What’s happening with the GNOME Foundation, January 2009

Sponsors and the Advisory Board

• Red Hat has a new member of the advisory board. His name is Lars and we’ll introduce him shortly!
• Our January meeting was a short round table.
• Our February meeting will be about infrastructure and system administration issues.
• Once again, the Advisory Board meets once a month, and while the meetings are by invite only, we are always looking for topics that might be interesting to the advisory board members, either as input to them or things we want their input on and we try to invite all relevant people to the discussion. Please contact Stormy, stormy -at- gnome -dot- org if you have topics you’d like to see discussed!
• 2009 Funding.
  • Companies are committing to their GNOME 2009 funding. We’re very happy to report that our overall funding will be slightly higher than 2008 in spite of the economy. We are very grateful to our sponsors!
  • All of the sponsors were enthusiastic about the success of hackfests and plan to support them this year.
  • We are looking at see if we can do things like fund a usability study and exploring how we can address our system administration and infrastructure issues.

Conferences

• Call for Papers – submit those GNOME talks! Spread the word! (Especially if the event is near you.)
  • OSCON
  • Red Hat Summit
  • Grace Hopper Women in Computing
• FOSDEM. February 8-9, Brussels. GNOME will have a devroom and a booth this year again.
• GTK+ Theming API Hackfest, February 16-20, Dublin, Ireland. About 10 people will get together in the Sun offices for some GTK+ Theming hacking. Thanks to Alberto Ruiz for pulling this together.
• SCALE. There will be a GNOME booth at SCALE, led by Jeff Schroeder.
• GUADLAC in March – some early planning work happening.
• GNOME has been invited to Free and Open Source Nigeria at Bayero University if anyone wishes and is able to go.
• OSiM USA: Approved loose relationship with OSiM as part of GNOME Mobile work. Stormy is speaking about GNOME Mobile at the event.
• OSBC. Dave Neary is speaking and Stormy has a panel.
• Collaboration Summit. April 8-10, San Francisco. GNOME Mobile and GNOME Marketing are proposing half day meetings.
• For more info see GNOME events.

Other stuff going on:

• Friends of GNOME launched! Thanks to Lucas, Andreas, Kalle, Zana and many others that made this happen. It’s off to a good start with:
  • 41 subscribers
  • $3933.69 (since January 1)
    There are badges for blogs here, if you’d like to help spread the word: http://www.andreasn.se/diverse/temp/fog-banners.tar.gz
• You can find GNOME on Facebook. There’s a GNOME Lovers group, a Friends of GNOME group and a GNOME Cause.
• Alberto Ruiz is GNOME’s official voice for GUADEC/Desktop Summit coordination. While it’s his job to be point person, he’s joined by lots of willing and capable volunteers like Dave Neary and Chema Casanova plus all of the local team and the KDE folks.
• The GNOME Foundation has an Amazon Affiliates account. It is not being officially used for anything now but could be used in applications like Banshee in the future.

For more administrative detail, you can also read the Board of Directors meeting minutes.

In reply to the comments:

Dave, the code is gnfo-20. Gabriel Hurt suggested making an Amazon extension like http://www.iheartmiro.org/. I think that’s be a great idea!

Alex, the link still works for me. I also believe we display it on the thank you page of Friends of GNOME but I’m checking on that.