GNOME Foundation

About GNOME

The GNOME project is an effort to create and provide a complete, free and easy-to-use desktop and mobile environment accessible to all users, as well as a powerful application development framework for software developers. GNOME technologies are used in millions of desktops, phones and devices around the world.

The GNOME Foundation supports the GNOME project by acting as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software, providing business development opportunities for GNOME and its partners, hosting GNOME events and marketing GNOME.

Comprised of thousands of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

Executive Director

The GNOME Foundation is currently recruiting an Executive Director to run and grow The GNOME Foundation and project by engaging volunteers, governments, partners, companies and independent organizations. The Executive Director will work to develop and maintain programs to further GNOME’s goals, to promote the benefits of the GNOME platform, and encourage contribution and collaboration within the GNOME ecosphere. Applicants for this job would be able to work effectively on their own, with little oversight, while possessing clear communications and persuasion skills so as to be comfortable talking about GNOME in front of large crowds at conferences, executives in boardrooms, one-on-one with heads of state, and with the GNOME volunteer community.

Location

Job Location: Home based with broadband connection (ideally North American or Western European Time Zones).

Required Skills & Responsibilities

General

• Able to run the day-to-day operations of The GNOME Foundation and manage staff.
• Able to lead in a distributed volunteer, open source non-profit
• Outstanding planning, writing and communication skills (including public speaking).
• Strong management and delegation skills.
• Strong multitasking skills – driving multiple projects simultaneously and successfully.
• Ability to be productive through self-motivation and self-discipline
• Manage existing relationships as well as develop new ones.
• Implement services and programs according with the vision and mission of the Foundation.
• Agreeable and able to travel internationally up to 25% of the time.

Community engagement

• Develop community outreach programs.
• Demonstrated experience managing volunteer or free/open source software projects from development to execution.
• Demonstrated experience leading international and virtual or free/open source software teams.
• Recruit and retain new volunteers in many different skill sets from marketing to development to design.
• Experienced with managing and tracking many diverse projects at once including motivating, engaging and working with volunteer community members.
• Develop stronger relationships with significant GNOME deployments and the larger GNOME community.
• Develop new programs to expand GNOME’s ecosystem, like developer documentation, training or consulting opportunities.
• Business development and management.
• Extensive knowledge and experience in the desktop and mobile industries. Solid understanding of desktop and mobile free/open source technologies and the competitive landscape.
• Manage existing Advisory Board relationships and develop new Advisory Board partnerships.
• Explore and develop new business development opportunities.
• Manage partner relationships.
• Manage sponsorship relationships.
• Managing Advisory Board relationships.

Financial management and fund raising

• Should have fund raising experience and a proven track record.
• Develop and run fund raising campaigns.

Strategic marketing & planning

• Represent GNOME at professional and community conferences, and in internet forums (blogging, etc.).
• Do short and long term strategic planning for the Foundation.
• Brand / image management.
• Engage in short and long term strategic planning for the Foundation.

To Apply

We welcome all interested and qualified candidates to apply by sending their resume and an email explaining their interest to ed-job-list@gnome.org.

F123.org and Mozilla both gave us grants for GNOME accessibility! We are opening contracts for good work with the funding. Thanks to Joanie Diggs for putting together the proposals and plans for the money. Joanie has been posting the opportunities.

Made a list of all the things I work on. I categorized them into things that could wait a while for a new executive director, things that need a board contact and things I thought the board should try to continue to work on in the short term. The board really stepped up to the plate to cover things. I am impressed by the work they are doing and willing to do.

Followed the Desktop Summit mailing list, had several chats with people about different topics, especially Dave Neary who has been following the progress closely and helping out. Reviewed the website and the press release. Helped Claudia Rauch with the text for the sponsorship brochure and proof reading it. Andreas Nilsson made it into a beautiful looking brochure. Claudia and I divvied up the companies we want to contact and I sent out the first request for Desktop Summit 2011 sponsorships to the companies on my list. Germán Póo-Caamaño and Claudia will continue the work.

Along with Paul Cutler met with Litl about the things they are working on related to GNOME. Litl is sponsoring the Boston Summit this weekend.

Worked on a standard document for terms and conditions for GNOME event sponsorship. It’s often a step that’s skipped as it’s work to put it together for each event. My hope is to make it easy. That said, we’ve had very few misunderstandings over the years.

Worked with James Vasile to write some standard letters for logo infringement. Actually, he wrote it, and then with feedback from the board I turned it into a couple of version to be used depending on the situation.

Wrote up a job description for the new executive director. Discussed the hiring process with the board.

Made a quick inquiry about health insurance in case that’s important to the new executive director. The way it works in the United States, it would be expensive. If we have a candidate from another country, we’ll have to research their employment laws.

Was very excited that we announced the interns for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.  We had a couple of marketing applicants – which was exciting to me – but they faced tough competition from the other projects. They did submit, as part of their applications, a very nicely and uniquely designed brochure and a website of screenshots among other things. Marina Zhurakhinskaya did an awesome job putting the whole Outreach Program together from encouraging applicants to working with all of the potential mentors to putting out the press release. Thanks to to Google and Collabora for enabling us to accept so many awesome candidates!

Published a wiki page of the advisory board member responsibilities. It’s something every new advisory board member asks but something I had always done verbally so it was good to get it in writing.

Followed up with some of the advisory board members that have missed a few meetings. Most of them have just been very busy – some with great GNOME work!

Worked with Egencia, an online travel reservation system, to see if they could help the travel committee and the GNOME community with travel. We believe they can but we are working out the costs now.

Reviewed the annual report. It is ready to be published!

Gave my feedback about the Grace Hopper Conference Open Source track. I hope they do it again!

Wrote my rough draft of CiviCRM requirements. Passed the task off to Rosanna. She will work with the sys admin team and a consultant to get them implemented.

Attended the GNOME Foundation IRC meetings. Two this month! Was impressed by the attendance and the discussion.

Talked to Canonical about Unity. They plan to continue to work with and support GNOME.

Got the LWN agreement officially signed. They gave us an awesome offer and all Friends of GNOME subscribers will get an LWN subscription.

Attended the Boston Summit. Great job by John Palmieri on organizing it again! Got to meet a see a lot of people in person. Had a lot of conversations about potential candidates for the executive director job. Attended the board meeting which was very productive. Led the Friends of GNOME planning session. Lots of great plans with a great team working on it! Jason Clinton, Joey Ferwerda, Og Maciel, Vincent Untz and Jeff Fortin. Many others participated and gave feedback like Heidi Ellis and Brian Cameron and Vinny. And obviously there are others on the team that weren’t here who will help out as well!

GNOME was invited to a Samsung open source conference in Korea. Dave Neary will be representing us and speaking. Others are welcome to attend.

Pinged teams about the quarterly report. Set up a new process where people submit their reports to the wiki.

Made some substantial edits to the hackfest wiki pages to include other events and to clarify the parts of the process where we’ve gotten the most questions.

Floated the idea that the Foundation hire a part time event manager to help with hackfests and other events. Had several discussions about what that person might do and be funded and most importantly how the position might interact with the travel committee. No decision made.

Excited that the GNOME Event Box has a new home for a while while Christer Edwards gives it some tender loving care. He’s used it a few times and has some ideas for improving it.

Worked with InitMarketing on some slide presentations they are making for GNOME advocates to be able to use. They are looking good.

Followed up with Friends of GNOME “adopt a hacker” hackers and the post cards they’ve been sending out. Everyone wants to continue even if the numbers are going to ramp up soon!

Had some conversations about the GNOME Ambassadors. Plan to invite mentors to join as well.

Talked to Jim Herbsleb from Carnegie Mellon about work they are doing to research how communities work and how we can learn from them and make them more effective. One idea was to do a joint survey to help set Foundation goals. Germán Póo-Caamaño will be following up.

Held the GNOME Advisory Board Meeting. We discussed moduleset reorgnization, GNOME Asia and the Boston Summit.

Attended board meetings, met with Rosanna, met with Brian.

Took some vacation to visit my parents.

Following our call for bids less than a month ago, it turns out that most people work better under pressure [1]. So we have set a deadline date for the bids to come in.

The date is Friday 19th November 2010. We’ll likely start going through the bids the following week, so we’re pretty flexible for what time we’ll receive the bids, so you don’t need to worry about timezones.

Looking forward to receiving your bids!

[1]: Note the tongue-in-cheek.

We are just over two weeks away from the Boston Summit! Thank you to J5 for helping organize the Boston Summit and finding rooms. More information is available on the Boston Summit wiki page.

A couple quick notes:

• Let us know you’re coming – add your name to the wiki here.
• Want to give a talk about something? Organize some hacking time? Participate in another project? Add your ideas on the wiki! Boston Summit is an unconference but a little planning never hurt either.

We’ll see you there!

The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in the city center of Berlin at the Humboldt University, Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events.

Find the official announcement of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation here and the Desktop Summit website here.

Desktop Summit

The GNOME and KDE communities develop the majority of Free Software desktop technology. Increasingly, they cooperate on underlying infrastructure. By holding their annual developer flagship events in the same location, the two projects hope to foster collaboration and discussion between their developer communities. Furthermore, KDE and GNOME aim to work more closely with the rest of the desktop and mobile open source community. The summit presents a unique opportunity for all of us to work together and improve the free and open source desktop for all.

At the Desktop Summit 2011 the organizing team expects well over a thousand core contributors, prominent open source technology leaders, government, education and corporate representatives and hundreds of open source desktop engineers, usability experts and designers. Local and international IT industry are invited to learn about and join in developing the latest innovative desktop technology. The event is locally supported by the TSB Innovation Agency Berlin GmbH and the Berlin Senate.

Location

Berlin Mitte with the University

The conference will take place at the 200 year old Humboldt University in the district of Under den Linden, part of the city center of Berlin. This area has plenty of good hotels and hostels, great restaurants and shopping areas and good public transport – all that in walking distance. Cultural needs can be met by the near-by Deutsches Historisches Museum, the City Library of Berlin and many other prominent buildings and institutions. A must-see for visitors of Berlin, the Brandenburger Tor, can be found on the street the university is on.

The registration for the Desktop Summit will open on 1 February 2011 and a call for papers will be issued. Talk submissions will be due on 15th of March and one month later the conference program will be announced. Saturday 6 August kicks off 3 days of joint keynotes, talks and social events followed by four days of collaborative workshops. The conference officially ends on Friday, 12 August.

Important dates

• 1 February: registration for Desktop Summit will open; Call for Papers issued.
• 15 March: Deadline for travel & hotel reimbursement requests. Registration remains open until the conference.
• 15 April: Feedback on travel and hotel reimbursement requests.
• 6 – 8 August: Kickoff and joint keynotes, talks and social events
• 9 August: General Assembly of KDE e.V.; Gnome Foundation meeting
• 9-12 August: Collaborative workshops

Website up

Meanwhile the website went online on DesktopSummit.org where you can read a bit of information on the conference, its history, the upcoming desktop summit and the location. More content will be added over the coming months. You can also subscribe for news on the conference so you will be notified whenever there is something going on.

I interviewed the final candidates for the system administration position, we made an offer and … welcomed Christer Edwards as our new system administrator! He’s already done great work in just the past couple of weeks. Thanks to our interviewers Jonathan Blandford, Bradley Kuhn and Brad Taylor and a special thanks to Paul Cutler for putting it all together.

Kicked off some work with InitMarketing to do some of the template presentations for GNOME folks to use when presenting about GNOME.

Attended a few of the GNOME a11y meetings. Had conversations about GNOME a11y with the team, the FSF and others. There’s lots of good stuff happening there and people are working out how best to get things done and collaborate across projects and organizations. I wish I was at the GNOME a11y hackfest at AEGIS this week! (Speaking of which I feel terrible that Bryen Yunashko got robbed in Barcelona before his trip even really started. Terrible because I feel like Barcelona is my home town and crime has been climbing as fast as unemployment and I didn’t warn him. And terrible because his computer and his camera are part of the way Bryen communicates with the world and now he’s on a two week trip without them. If you’d like to help Bryen get set back up again, there’s a Pledgie campaign where you can donate.)

Had a GNOME advisory board meeting where we updated them on all the things going on and asked them for feedback. We had discussions about hackfests and events (including plans for the Desktop Summit 2011), the Outreach Program for Women, 2011 budget planning and GNOME a11y. The advisory board meets once a month; let me know if you have suggestions for meeting topics.

Talked to a CiviCRM contracting company about getting some of the integration and customizations done that we need, like integrating it with Paypal and Friends of GNOME. If there are any CiviCRM experts in the GNOME community, let me know!

Met with Peter Brown from the FSF and Brian Cameron from the GNOME Board of Directors to discuss areas where we might collaborate, like accessibility.

Put together the Free and Open Source Software booth for Grace Hopper with lots of help from these awesome women and all the organizations (Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, FSF, GNOME and Oracle) that sent us goodies to hand out. And thanks to the Grace Hopper folks who gave us the booth space!

We handed out 180 fliers about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women program too. I also helped out with the Open Source Track and that was a great success finishing with a Sahana codeathon. Thanks to Jennifer Redman for making the track and the codeathon happen. Thanks to the NSA for sponsoring it!

Both the attendees and the conference speakers at GHC were all extremely motivating. I got to meet with lots of interesting people including Heidi Ellis whose class is working on Caribou as part of GNOME’s a11y and HFOSS program.

Kept up to date on the Desktop Summit 2011 planning. A big thanks to Andreas Nilsson, Dave Neary, Reinout van Schouwen, Kat Gerasimova and others for representing GNOME at the Desktop Summit 2011 planning meeting.

Sent out the notice about the 2010 Q2 Quarterly Report. (It was published in August.) Thanks to all the teams that are already sending out a call for the Q3 report!

Reviewed the GNOME 2.32 release notes. Thanks to Paul Cutler for keeping the release notes going! He could use help with writing and with screen shots.

Put together email and website for launching the GNOME Ambassador program. Need to launch it now!

Announced that the GNOME Foundation and LWN will be giving an LWN.net subscription to all Friends of GNOME subscribers! Thanks, LWN! Sent out a call for people to help with our end of the year subscriber campaign.

Exchanged a few emails with women who applied to the GNOME Outreach Program for Women that are interested in marketing. Thanks to Marina Zhurakhinskaya for answering all the rest of the mails (even a few difficult ones) and making the whole program happen!

Met with Phil Robb from HP. Talked about Palm, GNOME and Accessibility.

Worked with the marketing team on a GNOME ad for Linux 92. Thanks to Joey Ferwerda and Máirín Duffy.

Funding.

• Cat Allman gave me the good news at Grace Hopper that Google has some funding for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women!
• Mozilla is funding the Snowy hackfest! Snowy is the server side of Tomboy Online.
• Working with several organizations on some funding for a11y. Worked with Joanie on a write-up of goals.

Pinged a lot of people about a lot of things. Extremely grateful to the GNOME community for all the hard work they do!

The GNOME Q2 Quarterly Report is available.

The second quarter of 2010 was a big one for the GNOME Foundation. We elected our new GNOME Board of Directors, raised enough money to hire a system administrator and held numerous successful events while planning for GUADEC, our annual get together!

In the report you can read updates from many of the GNOME teams from the release team to documentation to the Outreach Program for Women to … please take a minute to catch up on all the hard work these teams have been doing for GNOME.

Thanks to every one who helped put together the report.