• T-Shirt Design Contest

    The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the GNOME T-Shirt Design Contest!

    With GNOME 3.0 coming next April, we are looking for your help to celebrate the 3.0 release by creating a design we can use to promote the release on a t-shirt.

    For more information, visit the contest website, read the rules or the FAQ.   We look forward to seeing your designs!

  • GNOME Foundation is hiring!

    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.

  • Stormy’s Update: November 7, 2010

    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.

  • GNOME Project Announces Outreach Program for Women Interns

    November 5, 2010 — BOSTON, Mass. — The GNOME project is proud to announce the participants of the Outreach Program for Women internships. Thanks to generous sponsors, Google, Collabora and the GNOME Foundation, GNOME was able to accept eight really strong candidates. These eight women from North America, South America and Asia will be working on GNOME technologies from December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011.

    “Google actively encourages students to get involved in software development through free software,” says Cat Allman, Program Manager at the Open Source Programs Office at Google. “Google is proud to help support this innovative global program for technical women and GNOME.”

    By creating a program specifically tailored to encourage women to participate in free software development, the GNOME Project has succeeded in reaching a diverse group of women from around the world. The dates for the program ensure that students in the Southern Hemisphere are able to participate. A follow-on program is planned for June through August of 2011, to run in parallel with Google Summer of Code.

    “This is an excellent initiative from the GNOME project to bring new enthusiasm and contributors into the project and we’re proud to support it with both our sponsorship and mentors,” says Robert McQueen, Director and Co-Founder of Collabora. “We’re really looking forwards to working with these highly motivated and skilled interns and seeing some great results.”

    All of the accepted participants have used GNOME before, are avid users of all types of free software, are in process or have completed a technical education, and made a good non-trivial contribution to GNOME as part of the application process. The participants will work remotely from home, while being guided by a mentor and communicating with other contributors over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The participants, as well as their location, project, and mentor, are:

    Tiffany Antopolski, Toronto, Canada – Documentation – Paul Cutler
    Nanci de Brito Bonfim, Salvador, Brazil – Anjuta – Sébastien Granjoux
    Luciana Fujii Pontello, Belo Horizonte, Brazil – Cheese – Thiago Sousa Santos
    Eugenia Gabrielova, Chicago, USA – Anjuta – Johannes Schmid
    Laura Elisa Lucas Alday, Buenos Aires, Argentina – Cheese – Daniel Siegel
    Hellyna Ng, Johor, Malaysia / Singapore – GNOME Shell – Marina Zhurakhinskaya
    Natalia Andrea Ruz Leiva, Valparaíso, Chile – Documentation – Paul Cutler
    Chandni Verma, Lucknow, India – Empathy – Danielle Madeley

    In addition, the GNOME Foundation is sponsoring two of the participants, Tiffany Antopolski and Eugenia Gabrielova, to attend GNOME’s Boston Summit, which is held November 6-8, 2010 in Boston, USA. This will give them a unique opportunity to meet people in the GNOME community, including ones they will be working with, and attend sessions about various projects. Other participants will be encouraged to attend GNOME events in their regions as soon as the opportunities present themselves.

    The community will be able to follow the progress of all participants through their weekly blog updates about their work that will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.

    This is a second time GNOME is organizing an internships program for women. The trailblazing Women’s Summer Outreach Program was run in July and August of 2006 by Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach. That time, the program had 6 participants, with three being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation and three being sponsored by Google. The number of qualified applicants that year showed that women are eager to get involved in free software development, but might need an extra encouragement and someone they know they can ask questions to get started.

    This year’s program is organized by Marina Zhurakhinskaya, with great help from Chris Ball, Emily Chen, Paul Cutler, Máirín Duffy, Diego Escalante Urrelo, Pockey Lam, Danielle Madeley, Stormy Peters, Germán Póo-Caamaño, Johannes Schmid, Daniel Siegel, Hanna Wallach, and Rosanna Yuen. Out of the eight participants, four are being sponsored by Google, three by the GNOME Foundation, and one by Collabora.

    The next round of the Outreach Program for Women internships is planned for June through August, 2011. Applicants who were not accepted for this round, or women who have not yet applied but are interested in GNOME, are encouraged to stay involved in GNOME and apply then or in a year. The GNOME Project would like to once again thank its sponsors, and encourage companies to consider sponsoring the next round of internships. We expect an even larger field of applicants in 2011, and would like to expand the number of available internships.

    About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

    GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

    The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

    Composed of hundreds 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.

    More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.
    Media Enquiries

    GNOME Foundation Executive Director
    Stormy Peters
    Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
    Phone: +1-617-206-3947

  • GTK+/MeeGo Handset integration work, call for bids: Deadline

    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.

  • GNOME Project Receives $15,000 for Accessibility Work

    October 25, 2010 — BOSTON, Mass. — The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work.

    Mozilla has once again stepped up to support GNOME accessibility (a11y) work with a $10,000 grant. The F123-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded a grant of $5,000 in total. This is the second accessibility grant that GNOME has received from Mozilla in the 2010 calendar year.

    The F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded GNOME for its design and implementation of cursor and focus tracking on the eZoom module of Compiz fusion, and other accessibility improvements in GNOME to benefit persons with low vision and other disabilities.

    Mozilla is helping to fund improvements in the Orca screen reader. The Mozilla Project has helped to identify performance problems when Orca interacts with Gecko-based applications and other desktop applications. The funds will be used to perform a review of Orca performance bottlenecks and help fix problems that are identified. Orca is an extremely important tool for users of GNOME with reduced vision.

    “The web is an integral part of everyday life and it’s important for it to be accessible to everyone.” says David Bolter of Mozilla. “I am thrilled we are again contributing funds to the GNOME Foundation for critical efforts, including Orca, and events like the accessibility hackfest at CSUN.”

    GNOME used the previous funds for accessibility to participate in the CSUN Conference. CSUN is one of the largest and most important gatherings on the topic of technology and persons with disabilities. While most technology that was showcased at this event was proprietary and typically had a high price point, GNOME offers a free personal computing platform that was feature rich, easy to use, and accessible to people with many disabilities.

    Because of different laws and regulations, technology accessibility is a consideration and concern primarily to large employers and government agencies. It is deeply important that free software solutions be at par with proprietary applications in order to gain adoption by government and large employers. The GNOME Project held three talks at CSUN, demonstrating Orca, smaller assistive technology projects, and an introduction of the collaborative development model employed by open source projects like GNOME.

    The GNOME Foundation and Mozilla are committed to open source, open standards, and open formats. Both organizations and their contributors contribute to numerous projects to ensure an open Web and open desktop platform for all users. Part of that effort is working hard to ensure users with physical disabilities are able to make use of a free desktop and Web browser.
    About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

    GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

    The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

    Composed of hundreds 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.

    More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.
    Media Enquiries

    GNOME Foundation Executive Director
    Stormy Peters
    Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
    Phone: +1-617-206-3947

  • Boston Summit is coming!

    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:

    We’ll see you there!

  • Upcoming GNOME Foundation IRC Meeting: October 27th, 2010

    Howdy fellow GNOMErs!

    It’s been a while since we last had an IRC meeting of the GNOME  Foundation, so we’d like to invite you all to join us once again!

    When: Wednesday, October 27th, from 14:00 to 15:00 UTC
    Where: irc.gnome.org,

    Foundation IRC meetings are just that, meetings held on in irc.gimp.org to discuss current matters related to the GNOME Foundation. Any GNOME Foundation member or non member are welcome. As long as you contribute positively to the discussion you are welcome.

    The meeting is moderated by Board members that are present, and they will guide the discussion through all the Agenda topics. Everyone can comment and speak at any time, just remember to be respectful and concise so it’s easy for everyone to follow the discussion.

    We already have a few topics to discuss but this is a great opportunity to discuss the topics you care about, or to get more information from the Board if you think we’re not communicating enough on some topics 😉 The agenda of the meeting is really up to you!

    So please add the agenda items you’d like to discuss to http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MembersAgenda

    Your topics will automatically appear on the meeting page:
    http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MeetingAgenda

    For reference, the minutes of the last meeting are available at:
    http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20100327

    Thanks,

    Og Maciel, on behalf of the GNOME Board of Directors

  • GTK+/MeeGo Handset integration work, call for bids

    The GNOME Foundation is looking for developers to enhance the developer experience of using GTK+ to port and create applications on MeeGo Handset devices.

    Knowledge of the MeeGo Handset development process, and GTK+ internals will be required to carry out the work.

    The tasks to be achieved are:

    • Ensure that GTK+ applications display as expected on the MeeGo Handset platform, including checking that fixes to the compositor are made if necessary.
    • Add to upstream GTK+ helper functionality to create stand-alone GTK+ applications to run on MeeGo.
    • Merge Hildon widgets functionality into GTK+ upstream, where it makes sense to do so.

    The money available for the project is $50,000, and the bidder selection will be made by a group including professional consultants with GTK+ and MeeGo experience and GNOME Foundation Board members.

    Bids should include:

    • Results of testing stock GTK+ applications on the MeeGo Handset platform
    • Details of your research into what GTK+ functionality needs to be added to ease porting of stock applications to MeeGo Handset.
    • The list of widgets and functionality ported from Hildon to upstream GTK+, including a review of how the functionality would be integrated (extending existing widgets, new widgets, etc.)
    • A time line and schedule for the whole project
    • References to previous MeeGo, MeeGo Handset, Maemo, or GTK+ work.

    Note that the goal of the GNOME Foundation for this project is upstream acceptance of the various modifications made during the project.

    Please send your proposals to board-list@gnome.org with the subject line “MeeGo Handset Bid”.

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