Attended (and gave several planned and several impromptu talks at) the GNOME Asia Summit November 20-22nd. It was great to see GNOME Asia successfully transition to a an annual conference. The GNOME Asia committee did a great job last year and they managed to transition that success to another country and a new team this year. While there were some things that could have gone better (more lead time, more sponsorships), the conference was great and added a few unique nice touches like using local business students to interpret and handing out volunteer certificates to all 115 volunteers! GNOME Asia faces an additional hurdle that conferences in the US and Europe don’t face. Not only do they have to educate attendees on GNOME but also on free software!

Met with Erwann Chénedé and Leontine Binchy from Sun – it’s always good to have a chance to meet companies and people involved in GNOME in person!

Spent 30 hours travelling home from Vietnam.

Worked with next year’s local organizers, board and press on the GUADEC press release. (Zonker wrote the press release.) You’ll see it Monday morning.

Set up plan and agenda for my trip to London for the OSS Watch advisory board meeting. (Also meeting with LiMo and Canonical.)

Got 401K plan set up for GNOME Foundation. Now we just have to set it up with our payroll company to roll deductions over to the 401K plan.

Got invited to speak at Open Mobility conference, Fort Collins Linux user group and the FOSS 2010 Research workshop. Accepted the Fort Collins user group. Waiting for GNOME Mobile group to figure out plan for Open Mobility. Thinking about the FOSS 2010 workshop.

Attended GNOME Board meeting.

Worked on CRM data structures and work flows, i.e. I wrote up what we need in the CRM system so that I can get help setting it up. (Jeff Schroeder installed CiviCRM on GNOME systems!)

Thursday and Friday were US holidays – Thanksgiving! I’m thankful for all the great people I get to work with in the GNOME community.

Not as much detail as normal as I’m covering a much longer time frame … I’ll be returning to weekly updates now.

Marketing hackfest. Helped plan and attended the first ever GNOME Marketing hackfest. It went well and we will be doing more. Thanks to Paul Cutler for putting it together. Thanks to the travel committee for getting everyone there. Thanks to Novell and Google for sponsoring it. Thanks very much to all the people that showed up to work hard on GNOME marketing!

GNOME Journal. Added a bunch of ideas for GNOME Journal articles. (Now we just need people to write them! Feel free to add ideas or write articles.) Recruited authors for the Women in GNOME Journal edition. Interviewed a woman GNOME advisory board member for it. Helped edit a couple of articles.

Published the GNOME Q3 report. Thanks to all the teams who submitted updates!

Attended the first OSS Watch advisory board meeting via phone. Will attend the first in person one in a couple of weeks.

Agustín Benito put me in touch with La Laguna College and we exchanged a couple of emails. They are interested in helping recruit more women to free software.

Forwarded several journalist requests to the appropriate people – most went to the release team with questions about GNOME 3.0.

Played around with several different views and methods of looking at my goals. Trying to find a better way to align goals to individual task items and to visualize how we are doing on larger goals. Plan to work on this further.

Got sponsors for hackfests (like the marketing one) and the Boston Summit. Wrote up a sponsorship agreement at the request of one of the sponsors. I plan to tweak it a bit make a sponsorship agreement that we can use for all GNOME events.

Attended free software women‘s group meeting.

Let the Teaching Open Source mailing list group that GNOME has people willing to speak about GNOME in their classes. Set Willie Walker up with RPI.

Talked to most of the advisory board members about raising advisory board fees for next year both at an advisory board meeting and one on one. Touched base with them in general.

Talked to Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Foundation. Got some interesting insights into fundraising and volunteers. I hope to interview him later about fundraising and post on my blog. He’s planning the Great American Hackathon to develop free and open source applications for open government.

Sent information to Claudia to help her wrap up finances for the Desktop Summit. We are just waiting on one sponsor to pay us so we can close the books.

Spent 30 hours travelling to Vietnam. But it’s been worth it! I’m currently attending the 2nd annual GNOME Asia Summit! They have an awesome team of volunteers. They recruited business and international trade students to help interpret for all of the foreign speakers. They are all very enthusiastic and having a great time! I’ve had a chance so far to speak to a city government official, local companies using and developing open source and lots of enthusiastic students!

I went to two conferences during the past couple of weeks:

• Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference in Tucson, Arizona. I went to the Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference on a Grace Hopper scholarship, i.e. they paid for travel. In addition to attending the conference, I participated on the open source software panel. There were a lot of students there that were very interested in learning more about how to get involved with free and open source software. The only place they could find out about free and open source software was at the panel I was on and at the Systers Codeathon. Given our push to recruit more women, it seems like a great opportunity. Next year I’d like to see better representation from free software projects like the GNOME Foundation and Apache as well as some representation by companies that hire free and open source software developers, like Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, Nokia, … I’ll be working on that.
• Utah Open Source conference in Salt Lake City. I gave the keynote on Friday, Would you do it again for free? and I hung out at the GNOME Booth that Christer Edwards put together. He had a lot of really good feedback for the Event Box (we need a banner! we need to tell people what’s important to point out at the booth!) and I passed some of it on to the marketing list. Christer got some great GNOME pictures with the booth webcam and told people about GNOME 3.0 and Friends of GNOME.

I had several one on one meetings with advisory board members. All of our sponsors have paid except for two – and rumor has it one of their checks is in our PO box or on Rosanna’s desk! The other one is actively working on getting us paid. (Although it seems like these payments are late, we are doing much better than previous years!) I also asked our partners to help out with lots of events. Novell, Collabora and Google all helped out with the Boston Summit. Igalia is hosting and sponsoring a WebKitGTK+ hackfest and Collabora is sponsoring it as well. Canonical and the TIS Innovation Park are sponsoring the Zeitgeist Hackfest. Say thanks to their employees if you see them!

We had our monthly GNOME Advisory Board meeting on October 13th. The main topic was our finances and how we’d like to raise advisory board fees. Germán did a great job of putting together 2009 results and a 2010 budget. The meeting was one of the more active discussions we’ve had all year and we got several compliments on how prepared we are. It’s also looking like most of our sponsors are amenable to raising the fees, which would be really good for our 2010 plans. (We had only one hackfest in the first half of 2009 because budgets were cut; we’re hoping to avoid that in the future.)

We had GNOME Board meetings on October 1st and October 15th. You can find the minutes on the wiki.

I had a one on one meeting with Brian Cameron to discuss progress and goals. He had lots of good suggestions. In particular we discussed things like how to get the GNOME partner companies more involved with marketing, how to work better with the FSF and how to get more women involved in GNOME. (Marina has been hard at work on our new GNOME Women’s Outreach!)

I talked to the President of system76, Carl Richell. They make servers, desktops and laptops with Ubuntu installed. He works with a lot of the upstream projects and was very interested in how he could work more with us. He’d like to give us some of their new hardware to play with and test. (Some of the new laptops/netbooks he was talking about made me want to start coding so I could get one to play with!)

I pulled together the Friends of GNOME September data. We have raised $23,415 this year! September saw a 40% increase over August, probably because of the release of GNOME 2.28. We have a goal of 10 new Friends of GNOME subscribers a month so sign up and tell your friends! The more subscribers we have, the sooner we’ll hire a system administrator and the more hackfests we can do. I sent out thank you’s to people who donated through Friend of GNOME.

Traded some ideas with Paul Cutler who is planning a Marketing Hackfest in Chicago for November 10-11th.  Novell and Google are sponsoring it. Say thanks to them!

GNOME Asia planning is coming along well and we are looking for sponsors. They will be announcing location (Vietnam) and dates (November 20-22) and putting out a call for papers any minute now!

Got a query from a professor about how students could contribute to FOSS projects – passed them on to the GSOC GNOME mentors list. I also got an invite to the annual HFOSS conference. Let me know if you are interested in attending and representing GNOME.

Gave feedback to the board on a bid for GUADEC 2010. Hopefully we will be announcing when we’ll be (deciding and) announcing the 2010 location soon.

Continued to push for press release to announce our new advisory board member …

Booked travel for Latinoware where I’ll be giving a keynote next week, attending the GNOME Day and the GNOME Women talk! Tried to go to Encuentro Linux during the same trip but the conferences are at the same time and quite a ways away travel wise if not miles wise. Started working on my presentation for the keynote.

Took some time off this past week to deal with non work stuff.

Worked on getting the GNOME Q3 2009 quarterly report out. We’re almost ready! – just waiting on a few teams to submit their write-ups.

This week:

• Latinoware in Brazil!
• (And hopefully sending out the Q3 report if everyone’s writeups come in.)

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation during the weeks of September 14th and 21st.

I spent a lot of my last week communicating with lots of people. (At one point I had three IM windows open in addition to my email conversations and IRC and the phone rang!) I’ve captured the results of some of those conversations below. Hopefully the other conversations will also prove as productive soon.

Two one on one meetings with Brian Cameron who is the board member who works most closely with me on goal planning and results. (This is to alleviate any confusion from having seven bosses, to make sure things move quickly and to keep me from filling their email boxes any more than I already do!) In one meeting we went over the last six months and year’s results. In the other we talked about current issues and plans for the next couple of weeks.

Board of Directors meeting. We held our regular board of directors meeting, you can find the minutes online.

Women’s mini-summit. I attended the FSF’s Mini-Summit for Women in Free Software. Unfortunately I was on the phone instead of there in person but there were several other GNOME women in the room like Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Mairin Duffy and Leslie Hawthorn. We came out with some concrete plans for the future and a mailing list for everyone interested that’s already active.

Interviewed with Bruce Byfield about the women’s minisummit.

Had a conversation with an advisory board member who is not happy with us. (Working on the follow up to that.) Followed up with several advisory board members on payments. Four haven’t paid 2009 fees. Two are in process. I’m worried about two. (But over all our last year of income/donations looks very good!)

Talked to several advisory board members about a new initiative one of them would like to fund through the GNOME Foundation. (We also got a proposal for a hackfest from an advisory board member!)

Reviewed German’s excellent written summary and explanation of the 2010 budget. It’s all ready to send out.

Got list of patents from OIN. Also got advice that it’s not in our best interests to review them.

I attended and was interviewed on Linux Link Tech show.

Joined the Planetaria FOSS Women Planet that James Vasile set up. (I think it’s an awesome idea. FYI, he modeled it after Planet GNOME.)

Worked on getting quotes for new advisory board member press release. (Quotes are never easy to get approved at big companies.)

Wrote Software Freedom Day press release.

Reviewed GNOME Travel Policy.

Had a couple of follow ups with Dave Neary and Vincent Untz about OSiM. Thanks to both of them for representing GNOME there. Thanks for Vinicius for making a GNOME Mobile member sign and to our GNOME partners that displayed them in their booths, Igalia and Codethink.

Proposed a marketing hackfest. There is interest, now we just have to figure out a time and a place we can all meet.

Proposed and got enough takers to do a women’s issue of GNOME Journal. An issue written all by women about what they are working on in GNOME or about things they find interesting in GNOME. It’ll come out in November.

Proposed that the a11y team branch out to non software conferences to spread the word about GNOME and how it can help people with accessibility needs.

Did some twittering on behalf of GNOME.

Proposed CiviCRM for a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation.

Followed up on 401K plan. Only step left is a signed document and a check from Rosanna.

Attended the GUADEC IRC planning meeting that Srinivasa Ragavan put together. Thanks to all the previous GUADEC organizers that attended – there was some really good information shared during that 2.5 hour meeting! Srini is going to post the logs.

Was disappointed that the invitation to GNOME to attend the 2nd International Symposium on Computers and Arabic Language fell through. Khaled Hosney, Seif Lotfy and others were working to make sure that GNOME was represented. It sounds like they are no longer interested in funding free software projects though. I think it still might be worth having someone from GNOME attend though.

Sent thank you’s to everyone who donated to GNOME.

Helped with the promotion plan for GNOME 2.28.

And although I didn’t do it, I think it certainly worth mentioning that GNOME 2.28 released!

Monday was a US holiday.

Met with a company interested in using Linux and GNOME. (Actually using it but not as much as they’d like.) They had a lot of feedback for us and we talked about ways that they could get that type of feedback directly to the projects. One of the main issues was knowing where to submit bugs. They submitted a lot of bugs to the Linux distributions. Then they’d be told to resubmit the GNOME ones to the GNOME project … it would help if we could just forward them along to the right place.

Talked about upcoming events at the GNOME Advisory Board meeting. Mario Behling and Emily Chen talked about the GNOME.Asia Summit. Daniel Siegel and Seif Lotfy talked about the Zeitgeist hackfest and John Palmieri talked about the Boston Summit.

Worked on 2009 waterfall chart and 2010 budget with German. It is now ready to share with the board of directors and then board of advisors and the Foundation list.

Talked to several people about OIN’s announcement about purchasing 22 patents from Microsoft. OIN is supposed to post the actual patent numbers.

Talked to Willie Walker about GNOME accessibility.

Met with Ruthe Farmer from the National Center for Women & Information Technology. They do studies about women in technology and publish best practices for how to encourage more women to take technology jobs and to stay in them. They would like to do a study around women in free software. They have recently written a study about the Culture of Open Source Computing (pdf) that points to a lot of resources about women in open source and developer motivations in open source and you can find their reports online.

Sent thank you letters to people who donated to the GNOME Foundation during the week.

Started studying Ford Foundation website to understand what types of programs they give grants for and how we might find a good fit for GNOME projects.

Followed up with an advisory board member who hasn’t paid 2009 fees yet.

For this week. This is not the list of all the things I have to do but rather what I want to do this week.

• Board of Directors meeting
• 1:1 with Brian Cameron about my goals and results
• Send finances out to advisory board. (All ready to go – waiting on Board of Directors feedback.)
• Work on requirements for a CRM system so that sys admin team can install one.
• Follow up with potential sponsors.
• Follow up on 401K plan.
• Follow up with International Cooperation, the group in Gran Canaria working with developing countries.
• Fill out (draft for) form for applying for a Ford Foundation grant and run by appropriate GNOME mailing list.
• Make sure that plans are in place to have a new US event box and get it to Utah Open Source Conference.
• Finish following up with advisory board members whose 2009 payments haven’t come in yet.

If you measure productivity based on what gets done (as opposed to how hard you work), this was a frustrating week.

What I got done:

• Got a new advisory board member invoiced. (Well, Rosanna invoiced them, not me, but I helped make it happen.) Working on quotes for press release. (Didn’t actually get any yet.)
• Got some feedback on financial waterfall.
• Followed up with end user looking to use GNOME and GNU/Linux and running into problems.
• Continued to push for Q3 quarterly report to be done.
• Pinged sponsors and potential sponsors.
• Pinged people holding up 401K setup.
• Pinged press team to get started.
• Met with Denise to talk about how the customer success stories are going.
• Met with Keith from the Open Invention Network to talk about how OIN and GNOME could work more closely together. He’s looking for the community to help find prior art and to be advocates for them.
• Posted Friends of GNOME August results.
• Blogged about Funambol grants.
• Attended Board of Directors meeting.
• Planned Board of Advisors meetings. Meetings will most likely be:
• • September – events (Boston Summit, GNOME Asia, Zeitgeist hackfest)
  • October – finances
  • November – updates from advisory board members on things they are working on (list to come later)
  • December – update on how the Oct/Nov events went and future events

Things to be done (and this is a short week due to the Labor Day holiday): (Feel free to suggest other things or to help.)

• Work on 2010 budget with treasurers. (More urgent than it sounds as our fiscal year starts in October and companies are planning their budgets now.)
• Send finances out to advisory board.
• Make sure press team takes off and starts working on some tasks.
• Work on requirements for a CRM system so that sys admin team can install one.
• Follow up with adboard members who are missing payments.
• Follow up with potential sponsors.
• Follow up on 401K plan.
• Follow up with International Cooperation, the group in Gran Canaria working with developing countries.
• Fill out form for applying for a Ford Foundation grant.
• … and a bunch more stuff that will have to wait until next week.

Thoughts?

In the month of August we raised $1,212, for a total of $21,695 since January 1, 2009.

We made several improvements to our Friends of GNOME site, including the ability to specify your monthly donation amount.

Money from subscriptions held steady.

August 2009 was better than previous Augusts, thanks to the subscriptions to Friends of GNOME!

2009 is our best year yet and getting better.

This update is actually for three weeks, the week of August 10th when I was at OpenSource World, the week of August 17th when I was on vacation and the week of August 24th when I caught up with all the email I got in the previous two weeks!

During the weeks of August 10th and August 24th, in no particular order:

I met with existing sponsor to discuss how to get payment for their GNOME Foundation dues.

I met with a potential new sponsor and pinged a potential sponsor that I’ve spoken to a couple of times.

Sent out the feedback from the interviews with the advisory board members. (Sent it out to the advisory board and to the GNOME Foundation.)

Attended OpenSource World, ran the Desktop track and spoke. The Desktop track was very well attended with 80-100 people at every session. I really enjoyed the fact that the participants were very engaged and every speaker got lots of questions during and after their session. The opening panel was all questions from the audience. I got a lot of GNOME questions that I have passed on to the right experts.

OSiM World arrangements. Arranged for company working with GNOME technologies to meet with Vincent Untz and Dave Neary while they are there. Several GNOME companies will have booths. Igalia offered to display GNOME Mobile information in their booth. Checking with the others.

Drafted mail with marketing team about raising advisory board fees.

Met with one of the advisory board members who’s offered to mentor us on
finances and got feedback on how to display our financial data. Worked
with Germán Póo-Caamaño to create a waterfall summary of our fiscal year 2009
finances. (Will share soon.)

Did a short interview on women in opensource with Rikki Kite for her series on women in open source – suggested some more GNOME women for her to interview too.

In general I’ve been working on attending and giving less talks myself and getting more GNOME folks involved. I’ve passed on several speaking opportunities to other GNOME people. If you are available to speak on GNOME topics please add yourself to GNOME speakers page so people can find you. (Feel free to nominate other people you think should be on that page – at least their name and what talk you saw them give.) If you are speaking about GNOME technologies or attending a talk on GNOME, please make sure it’s in our calendars, both the wiki and the Google calendar.

GNOME press team was announced.

Took a week of vacation. We went camping for a few days (climbed the biggest sand hill ever and slid down it with my 9 year old), had my parents over for a few days (still trying to talk them into moving to Colorado), threw a couple of parties (a wine tasting party and a kid’s birthday party – not at the same time), cleaned the fridge, freezer and bathroom cabinets, caught up on bills.