Stormy’s Update: Week of May 25th

Monday was a US holiday. Went fishing and to a barbeque.

Talked to our attorney about 4 outstanding issues.

• Told him to hold off on SugarCRM until we decide we are ready to use it.
• Verified that hackerthreads agreement didn’t sound like it prevented us from creating our own store.
• He will also get 401k agreement reviewed and look over the accessibility contract.

Dave Neary suggested putting out a notice of action when the board investigates something. Board agreed.

Dave Neary suggested making the gnucash file public. Board agreed but we need to figure out automated way to scrub donor data.

Board Meeting. See the minutes. We talked about making the gnucash file public. We’d need to scrub the donor names because even the people that want recognition may not want revealed how much they donated. Several people offered to figure out how to scrub the data. I pointed out if we were automating anything, we need to automate getting the Paypal data into gnucash. Rosanna spends a lot of time manually doing that. J5 offered to help out with that. (Talked about several other things as well.)

Luis pointed out that on that several open source nonprofits have talked about how good CiviCRM is for tracking donations. It can import from Paypal and help with things like thank you notes. (Anyone want to take a look at it? I don’t think the sys admin team is ready for yet another task right now but I’ll add it to the list.)

Talked to a representative from a sponsor company that is way behind on payments and he thinks he can pay it all next month! Yeah!

Pinged a sponsor about some additional money they’ve agreed to give.

Pinged community members signing Canonical agreement to do some of the bugzilla upgrade work.

Talked to  a non-sponsor company, but one that is active in our community, about helping out with a usability study.

Tested Friends of GNOME survey with the marketing list. Corrected all typos and design issues. Put together the list of email addresses from all donors in the past 12 months. Launching next week.

Continued sponsorship discussion on marketing mailing list. We’ve been talking about different levels of sponsorship, different levels for different size companies and different packages of benefits for different amounts of money. Not much response to my initial list of benefits that we could package up.

Prepared talk for keynote at Open Source Systems conference next week. See my blog post.

Got sponsorship yes/no finalized with all potential sponsors. Got invoices out to a few more. Repinged all for logos and company blurbs. (Two left to invoice. A handful left to submit logos and company blurbs.)

Pinged travel agency several times about rooms for board of directors and board of advisors meetings at GUADEC. Travel agency is not very responsive – confirms what others have been saying. (I booked my hotel room directly with the hotel.)

Wrote draft of Google Adwords Grant application and sent to marketing mailing list – didn’t get any feedback until I said I was submitting. Discussion happening now.

Applied for scholarship, i.e. sponsored travel, to attend the Grace Hopper conference, a very cool women in computing conference. I’ve been invited to be on a panel.

Wanted to work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop in mind but didn’t get to it.

• Repeat from last week but won’t do until next week as I’m traveling this week:
  • 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 remaining Desktop Summit invoiced and their logos in the program.
• Put out a press release on the Desktop Summit keynote speakers.
• Open Source Systems Conference – 3 days of travel, two days at the conference
• Send out survey to Friends of GNOME.
• Put together Friends of GNOME May data and blog post.

Notice: I will be on vacation June 13th – June 23rd and won’t have much time to keep up on email. (I’m taking my kids to see my parents and we are going to set up the first Kids on Computers lab in Huajuapan de Leon.)