Author: stormy

In the month of June we raised $1,585, for a total of $18,953 since January 1, 2009. We’ve almost reached our goal of $20,000 for 2009! However, donations in June were down significantly.

While donations have been increasing for the past four months, June saw a return to February levels.  What June does show us is how important the Friends of GNOME subscription program is. We were able to count on those monthly donations which held steady when the one time donations dropped.

Here are some graphs that show some of the data visually.

Subscriptions held steady but overall donations dropped in June:

June 2009 was still better than previous Junes, thanks to the subscriptions to Friends of GNOME!

And year to date we are very close to our goal of $20,000 for 2009!

Help GNOME and sign up for Friends of GNOME‘s monthly subscription. (You’ll also get a set of stickers and a tshirt to help spread the word about GNOME!)

First thing Monday morning I went to the doctor who determined that I had a sinus infection. (For fellow travelers, if your cheekbones ache and your teeth feel like they are going to fall out every time the plane takes off and lands, you may have a sinus infection. Not only did I have the scheduled 3 takeoffs and landings on my trip home from the Desktop Summit but when our plane got hit by lightening, they threw in a bonus landing and takeoff in Wyoming!)

Followed up on some Desktop Summit stuff:

• Sent co-locating survey results to both KDE and GNOME boards. Attended GNOME Board decision meeting about co-locating in the future. (You’ll have to wait for them to say what the decision was …)
• Pinged sponsor companies about banners that were left behind.
• Helped draft co-located press release.

Pinged attorney about 401K plan. (Our attorney did meet with the plan’s attorney.)

Trying to help figure out a board meeting time – with seven board members around the world with jobs and school, it’s hard to find a time that works. Our current time doesn’t work very well for folks in India, like Srini. (He did stay up until 3am last time though to dial in!)

Read the GNOME Annual Report 2008. Nice job, Lucas, writers and photographers! It was a good year for GNOME.

Created a Zazzle account for the new GNOME Store. (Got permission to have a 5 letter login and store name, gnome.)

Set up a press interview about my talk at OpenSource World.

Wrote my Friends of GNOME post cards. They went to Finland, Australia, Cyprus, and Canada as well as several US states! Sign up to support GNOME with a Friends of GNOME monthly subscription and get a postcard from your favorite hacker!

Created some Amazon affiliate accounts in US, UK, Canada and Germany so that Jaap can set up stores and a Firefox widget that will enable people to direct Amazon referral fees for their purchase to GNOME.

Talked to a couple of sponsors (Canonical, IBM) about things they’d like to see done and things they are willing to sponsor.

Met with Sally from HALO Worldwide. She helps the Apache Foundation with their press and marketing and teaches a class every year at ApacheCon. We talked about how she could help with GNOME marketing and pres. I’d love to have a marketing hackfest and have her come teach a press class.

Met with Paul Cutler about all the things we’d like to get going on GNOME marketing, following up on all the conversations from the Desktop Summit.

Went through all my email and notes from the Desktop Summit and created an enormous todo list.

For next week:

• Create slides for my OSCON talk, the Role of Users in Open Source Projects.  It will be based on [Correction] The Role of Consumers in an Open Source Community. Speaking of OSCON, I really like the system they have set up for identifying which talks you want to see, what other talks people interested in those talks are interested in and identifying who will be at the conference and who you’d like to meet. It would be great to have something like that for GUADEC.
• Attending two days of OSCON. (Short trip this year to save on hotel stays and to minimize time away from home as I’ve already spent 10 days away from home this month.)
• Tackling as many items from the rest of my todo list as possible.

The rest of my to do list. (Let me know if you’d like to help on any of the projects!) These are not in any particular order here.

• thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Hoping someone from the marketing team will help compile a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit.)
• finalize 401K plan with attorneys
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• ask all teams for input on Q2 report
• follow up with potential sponsor who was at GUADEC
• 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 Foudnation
• GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
• publish June Friends of GNOME data
• 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 people to help with the customer testimonials (case study article, quotes, slides, sidebar)
• find someone to help Dave Richards with the usability hackfest he’d like to hold in the City of Largo
• find sponsors for GNOME foundation booth in 2010 CSUN
• apologize to invited journalists who didn’t make the Desktop Summit because there travel wasn’t booked
• talk to OIN – they list GNOME as a partner
• Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
• summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
• summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
• fill out Google Adwords Grant Application
• 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
• add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
• continue to ping about GUADEC 2008 finances
• continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
• 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
• get back to Funambol on where to advertise GNOME related projects that they are willing to pay for
• 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
• 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.
• 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.)
• get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC
• 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
• get identica@gnome.org email address so identica/twitter team can post from email
• create wiki page for GNOME press team
• get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME
• Make sure we get donate button on gnome.org front page
• Find speakers for the Desktop panel I am now chairing at OpenSource World. (In addition to my talk.)

Spent the week at the Desktop Summit/GUADEC.

Met with a ton of people. Putting lots of faces to names. (Some people need new hackergotchis, identi.ca and twitter icons. Me included.) Managed to see a couple of talks too. 🙂 I have to admit I was most interested in the questions and discussions that the presentations generated. I was very excited that many people reported interesting KDE/GNOME conversations.

Realized that while this year I don’t have several hundred GNOME people to meet for the first time, I suddenly have several hundred KDE people to meet … I met quite a few at the Nokia party as I was one of the first (if not the first) GNOME person to show up.

Igalia sponsored the GNOME party and didn’t forget our traditions: ice cream death match and jam session. It was a great time! (The whiskey thing happened another night. I decided it was wisest not to attend that party. 🙂

The board of advisors meeting went well. We had a round table in the morning followed by a finance update and a call for help with hackfests. (Almost all the sponsors would very much like to see us do more hackfests we just have to figure out how to get the funding.) We also got some great commitments to help with Friends of GNOME, GNOME customer success stories and hackfests. After an excellent lunch in a Persian restaurant that Rosanna, Owen and Blizzard found, we returned for a discussion with the GNOME 3.0 projects. (All those projects involved in GNOME 3.0.)

I had breakfast with some local government and university officials. I sat next to Jose Miguel Santos Espino, the director of the computer science department, and I happened to tell him about the GNOME and KDE folks in Nigeria that couldn’t get visas to come. A couple of days later he contacted me with an excellent proposal. He suggested that we work with their International Cooperations Department to find ways to bring free software to countries in Africa as well as Latin America and Asia. We had a good conversation with Josefa de la Rosa Cantos and we will work with them during their next conference of Spanish and African universities.

I also got a chance to talk to Antonio Jose Saenz Albanes who is working a project to deploy 2 million laptops to students in Andalucia. His main problem is accessibility so I introduced him to the GNOME accessibility team.

The GNOME Mobile BOF started out the same way that so many GNOME Mobile BOFs do trying to define what is GNOME mobile but we actually progressed during this one which was awesome. GNOME Mobile is a place for people using GNOME Mobile technologies to collaborate. However, we’ll build on the GNOME brand, not the GNOME Mobile brand. We also brainstormed quite a few ideas, like inviting the maintainers for key GNOME technologies to join the GNOME Mobile mailing list.

AGM. The AGM went really well even though we competed with many other attractions. All the teams gave an update. We’ll be posting minutes and slides but in the meantime you can check out the GNOME identi.ca feed where the AGM was broadcast live: http://identi.ca/gnome.

The marketing BOF was late Thursday afternoon in a really hot room but people had some great ideas. (We were hot! 🙂 We discussed things like marketing campaigns, audiences (existing GNOME users, not developers), having regional presence on the to-be-formed press team. and we decided we’d put together 4 case studies (GNOME success stories) by the end of the month. Anne Ostergaard suggested the Andalusian school project. Guy Lunardi provided a Novell customer story. I took notes and we’ be publishing soon.

Survey. If you haven’t already, please take the co-locating survey. We’ll be deciding next week whether we are co-locating again or not next year. One thing I’ve noticed about the respondents so far is that of the people that collaborated with a KDE person, 95+% think the co-located Desktop Summit was a success. Among those that didn’t collaborate with a KDE person, only 35% think the Desktop Summit was a success.

Starting the 20+ hour trip home tomorrow at 4am.

Answered several sets of email interview questions for articles about the Desktop Summit.

Interviewed several more advisory board members. Tried to get the writeup out before GUADEC but didn’t quite manage.

Wrote one last invitation letter for the Desktop Summit/GUADEC attendee who needs it for visa/work reasons. (Sadly a couple of Nigerians and an Iranian didn’t make it for visa reasons.)

Wrote a press release that was delayed for a while … hopefully it’ll come out in a couple of weeks.

Booked travel for OSCON. Short trip to save on hotels and because doing two long trips (GUADEC and OSCON) in one month is too much for my family, especially during the summer.

Looked for other GNOME speakers, especially in Europe, to help out with events where GNOME is invited to speak. (Let me know if you’d like to nominate someone to be added to the list.)

Traveled to the Canary Islands – a long trip. Almost missed my connection in Madrid but thank fully I didn’t and I got to see Chema in the airport.

Attended the press interview for the local Spanish press at the Desktop Summit on Friday. They had questions like what is free software, is it as good as proprietary software, could our government be using it, why isn’t our government using it? The local politician we’ve been working with, Roberto Moreno, is a computer science professor at the local university.

Worked on agenda and location for GUADEC board of directors and board of advisors meeting. (Didn’t finalize board of advisors location until the day before with Rosanna’s help. It was all “mañana.”)

Went to the board of directors meetings. It was productive even if we were all a bit jetlagged. We welcomed Germán and Diego to the board. (Also, because of flight delays, Diego wasn’t able to join us until later.) We talked about logistical things like minutes and roles as well as things like an agenda for the AGM and other things. Minutes will probably come out shortly after everyone gets home from GUADEC.

Went to the opening party sponsored by Canonical. It was good to put faces with a lot of people I’ve met over the past year. (Including a few faces I met last year but didn’t remember since I met so many hundreds of people in that first week on the job …) Also talked to the keynote speakers, Walter Bender and r0ml, about their keynotes …

Pinged about a lot of last minute Desktop Summit details. Most of them are turning out well.

Attended the first day of the Desktop Summit. Went to the keynotes in the morning and then spent the afternoon in the press room. Walter Bender and r0ml’s keynotes were great. Walter has a great project and cause and r0ml is a very entertaining speaker. Richard Stallman’s keynote caused a lot of controversy. (It also had  a lot of old content and when keynoting, it’s generally understood that you show something new unless specifically requested to regive an old talk.) The local media was extremely interested in speaking to Stallman and I think he probably helped promote free software in the Canary Islands quite a bit.

Had lunch with the board of directors and Richard Stallman. He reminded us to use free software instead of the term open source software in order to show support for the free software movement. He also wanted to discuss C#/mono. (This was before the latest Microsoft announcement. I don’t know if the conversation would be different now or not.)

I have a very long to do list. This is only part of it. (Anyone is welcome to help out too!) I’ll publish the entire list in an update after the Desktop Summit.

• Attend the Desktop Summit!
• Apply for Amazon accounts in other countries so people can direct referral money to the GNOME Foundation.
• Fill out Google Grant Adwords application with data from Claus Schwarm.
• Send out summaries of the meetings with Board of Advisor folks.
• Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop and Jaap’s feedback in mind. Hopefully with the new treasurer.
• Update Friends of GNOME spreadsheet data with the checks we’ve received. (It’s currently Paypal data. We don’t get many checks.)
• Work on the new GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan, like premium sponsorship.
• Work with marketing list to figure out how best to report and act on Friends of GNOME survey data. (John Williams is looking at it now.)

Short week as I got back from vacation mid-week. (The lab setup went really well. Hopefully people will start to blog on http://www.kidsoncomputers.org.)

Caught up with a ton of email. Only sent out two redundant emails I think.  (That’s emails that I wouldn’t have sent out if I read all my mail before I answered any of it.)

Met with four more members of the Board of Advisors. Sent notes to Board of Directors. Next week I’ll write it up for the Board of Advisors and the GNOME Foundation. I believe their feedback is some good stuff for discussion at GUADEC.

Sent out a mail to some of the team leads (like travel, sys admin, etc) to talk about how we can standardize on reporting. Early consensus is to have standard documents and reporting times and places.

Got press contacts from advisory board members and Desktop Summit sponsors for the press at the Desktop Summit.

Pinged on the status for a couple of the sponsored parties at the Desktop Summit.

Gave input on agendas for board of advisors, board of directors and AGM meetings at GUADEC.

Still working on getting a meeting room for the advisory board meeting. (Thought I had it all until they told me that the speaker phone and projector were going to add 600 euros to the price!!)

Was very excited about all the progress Paul Cutler and the marketing team have made on mission, goals, wiki pages, etc. Contributed a few ideas to a couple of pages.

Exchanged email with someone who put in a bid to host this year’s GNOME.Asia summit.

Talked to TI who is donating some Zoom 2‘s to the GNOME usability team.

Sent 401K plan guy’s answers back to our attorneys for another round of review.

Next week:

• Answer some interview questions for an article around Desktop Summit.
• Write another invitation letter for a Desktop Summit/GUADEC attendee who needs it for visa/work reasons.
• Write a press release! (Watch for it!)
• Fill out Google Grant Adwords application with data from Claus Schwarm.
• Send out summaries of the meetings with Board of Advisor folks.
• Send out agenda for advisory board meeting at GUADEC.
• Make sure sponsored Desktop Summit and GUADEC parties happen.
• Travel to Desktop Summit/GUADEC. (24 hour trip)
• Board of Directors meeting.

Post GUADEC:

• Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop and Jaap’s feedback in mind. Hopefully with the new treasurer.
• Update Friends of GNOME spreadsheet data with the checks we’ve received. (It’s currently Paypal data. We don’t get many checks.)
• Work on the new GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan, like premium sponsorship.
• Work with marketing list to figure out how best to report and act on Friends of GNOME survey data. (John Williams is looking at it now.)

This was a crazy week with a ton of meetings but I asked for it!

I set up one on one (phone) meetings with (almost) all the advisory board members. I wanted to talk about their GUADEC plans, what they’d like to see at GUADEC (especially with regards to the advisory board meeting) and to get their feedback about how things have gone with the Foundation in the past year. Met with 15 of the advisory board representatives this week representing 12 companies. (Got stood up a few times too.) Have five companies that I didn’t meet with – two are not being responsive, the rest are working on scheduling. I will be sending my notes to the board of directors and summaries to the board of advisors and the Foundation List.

As a side note, several of the advisors will be having others from their company represent them at the advisory board meeting at GUADEC. At least two will try to attend by phone – hopefully that will work better this year. (Many of them are not happy with this year’s GUADEC location because it is expensive and inconvenient to get to and because of the expense and the perceived vacation-location, it’s hard to ask for travel approval. Although I think the time it takes to get there was the real impediment for the ones not able to make it.) When this year’s bids for hosting GUADEC come in, I’ll be sure to alert the advisory board that it’s time to give input.

Karen Sandler will represent the SFLC (our attorneys) and she’ll hold a legal BOF if anyone in the community has questions for her.

Voted in the GNOME Foundation directors election.

Took a look at the Friends of GNOME survey data which is looking really interesting. We had 234 people respond! Off the top of my head, this stands out:

• Only 5% of those that donated money are GNOME Foundation members and less than 20% are GNOME contributors. Several mentioned in the comments that they give money because they don’t have time/skills to give code.
• A good third use GNOME projects on Windows. (In addition to the GNOME desktop – almost everyone used that.)
• The “what would you like to see” question is a ranking one but it looks like at least half of all respondents ranked “exactly what you are doing now” and “usability studies” in the top half.
• Of the 230 people that answered the gender question, only one was a woman.
• Someone suggested the survey was a good idea and we should do it regularly.
• Someone suggested pinging people if they have donated in the past but not in the past year.
• There were some great comments in the free form fields.

Announced Nokia as the platinum sponsor for the Desktop Summit and announced the keynote speakers. (I wrote the keynote one and I sent both to my press contacts. Other people wrote the other one and got them all posted in the right places.)

Did a few other logistical things for the Desktop Summit like remind all of the sponsors who qualify for displaying banners that they can bring banners, bugged travel agency about meeting room for advisory board (and Chema called them for me), sent a bunch of invitation letters to GNOME folks for visa purposes, gave quick input on several issues, etc.

Reviewed accessibility contract and Willie Walker now has it to use as appropriate to contract with people to do GNOME accessibility work. He’s already drafted the first statement of work and is working on getting everything signed in a way that makes our attorney happy.

GNOME Board Meeting was cancelled/postponed as we didn’t have any issues to discuss.

Next week:

• Out June 13th-June 23rd visiting my parents and setting up a Kids on Computers lab in Huajuapan de Leon.
• For the following week: (Looks like too much for a week so I’ll have to decide what to postpone until after GUADEC.)
  • Meet with the remaining advisors that I haven’t met with.
  • Send out summaries of the meetings with Board of Advisor folks.
  • Finalize agenda for advisory board meeting at GUADEC.
  • Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop and Jaap’s feedback 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.
  • Work on the new GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan, like premium sponsorship.
  • Work with marketing list to figure out how best to report and act on Friends of GNOME survey data.

Went to the Open Source Systems Conference. This was a very different academic group than TOS and HFOSS. Instead of professors using open source in their undergraduate curriculum, it was mostly professors and PhD students who are studying open source software projects. Not necessarily participating in them or teaching people how to participate but studying how they work, like this study of GIMP. There were quite a few people that had studied GNOME but several people mentioned that it is a hard project to study because it has so many subprojects. (I don’t think that’s a problem, except to researchers.) During my keynote people asked a lot about how GNOME works and several people asked how they could help from a research perspective. I said anything that told us more about our users! I also encouraged them all to blog – I said bits of information often would be more useful to the community than one research paper at the end.

Went all the way to Sweden and didn’t see Andreas Nilsson, Kalle Persson nor my high school friend that lives there.

Had a train ride and dinner with Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. I asked him how he would get GNOME more involved with governments and his advice was to start in Spain where the government is already heavily involved with open source and GNOME has strong ties.

Wrote press release for the keynote speakers at the Desktop Summit. (No immediate feedback from the Desktop Summit mailing list.) The platinum sponsor press release came back approved from the sponsoring company too. We need to schedule these this week.

Sent out Friends of GNOME survey to learn more about who our donors are, why they support the GNOME Foundation and what they’d like to see the Foundation do. Need to go through the data this week.

Put together Friends of GNOME May data and blog post. (Thanks to Jaap A. Haitsma for improving the spreadsheet and correcting the errors in the monthly calculations.) We’re doing really well on our annual goal ($16,000 of $20,000!) but I’d like to see much more of it from subscriptions as we can count on those monthly and make plans accordingly.

Pinged Desktop Summit sponsors about logos and company descriptions for the USB drives.

Participated in the “What do you expect from the Foundation” thread on the GNOME Foundation mailing list plus several off thread conversations.

Took over writing some of the invitation letters for the Desktop Summit from Agustin for people that need visas.

Heard back from travel agency about hotels that have meeting rooms (finally!) but they didn’t say what features the rooms had nor how much they cost – just the names of the hotels … (These are rooms for the Board of Directors and Board of Advisors meetings at GUADEC.)

Sent our attorney’s feedback on our 401K plan to the 401K plan provider, SocialK.

This week:

• Schedule one on one meetings with each of our sponsors to talk about their GUADEC plans, what they’d like to see at GUADEC and what their impressions have been over the last year (what we’ve done well and what we could improve on.)
• Schedule press releases for the Desktop Summit.
• Review accessibility contract that attorney reviewed/rewrote.
• GNOME Board Meeting.
• Get and analyze data from Friends of GNOME survey.
• Vote in the GNOME Foundation Directors election!
• Put these on the list to do sometime:
  • 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 ready to be mostly offline for 10 days. (June 13th-June 23rd)

In the month of May we raised $7,341, for a total of $16,910 since January 1, 2009. May was an awesome month! (We got a lot of donations when John Palmieri posted The GNOME Foundation Needs Your Help.)

Here are some graphs that show recent trends.

Comparing donations by years:

Comparing donations by month across years:

Showing what percentage of our Friends of GNOME income comes from subscription payments:

Thanks very much to Jaap A. Haitsma for improving the spreadsheet and correcting the errors in the monthly calculations.

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.)

What are these updates?

Here are some of the things I worked on during the week of May 18th in no particular order of importance.  I’m focusing more on just letting people know what I’m working on in these updates than giving a complete update on any issue – that happens in the different forums I’m working on. A few things don’t make it to this list for confidentiality reasons.

If you have questions, please ask them in the comments!

So what did I work on?

Had an email discussion with a few people from FOSSFA. We will meet at OSCON to discuss how the GNOME Foundation and FOSSFA might collaborate.

Helped promote Friends of GNOME badges. Marketing list came up with a schedule for people to help promote it on a regular basis via blogs.

Had lunch with Jonathan Corbet from LWN. I asked him how projects like GNOME could work best with him. He’d love to get more regular updates of future plans – technical, product plans. It’s really hard to follow all the project related lists to keep up on what’s going on. They are also willing to pay people to write articles on GNOME. (But if you are willing to write articles on GNOME, please also remember GNOME Journal!!)

Worked on my GNOME Journal article – an interview with Laszlo Peter from Sun on how Sun works with upstream GNOME. We’re on the final touches.

Started a discussion on the agenda  for the GUADEC Advisory Board meeting. We’ll be focusing on GNOME 3.0. We’ll want community members to come talk about GNOME 3.0 roadmap, marketing and projects like Zeitgeist and GNOME Shell. We’ll also have time for the advisory board members to update us and each other on their GNOME plan.

Google adsense vs adwords. We had a discussion on the GNOME Marketing list about adding ads to gnome.org. (A discussion, not a proposal nor a plan!) I followed up with a conversation with Google and discovered that Google has an AdWords grant program. If we get it we get $300/day worth of free ads. (And we can’t have an adsense account which I don’t believe we really wanted anyway. If we ever do ads, we’d want to work closely with the company and approve the ad itself.)

Booked travel for GUADEC. Staying at the Hotel Fataga with hopes of being close to board of directors and board of advisors. (If you are at GUADEC, please remember that some of the board of advisors members are new to our community and include them in your happy hour and dinner plans as appropriate!)

Attended great nonprofit seminar. Tuesday I went to a local nonprofit seminar and learned about board of directors responsibilities, subcommittees, marketing and finances. I will share in the appropriate lists and on my blog as I digest the information and make it useful. (For example, this week I plan to add some info/graphs to the 2009 budget to make it easier to read based on some of the things I learned in the finance talk.)

Discussed sponsorship levels for companies – active discussion on the marketing list. Things like should we have more granulation based on company size? Should we have different levels of sponsorship with different benefits?

Signed up another corporate sponsor for the Desktop Summit. A couple of more to finalize!

Created a survey for Friends of GNOME donors. Will test this week with marketing list. I really would like to know why they donated, what they appreciate about what the Foundation is doing, what they’d like to see in the future, and what GNOME products do they use.

Pinged about website ruler for Friends of GNOME. There’s a ruler in progress to track Friends of GNOME donations and goals we have for that money.

Pinged about analytics for website. Not an urgent issue but something I’d like to see added to the (very long already) sys admin to do list. We could do much better marketing, fundraising and *meeting people’s needs* if we knew why they came to our website and what they looked at. We have some data now but it’s not nearly as much nor as useful as it could be.

Made appointment to talk to attorney this week about pending issues. Yeah!

Discussing GNOME Mobile plans at OSiM 2009. Several people have been working on GNOME Mobile plans for OSiM and we are now talking together about them.

Finalized OSBR article about GNOME Foundation. The goal of the article was to tell people what open source related foundations/organizations look like – or rather tell them how the GNOME Foundation works as an example of what they might look like. (And it’s in an issue with all women authors which is how I ended up writing it. I was recruited to write an article because I was a women in open source and I choose to write it on the GNOME Foundation.)

Looking for a desktop deployment cases study (and presenter) for OpenSource Word.

Agreed to keynote at UTOSC (they are paying travel even though I can only go for one day – it’s a very short flight from my home) and asked for volunteers to run a GNOME booth. Christer Edwards expressed interest.

SFScon 2009 would like to know if we’d like to have another hackfest there. It’s being discussed with last year’s planners and the board.

Sent a few GNOME related announcements through identica/twitter GNOME account. If you’d like to help twitter, let me know!

Had a few discussions (seperately) with projects, companies and the board about how people might use our Amazon Affiliate account. If it’s built in to a project and the proceeds go to the GNOME Foundation, how much credit or control could or should go to the project or to the maintainers of that project? That type of conversation.

Had a discussion with the OpenLogic CEO about recommending some GNOME desktop applications to add to their library. If you’d like to help decide on a short list of enterprise ready desktop applications, let me know. (These would not be supported applications at first. OpenLogic would add them to the library and eventually certify them. If/when added, their customers could download them and use them.)

There’s probably a few other threads in my email that I missed but I think that’s a most of what I did last week.

Plans for this week:

• Test Friends of GNOME survey with marketing list.
• Contribute to levels of sponsorship discussion on marketing list.
• Talk to attorney. Hopefully wrap up three outstanding legal projects.
• Ping several of our existing sponsors on open issues. (One is very behind on advisory board fee payments.)
• Prepare talk for keynote at Open Source Systems confernece next week. (They are paying for travel. Still a long trip but a good chance to talk to unversity folks about GNOME and many of our contributors start in university.)
• Wrap up as many issues, projects and conversations as possible.
• Get remaining pending Desktop Summit sponsors agreed upon and invoiced.
• 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.
• Apply for Google Adwords Grant program.
• Board of Directors meeting.