidity of movement between the two desktops gives learners the ability to transition from a learning environment – Sugar – to a production and productivity environment – GNOME. They have the means of honing the creative skills acquired in an elementary education setting into entrepreneurial skills in a secondary education setting.”

“Sugar on a Stick” allows children who don’t have an XO laptop to benefit from this new software. Available for download from Sugar Labs in the new, v3 Mirabelle flavor, it can be loaded onto an ordinary USB thumbdrive and used to start a PC in Sugar without touching the hard disk. The XO laptops and Sugar on a Stick run Fedora GNU/Linux

About Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, nonprofit organization, is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Originally part of the One Laptop Per Child project, Sugar Labs coordinates volunteers around the world who are passionate about providing educational opportunities to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Sugar Labs is supported by donations and is seeking funding to accelerate development.

For more information, please visit http://www.sugarlabs.org/.

About GNOME

GNOME is a free-software project which develops a complete, accessible and easy-to-use desktop standard on all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions. Popular with large corporate deployments and millions of small-business and home users worldwide, it includes a development environment to create new applications. The nonprofit GNOME Foundation is composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies.

More information can be found at http://www.gnome.org/ and http://foundation.gnome.org/.

About One Laptop per Child

OLPC is a non-profit organization created by Nicholas Negroponte and others from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are inexpensive enough to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.

For more information, please visit http://www.laptop.org/.

Media Enquiries

Stormy’s Update: Week of June 1, 2010

Had a million conversations (well maybe not that many), followed threads and kept up (mostly) with email. Too many different things going on for a short week.

Organized a GNOME Roadmap discussion.

Discussed copyright policy with team putting it together and adboard member with feedback.

Discussed having a GNOME Mobile event at LinuxTag through WIPJam.

Talked to Zonker about GNOME 3 press roadmap.

Had some interchanges about GUADEC sponsors, logos, etc. I think all agreements are worked out except one now.

Set up some meetings at LinuxTag.

Met 1:1 with Brian and Rosanna (separately).

Next week:

  • Get out board approved proposal for using the Nokia money for GNOME Mobile.
  • Put together presentation for LinuxTag.
  • Attend LinuxTag.
  • Write opening letter for annual report.

The GNOME Foundation is hiring a system administrator

The GNOME Foundation is hiring a system administrator. Thanks to all of you who have made this possible!

System Administrator Job Description

The GNOME Foundation is seeking candidates for a part-time system administrator position. The GNOME infrastructure cluster consists of a distributed network of machines providing services such as version control, bug tracking, web sites, and mailing lists to hundreds of part and full-time GNOME developers, and to the GNOME user community. The system administrator will work with and assist the volunteer GNOME sysadmin team to keep these services running smoothly, securely, and reliably, and to implement enhancements.

This position is not primarily a coding position, however a certain amount of programming ability is needed to be able to maintain and enhance the system administration scripts and custom web applications that run on the GNOME servers.

This position reports to the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

The successful candidate will:

  • Be able to conceive and execute projects independently without detailed direction.
  • Have experience working with volunteer and geographically distributed communities.
  • Be technically strong with experience in many or most of the following technologies:
    • Multiple GNU/Linux distributions with specific knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Debian / Ubuntu distributions
    • Python
    • SQL databases
    • PHP
    • LDAP
    • Puppet
    • Mailman
  • Have good communication skills in written and spoken English.
  • Be passionate about Free Software and have knowledge regarding GNOME.

Other job requirements include:

  • Ability to communicate and manage projects and priorities with a distributed group of volunteers who make up the GNOME Sysadmin team
  • Weekly and monthly communication with the Executive Director and quarterly reports regarding the Sysadmin Team’s work to the GNOME Foundation.

There are no specific educational requirements for this position, however a typical candidate will have completed or be in the process of completing an undergraduate degree. Several years experience maintaining production servers is mandatory.

How to Apply

To apply for this job, send your resume to board-list@gnome.org.

Timeline

  • June 22nd: deadline for accepting resumes
  • June 15-July 15th: phone interviews by hiring team
  • July 25-30th: Follow up with top candidates.
  • August 9th: Job starts.
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.