Author: stormy

Stormy’s Update: Week of May 11, 2009

Short two day week, as I’m off on vacation!

  • GNOME Advisory Board meeting
    • did roundtable
    • Asked who was planning to ship GNOME 3.0. Everybody was interested in shipping it but probably not GNOME 3.0.0. Still working plans about when they’d ship it.
    • Briefly discussed 2009 finances. One person said they’d have preferred a more positive message or a message with a call to support lots of new things. (I pointed out we are planning to use additional money for things like sys admin and hackfests.) Once again it was agreed that lots of subscribers would make for a strong GNOME Foundation and we need to figure out ways to make subscribers feel like they belong.
    • GUADEC advisory board meeting. Most likely the main topic of discussion will be GNOME 3.0 – the advisory board is interested in an update. We’ll also probably have presentations by members. Stormy will send out draft agenda.
    • Heard again that the Canary Islands is not a good destination for corporate travel, especially this year. Several people pointed out that it is cheaper than Istanbul was!
    • Hackfests. This was a short discussion at the end. We had a couple of ideas like hosting them at company sites and approving employee time to participate.
  • Replacing US event box is low on Rosanna’s priority until we have a need for the box. (Event box and some contents were stolen from a volunteer’s apartment after SCALE.)
  • Wrote an article about the GNOME Foundation for the next release of OSBR. (The next issue’s theme is articles written by women in open source.)
  • Pinged lots of people: attorney, travel agent for meeting rooms for board meetings at GUADEC, Google about adsense account, various sponsors about GUADEC sponsorship, …
  • Participated in several discussions on the marketing list on GNOME merchandise, audience themes, Friends of GNOME, …

Stormy’s Update, Week of May 4, 2009

  • Marketing
    • GNOME 3.0 Marketing
      • Working on a plan for GNOME 3.0 marketing with Paul Cutler. Paul sent out a plan to create a plan. We will use the discussion and feedback on the list to create a calendar. See thread on the marketing mailing list if you are interested in participating.
      • Planning GNOME 3.0 BOF at GUADEC with Paul Cutler.
    • Working on standard presentations for GNOME for people interested in speaking on GNOME.
    • Discussed whether we’d want to add ads to gnome.org. (Rumor has it they could be worth up to $145K/year.)
    • Agreed to approach Google about sharing revenue generated from search from aps like Epiphany.
    • Put together a draft for how to recruit sponsors for GNOME.
  • Legal stuff:
    • Agreement with SugarCRM for free use of their services being reviewed by attorneys.
    • 401K plan being reviewed by attorneys. (Setting up a GNOME Foundation 401K with SocialK. Plan costs, including matching funds for Rosanna and Stormy, to be covered by a paycut to Stormy.)
    • GNOME Accessibility Outreach program contract. Modified the contest contract to be a more generic contract so that we can continue to have people work on the tasks even though the contest is officially over. Sent to attorney for review.
  • Friends of GNOME
    • got feedback from several people, brought it up on the marketing list
    • published April data
    • discussed how to get data for a ruler on the webpage
  • Desktop Summit
    • On going: Looking for rooms for the adboard and board meeting. Looking for a local person to help work with two sponsors that want to host parties. (In addition to the two that are already connected.)
    • Pinged companies that have not finalized sponsoring plans. Finalized agreement with two of them. Still several outstanding.
  • Sponsors:
    • Exchanged email with three companies interested in signing up. (These have been on-going conversations for a while.)
    • Contacted two other companies I think might be interested. Had a phone discussion with one.
    • Pinged one that is way behind on payments.

What’s happening with the GNOME Foundation, April 2009

Sponsors and the Advisory Board

  • Our April meeting was about GNOME 3.0 and deprecation plans.
  • 2009 Funding.
  • In person Advisory Board meeting at the Desktop Summit will be Tuesday, July 7th.
  • Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier has joined the advisory board as Novell’s representative.

Conferences & Events

  • There was a GNOME Mobile meeting at the Collaboration Summit.
  • Upcoming events:
    • GUADEC & Akademy. Canary Islands, Spain, July 8, 2009. Website is live, general schedule is ready. The AGM meeting will be on Wednesday, July 8, 2009.
    • Shaun McCance is planning a GNOME documentation hackfest at the Open Source Documentation Conference that will be funded by Intel.
    • Libre Graphics Meeting: The GNOME Foundation is sponsoring LGM by handling their donation process for no fee.
    • Passed on an OSiM Taiwan speaking opportunity to the GNOME Mobile group.
    • For more info see GNOME events.

Other stuff going on:

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

Friends of GNOME update

In the month of April we raised $3,316, for a total of $10,027.13 since January 1, 2009. (We had a big day on April 30th when John Palmieri posted The GNOME Foundation Needs Your Help.)

Here are some graphs that show recent trends.

Comparing donations by years:

Donations by Year

Comparing donations by month across years:

Compare Months by Year

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

Subscriptions

In 2009, we were planning on raising $20,000 from Friends of GNOME for general Foundation funds. With the launch of the sys admin team, the Foundation said it would like to be able to hire a part time system administrator to coordinate efforts and in order to do so, we are looking to raise $50,000 from Friends of GNOME. Canonical has agreed to match $10,000 of contributions with the goal being to hire a system administrator for GNOME.

What’s happening with the GNOME Foundation, February and March 2009

[Sorry, just realized this was in draft format all month! – Stormy, May 4, 2009]

Sponsors and the Advisory Board

  • Our February meeting was about infrastructure and system administration issues. We talked about creating a formal sys admin team, what the GNOME project needs and how companies can help with people and money. Sys admin team announced along with donations from Google, Codethink and Canonical.
  • Our March meeting was to update the advisory board members on GUADEC and Desktop Summit planning status.
  • The April meeting will be about GNOME 3.0 and deprecation plans.
  • 2009 Funding.
    • 2009 money is coming in from companies.
    • Balanced our budget to match expected income this year. Hackfest funding is expected to be way down.
    • Hackfests – while all of our sponsors are enthusiastic about hackfests, they are having trouble coming up with funding for them this year due to the budget.
    • We are looking at see if we can do things like fund a usability study- see discussions on the usability list.

Conferences

Other stuff going on:

  • Friends of GNOME:
    • $6711.35 (since January 1)
    • Please consider showing your GNOME love and signing up!
  • The GNOME Travel Committee has been formed and announced along with a call for GUADEC travel assistance applications.
  • GTK+ Theming API Hackfest, February 16-20, Dublin, Ireland. About 10 people got together in the Sun offices for some GTK+ Theming hacking. Thanks to Alberto Ruiz for pulling this together.
  • We will have preferential voting this year.
  • GNOME 3.0 planning announced!
  • Cancelled the Bolzano GTK+ Hackfest due to lack of sponsorship.
  • Shaun McCance is planning a GNOME documentation hackfest at the Open Source Documentation Conference.
  • You can buy GNOME branded clothing at Hackerthreads, including a new polo shirt and a baseball cap.
  • Libre Graphics Meeting: The GNOME Foundation is sponsoring LGM by handling their donation process for no fee.

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

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.)
  • 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:
  • 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.

What’s happening with the GNOME Foundation, December 2008

We’ll continue to post meeting minutes online but we (the board) would like a place to discuss what’s happening in a bit more detail.

Sponsors and the Advisory Board

  • Advisory Board Members:
    • Sugar Labs joined the GNOME Advisory Board. Walter Bender will be representing them. Check out the press release or some of the nice articles written about it. It was also pretty popular news in Twitter.
    • Canonical – Rick Spencer, the new engineering manager for the Ubuntu Desktop team, will be representing Canonical on the GNOME Advisory Board.
    • Stefan Kost will be Nokia’s technical representative to the advisory board. (Rodrigo Novo will be Nokia’s decision-making representative and Carlos Guerreiro has moved on to another project.
  • Our December meeting was about upstream/downstream relationships. We had a lot of new members of the advisory board attending (Walter Bender, Rick Spencer, Leslie Hawthorne, Robert Love, Stefan Kost) and we were missing a lot of our regular attendees. While we talked some about downstream/upstream relationships, we ended up talking about the GNOME Foundation goals and how others organizations can relate to that.
  • 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. We haven’t sent out invoices for 2009 yet but we’ve gotten commitments from a number of our members.

Conferences

  • Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. GNOME and KDE had their first in person meeting to discuss the 2009 Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the co-located GUADEC and Akademy conferences. Sebastian Kügler, Will Stephenson, Claudia Rauch, Dave Neary, Vincent Untz and Alberto Ruiz met in Gran Canaria to see the facilities and meet with the local planning team and the local government. (See Dave and Alberto’s blogs for their impressions of the visit.)
  • FOSDEM. February 8-9, Brussels. GNOME will have a devroom and a booth this year again. We are still looking for volunteers for the booth. If you are interested, check out the wiki page GNOME presence at FOSDEM or contact Christophe.
  • SCALE. There will be a GNOME booth at SCALE, led by Jeff Schroeder. If we get enough interested projects together, we might even have a GNOME Zone.
  • GUADLAC is scheduled for March.
  • OSiM USA: Approved loose relationship with OSiM as part of GNOME Mobile work. Stormy is speaking about GNOME Mobile at the event.
  • For more info on GNOME events.

Other

  • Annual report. All is on track with the GNOME annual report. Once again Lucas Rocha is coordinating it. Check out the wiki or contact Lucas if you are interested in helping.
  • Legal stuff:
    • All taxes through 2007 filed, just in time for 2008 taxes.
    • All California nonprofit paper work is up to date.
    • D&O insurance obtained.
  • Board members:
    • Jeff Waugh has stepped down from the board in order to focus on work and other projects.
    • Diego Escalante Urrelo will be joining the board as a new member for the remainder of this term.
  • Reimbursements done for LGM travel, Cairo hackfest, and Latin America Tour.
  • DVCS Survey: board helped revise text of survey to determine developer preferences between various DVCSs.
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