GNOME Foundation

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.

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, …

• 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.

Sponsors and the Advisory Board

• Our April meeting was about GNOME 3.0 and deprecation plans.
• 2009 Funding.
  • Sent out 2009 budget
  • J5 sent out call for community financial support. Great response so far!
  • Received Sun, HP and Nokia 2009 fees plus Nokia’s sponsorship money for GNOME.Asia 2008.
• 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:

• Friends of GNOME:
  • $3,316 in April! For a total of $10,027.13 since January 1.
  • All Friends of GNOME gifts for those that signed up before Apr 15, 2009 have gone out.
  • Please consider showing your GNOME love and signing up!
• Marketing
• Hackerthreads now has polo shirts and hats with the GNOME logo in stock.
• GNOME has won Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice award for the “Favorite Desktop Environment”.
• Sent out a statement of support for GNOME 3.0 planning.

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

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:

Comparing donations by month across years:

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

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.

[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

• Call for Papers – submit those GNOME talks! Spread the word! (Especially if the event is near you.)
  • LinuxCon
• Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, San Francisco, 8 Apr 2009.
  • GNOME Mobile
  • Marketing in open source, led by Stormy
• GUADEC & Akademy. Canary Islands, Spain, 3 Jul 2009. Website is live, general schedule is ready. Call for participation and call for travel assistance is now open.
• For more info see GNOME events.

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.