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!

Deadline is today. We’re expecting your bids very soon!

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!