Author: stormy

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.)

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation during the weeks of September 14th and 21st.

I spent a lot of my last week communicating with lots of people. (At one point I had three IM windows open in addition to my email conversations and IRC and the phone rang!) I’ve captured the results of some of those conversations below. Hopefully the other conversations will also prove as productive soon.

Two one on one meetings with Brian Cameron who is the board member who works most closely with me on goal planning and results. (This is to alleviate any confusion from having seven bosses, to make sure things move quickly and to keep me from filling their email boxes any more than I already do!) In one meeting we went over the last six months and year’s results. In the other we talked about current issues and plans for the next couple of weeks.

Board of Directors meeting. We held our regular board of directors meeting, you can find the minutes online.

Women’s mini-summit. I attended the FSF’s Mini-Summit for Women in Free Software. Unfortunately I was on the phone instead of there in person but there were several other GNOME women in the room like Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Mairin Duffy and Leslie Hawthorn. We came out with some concrete plans for the future and a mailing list for everyone interested that’s already active.

Interviewed with Bruce Byfield about the women’s minisummit.

Had a conversation with an advisory board member who is not happy with us. (Working on the follow up to that.) Followed up with several advisory board members on payments. Four haven’t paid 2009 fees. Two are in process. I’m worried about two. (But over all our last year of income/donations looks very good!)

Talked to several advisory board members about a new initiative one of them would like to fund through the GNOME Foundation. (We also got a proposal for a hackfest from an advisory board member!)

Reviewed German’s excellent written summary and explanation of the 2010 budget. It’s all ready to send out.

Got list of patents from OIN. Also got advice that it’s not in our best interests to review them.

I attended and was interviewed on Linux Link Tech show.

Joined the Planetaria FOSS Women Planet that James Vasile set up. (I think it’s an awesome idea. FYI, he modeled it after Planet GNOME.)

Worked on getting quotes for new advisory board member press release. (Quotes are never easy to get approved at big companies.)

Wrote Software Freedom Day press release.

Reviewed GNOME Travel Policy.

Had a couple of follow ups with Dave Neary and Vincent Untz about OSiM. Thanks to both of them for representing GNOME there. Thanks for Vinicius for making a GNOME Mobile member sign and to our GNOME partners that displayed them in their booths, Igalia and Codethink.

Proposed a marketing hackfest. There is interest, now we just have to figure out a time and a place we can all meet.

Proposed and got enough takers to do a women’s issue of GNOME Journal. An issue written all by women about what they are working on in GNOME or about things they find interesting in GNOME. It’ll come out in November.

Proposed that the a11y team branch out to non software conferences to spread the word about GNOME and how it can help people with accessibility needs.

Did some twittering on behalf of GNOME.

Proposed CiviCRM for a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation.

Followed up on 401K plan. Only step left is a signed document and a check from Rosanna.

Attended the GUADEC IRC planning meeting that Srinivasa Ragavan put together. Thanks to all the previous GUADEC organizers that attended – there was some really good information shared during that 2.5 hour meeting! Srini is going to post the logs.

Was disappointed that the invitation to GNOME to attend the 2nd International Symposium on Computers and Arabic Language fell through. Khaled Hosney, Seif Lotfy and others were working to make sure that GNOME was represented. It sounds like they are no longer interested in funding free software projects though. I think it still might be worth having someone from GNOME attend though.

Sent thank you’s to everyone who donated to GNOME.

Helped with the promotion plan for GNOME 2.28.

And although I didn’t do it, I think it certainly worth mentioning that GNOME 2.28 released!

Monday was a US holiday.

Met with a company interested in using Linux and GNOME. (Actually using it but not as much as they’d like.) They had a lot of feedback for us and we talked about ways that they could get that type of feedback directly to the projects. One of the main issues was knowing where to submit bugs. They submitted a lot of bugs to the Linux distributions. Then they’d be told to resubmit the GNOME ones to the GNOME project … it would help if we could just forward them along to the right place.

Talked about upcoming events at the GNOME Advisory Board meeting. Mario Behling and Emily Chen talked about the GNOME.Asia Summit. Daniel Siegel and Seif Lotfy talked about the Zeitgeist hackfest and John Palmieri talked about the Boston Summit.

Worked on 2009 waterfall chart and 2010 budget with German. It is now ready to share with the board of directors and then board of advisors and the Foundation list.

Talked to several people about OIN’s announcement about purchasing 22 patents from Microsoft. OIN is supposed to post the actual patent numbers.

Talked to Willie Walker about GNOME accessibility.

Met with Ruthe Farmer from the National Center for Women & Information Technology. They do studies about women in technology and publish best practices for how to encourage more women to take technology jobs and to stay in them. They would like to do a study around women in free software. They have recently written a study about the Culture of Open Source Computing (pdf) that points to a lot of resources about women in open source and developer motivations in open source and you can find their reports online.

Sent thank you letters to people who donated to the GNOME Foundation during the week.

Started studying Ford Foundation website to understand what types of programs they give grants for and how we might find a good fit for GNOME projects.

Followed up with an advisory board member who hasn’t paid 2009 fees yet.

For this week. This is not the list of all the things I have to do but rather what I want to do this week.

• Board of Directors meeting
• 1:1 with Brian Cameron about my goals and results
• Send finances out to advisory board. (All ready to go – waiting on Board of Directors feedback.)
• Work on requirements for a CRM system so that sys admin team can install one.
• Follow up with potential sponsors.
• Follow up on 401K plan.
• Follow up with International Cooperation, the group in Gran Canaria working with developing countries.
• Fill out (draft for) form for applying for a Ford Foundation grant and run by appropriate GNOME mailing list.
• Make sure that plans are in place to have a new US event box and get it to Utah Open Source Conference.
• Finish following up with advisory board members whose 2009 payments haven’t come in yet.

If you measure productivity based on what gets done (as opposed to how hard you work), this was a frustrating week.

What I got done:

• Got a new advisory board member invoiced. (Well, Rosanna invoiced them, not me, but I helped make it happen.) Working on quotes for press release. (Didn’t actually get any yet.)
• Got some feedback on financial waterfall.
• Followed up with end user looking to use GNOME and GNU/Linux and running into problems.
• Continued to push for Q3 quarterly report to be done.
• Pinged sponsors and potential sponsors.
• Pinged people holding up 401K setup.
• Pinged press team to get started.
• Met with Denise to talk about how the customer success stories are going.
• Met with Keith from the Open Invention Network to talk about how OIN and GNOME could work more closely together. He’s looking for the community to help find prior art and to be advocates for them.
• Posted Friends of GNOME August results.
• Blogged about Funambol grants.
• Attended Board of Directors meeting.
• Planned Board of Advisors meetings. Meetings will most likely be:
• • September – events (Boston Summit, GNOME Asia, Zeitgeist hackfest)
  • October – finances
  • November – updates from advisory board members on things they are working on (list to come later)
  • December – update on how the Oct/Nov events went and future events

Things to be done (and this is a short week due to the Labor Day holiday): (Feel free to suggest other things or to help.)

• Work on 2010 budget with treasurers. (More urgent than it sounds as our fiscal year starts in October and companies are planning their budgets now.)
• Send finances out to advisory board.
• Make sure press team takes off and starts working on some tasks.
• Work on requirements for a CRM system so that sys admin team can install one.
• Follow up with adboard members who are missing payments.
• Follow up with potential sponsors.
• Follow up on 401K plan.
• Follow up with International Cooperation, the group in Gran Canaria working with developing countries.
• Fill out form for applying for a Ford Foundation grant.
• … and a bunch more stuff that will have to wait until next week.

Thoughts?

In the month of August we raised $1,212, for a total of $21,695 since January 1, 2009.

We made several improvements to our Friends of GNOME site, including the ability to specify your monthly donation amount.

Money from subscriptions held steady.

August 2009 was better than previous Augusts, thanks to the subscriptions to Friends of GNOME!

2009 is our best year yet and getting better.

This update is actually for three weeks, the week of August 10th when I was at OpenSource World, the week of August 17th when I was on vacation and the week of August 24th when I caught up with all the email I got in the previous two weeks!

During the weeks of August 10th and August 24th, in no particular order:

I met with existing sponsor to discuss how to get payment for their GNOME Foundation dues.

I met with a potential new sponsor and pinged a potential sponsor that I’ve spoken to a couple of times.

Sent out the feedback from the interviews with the advisory board members. (Sent it out to the advisory board and to the GNOME Foundation.)

Attended OpenSource World, ran the Desktop track and spoke. The Desktop track was very well attended with 80-100 people at every session. I really enjoyed the fact that the participants were very engaged and every speaker got lots of questions during and after their session. The opening panel was all questions from the audience. I got a lot of GNOME questions that I have passed on to the right experts.

OSiM World arrangements. Arranged for company working with GNOME technologies to meet with Vincent Untz and Dave Neary while they are there. Several GNOME companies will have booths. Igalia offered to display GNOME Mobile information in their booth. Checking with the others.

Drafted mail with marketing team about raising advisory board fees.

Met with one of the advisory board members who’s offered to mentor us on
finances and got feedback on how to display our financial data. Worked
with Germán Póo-Caamaño to create a waterfall summary of our fiscal year 2009
finances. (Will share soon.)

Did a short interview on women in opensource with Rikki Kite for her series on women in open source – suggested some more GNOME women for her to interview too.

In general I’ve been working on attending and giving less talks myself and getting more GNOME folks involved. I’ve passed on several speaking opportunities to other GNOME people. If you are available to speak on GNOME topics please add yourself to GNOME speakers page so people can find you. (Feel free to nominate other people you think should be on that page – at least their name and what talk you saw them give.) If you are speaking about GNOME technologies or attending a talk on GNOME, please make sure it’s in our calendars, both the wiki and the Google calendar.

GNOME press team was announced.

Took a week of vacation. We went camping for a few days (climbed the biggest sand hill ever and slid down it with my 9 year old), had my parents over for a few days (still trying to talk them into moving to Colorado), threw a couple of parties (a wine tasting party and a kid’s birthday party – not at the same time), cleaned the fridge, freezer and bathroom cabinets, caught up on bills.

Worked on the quarterly report.Got 11 updates out of the 15 we’d like to include. (And if I forgot a team, please let me know!!) Working on two more with the team leads. Waiting on two additional ones. Editing them and working with Paul Cutler and Vinicius Depizzol on the layout.

Wrote final draft of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit press release. Vincent and Cornelius released it.

Met with the GNOME Asia Summit planning committee. Good stuff happening there but I’ll wait for them to announce …

Recruited Denise Walters to help with GNOME marketing, in particular the customer success stories. I know Denise from HP where she worked on Linux and open source marketing.

Summarized the information I got while interviewing all the advisory board members and sent it out to the advisory board members. Will send out to the GNOME Foundation list on Tuesday.

Created a very rough place holder of a wiki page for the new GNOME press team we’d like to create. (I realized I didn’t really know what to put in the page – hopefully people will ask questions which will make it obvious to me what’s missing.)

Had a short interview with Todd Wiess, a free lance reporter for an article he was writing about whether the economy is affecting free software projects. What was interesting is that he thought laid off people would have less time to work on free software while they looked for a job whereas I would have thought they’d have more until they found a job. (While looking for a job is a full time job, few people who like coding like all the stuff involved with finding a job, so I’d think they’d need a coding break!)

Finalized 401K plan! Sent signed documents off to SocialK folks.

Booked travel for Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference and Utah Open Source Conference – both events are covering my travel.

Sent a thank you note to all the Desktop Summit sponsors with links to press about the Desktop Summit. (Press links compiled by Dave Neary.)

Got the Zoom2’s from Texas Instruments for our usability study! Talking to folks about how to move forward.

Sent thank you notes to those that donated through Friends of GNOME. Personalized them where I could.

What I’m planning on doing this week:

This week I’ll be at OpenSource World, running the desktop track, moderating a panel and giving a talk the Desktop or the Browser: Is the Netbook Escalating the Issue? (Plus I still have to create the talk and slides.)

The following week (August 17th) between a camping trip and my parents coming into town, I will probably take some time off.

Here’s my list of things I’ll work on in between those events: (Things that are missing from the list have been passed on to somebody else or are in progress.)

• Get the 2009 Q2 Quarterly report published!
• Advisory board/sponsors work:
  • get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC (I think I’m going to need to ping them individually.)
  • get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME (Missing one signature – from the sys admin team.)
  • Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
  • send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• Marketing team stuff
  • Start marketing list thread about raising advisory board fees and the communication around that
  • Update GNOME marketing wiki pages with Paul Cutler
  • Get the press team created and started
  • find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
  • write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to help with sponsors?)GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• Partnerships:
  • Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
  • follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner
• Recruit others to help:
  • Figure out how to get a team started to get GNOME working more closely with governments.
  • find someone who can help create a list of recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for enterprise customers
  • Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
  • Automate things. In past lives I’ve found the best way to get tedious tasks automated is to give them to someone who (a) finds them tedious and (b) has the skills to automate them. Tasks that I think could be improved somehow by automation: (Let me know if you fit (a) and (b) and would like to give them a try.
    • Getting Friends of GNOME names onto the website.
    • Sending thank you notes to Friends of GNOME. (Could be done by CRM.)
    • Getting Friends of GNOME data into gnucash. (One of the board members is looking at this.)
    • Scrubbing confidential Friends of GNOME data from gnucash so we can publish the gnucash file.
    • Reimbursing contributors whose travel we pay. (While the travel committee is helping with receipts and reminders, it still takes Rosanna 20 minutes per wire transfer to transfer money to someone. That means it takes her several weeks of work time to reimburse everyone for GUADEC travel. Every year.)
    • Putting feedback we get through Friends of GNOME onto a website.
• 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.) Dave Neary offered to install a CRM for us, so this might be more about picking the right one now.
• 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.)
• Create policies for the GNOME Foundation to comply with new US nonprofit regulations. (Things like conflict of interest, travel, whistle blower, compensation and records retention.)

In the month of June we raised $1,530, for a total of $20,483 since January 1, 2009.

Great news:

• We passed the $20,000 mark which was our original goal for all of 2009!

Good news:

• July 2009 is much better than all other July’s in documented history.

OK news:

• Numbers held steady with June.

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

Thanks to everyone who helped get things done this week!

I think we could have a bunch more roles in GNOME. We could have someone in charge of customer case studies, someone responsible for GNOME presentation materials (slide templates, business cards), someone in charge of potential sponsor identification, etc.  If anyone sees a common thread of tasks and thinks they are up to, suggest an appropriate title and let the Foundation know you are interested!

We now have a donate section on the right hand side of the GNOME home page thanks to Andreas Nillson, Paul Cutler and Andre Klapper.

Touched base with John Carr about how the system administration team is doing. They have a team formed that’s been hard at work and have posted minutes from their last meeting. New requests can be logged in bugzilla now.

I emailed Hackerthreads about our GNOME store plans but didn’t get a response. (I’ve never gotten a response from them about anything I’ve emailed them but they email Rosanna every once in a while and they send us a percentage of all the proceeds they get from GNOME merchandise.)

Added June numbers to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet and posted a Friends of GNOME update to the Foundation blog. (June numbers weren’t great but it was good to see the subscription revenue hold steady. We are almost at our initial annual goal of $20,000! Thanks to all our Friends of GNOME!)

Asked all GNOME teams for Q2 results for the Q2 quarterly report that will come out in a couple of weeks.

Pinged a couple of times about GUADEC 2008 finances and heard that Baris is working on the tax situation in Turkey.

Prepared slides for my OSCON talk on the role of users in free software projects.

Paul Cutler set up a microblog@gnome.org email address so the identica/twitter team can post from email. (Let us know if you’d like to help identica/twitter or set up a plan for how best to do that.)

Went to OSCON in San Jose for two days.

• Gave my talk on users in free software projects – it started some good discussions.
• Met with potential GNOME partners like FOSSFA.
• Met with a GNOME Mobile member who would like to get more involved.
• Put lots of faces to names. Hopefully I can remember them all.
• Attended Open Source for America launch party. The GNOME Foundation is a founding member!
• Met Stefano Maffulli very briefly in person and discussed where to advertise Funambol sponsored GNOME related projects (that they are willing to pay for)
• Interviewed with Paul Hudson from TuxRadar. He posted some snippets. Full interview to come later.

Met with another advisory board member to get their feedback. (And to encourage them to pay their way overdue advisory board fees.)

Met with a large financial company who is trying to move to GNOME/Linux desktops. Talked about ways to get their issues in front of GNOME developers for discussion. Look for blog interviews or GNOME Journal articles or something similar!

My priorities for this week:

• thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Still hoping someone from the marketing team will help compile a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit.)
• Identify 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
• find someone to help Dave Richards with the usability hackfest he’d like to hold in the City of Largo (Lucas Rocha is helping to find someone.)
• summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
• summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
• fill out Google Adwords Grant Application
• apologize to invited journalists who didn’t make the Desktop Summit because there travel wasn’t booked
• get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC
• create wiki page for GNOME press team
• get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME
• Find speakers for the Desktop panel I am now chairing at OpenSource World. (In addition to my talk.)
• Meeting with Paul Cutler in person to talk about updating GNOME marketing wiki pages.
• Speaking at a Colorado Springs Linux User Group.

More stuff that needs to be done:

• finalize 401K plan with attorneys (pinged attorney again – I know she’s been traveling as I saw her at OSCON. 🙂
• 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 (Janjo Marin sent me some ideas.)
• Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
• continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
• Finance stuff (waiting on a treasurer):
  • 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
• Find out how to review new gnome webpage content so I can help
• 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.)
• Figure out who could attend a conference in Saudi Arabia to discuss potential financial support for adabizing programs
• 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