GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Foundation is hiring a system administrator. Thanks to all of you who have made this possible!

System Administrator Job Description

The GNOME Foundation is seeking candidates for a part-time system administrator position. The GNOME infrastructure cluster consists of a distributed network of machines providing services such as version control, bug tracking, web sites, and mailing lists to hundreds of part and full-time GNOME developers, and to the GNOME user community. The system administrator will work with and assist the volunteer GNOME sysadmin team to keep these services running smoothly, securely, and reliably, and to implement enhancements.

This position is not primarily a coding position, however a certain amount of programming ability is needed to be able to maintain and enhance the system administration scripts and custom web applications that run on the GNOME servers.

This position reports to the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

The successful candidate will:

• Be able to conceive and execute projects independently without detailed direction.
• Have experience working with volunteer and geographically distributed communities.
• Be technically strong with experience in many or most of the following technologies:
  • Multiple GNU/Linux distributions with specific knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Debian / Ubuntu distributions
  • Python
  • SQL databases
  • PHP
  • LDAP
  • Puppet
  • Mailman
• Have good communication skills in written and spoken English.
• Be passionate about Free Software and have knowledge regarding GNOME.

Other job requirements include:

• Ability to communicate and manage projects and priorities with a distributed group of volunteers who make up the GNOME Sysadmin team
• Weekly and monthly communication with the Executive Director and quarterly reports regarding the Sysadmin Team’s work to the GNOME Foundation.

There are no specific educational requirements for this position, however a typical candidate will have completed or be in the process of completing an undergraduate degree. Several years experience maintaining production servers is mandatory.

How to Apply

To apply for this job, send your resume to board-list@gnome.org.

Timeline

• June 22nd: deadline for accepting resumes
• June 15-July 15th: phone interviews by hiring team
• July 25-30th: Follow up with top candidates.
• August 9th: Job starts.

Attended the fantastic GNOME Marketing Hackfest. Got there and back – on the way home we took a six hour detour – making it a more than 24 hour trip home – and flew by the volcano. For something that has caused so much trouble, it’s not very impressive from an airplane.

Put together a survey after the hackfest for attendees in order to help the GNOME Foundation and travel committee to make more informed decisions.

Attended board meetings. Met regularly with Rosanna. Met regularly with Brian.

Encouraged people to apply for the GNOME Board of Directors. Thanks to everyone who applied. Although it’s a lot of work, it’s an interesting and rewarding job!

Had GNOME Advisory Board meeting on finances.

Helped German update the budget. Discussed 2H (second half) budget plan.

Talked to Marina about launching the Outreach Program for Women in the southern hemisphere.

Worked with Orbitz to see if they have an account or processes that could help the GNOME Travel Committee.

Continued to ping GUADEC sponsors and work out details. Almost all finalized. Kept up on a few GUADEC details and issues, including sponsored travel plans.

Met with Jonathan Markow from Jasig and discussed how we do things and if there were opportunities to work together. Jasig makes open source software projects for higher education.

Booked travel for most of my trips this summer. Still missing a few that will be paid for by the events. Bummed that tickets to Europe are so expensive this summer as it will make it much harder for us adn companies to sponsor all the folks we’d like to see at GUADEC.

Submitted title and abstract for LinuxCon keynote.

Attended a couple of the GNOME.Asia planning meetings. It’s coming along nicely this year. You should plan on attending. 🙂

Met with James Vasile, our attorney from the SFLC, to talk about a few things.

Met with a few advisory board members to discuss projects, GUADEC, issues, etc.

Met with a potential sponsor.

Pushed for a GNOME technologies roadmap process.

Put together the list of 2009 donors for the Friends of GNOME page! Due to a Paypal “feature” this was a very manual process. Thanks to Vincent Untz for posting them. If your name should be there and it’s missing, let me know. Thanks to all our Friends both known and anonymous!

Kept the conversation moving about how best to use the Nokia money to sponsor GNOME apps on Maemo/MeeGo.

Worked with Brian Cameron and the sys admin team to launch the GNOME Developing World mailing list. If you are interested in how we can promote GNOME, the free desktop, in the developing world, please join the list.

Talked to AEGIS and the GNOME Accessibility team about having a GNOME A11y Hackfest atAEGIS conference.

Changed Amazon Affiliate accounts to pay out less often as the international checks cost quite a bit of money to deposit.

Worked at finding people to represent GNOME at events. It was more difficult than I expected and after several conversations (including some at the marketing hackfest) we will be launching a GNOME Ambassadors program to try to improve this process and get better GNOME representation.

May 31st is a US holiday.

(Remembered why I normally do these weekly and not monthly! It’s hard to go back and remember all the things you did and discussed for an entire month.)

GNOME Asia meeting. The GNOME Asia team is planning GNOME Asia 2010. While the exact event hasn’t been announced, I can tell you it will most likely be in Taiwan and they are already looking for potential speakers.

I attended several GNOME A11y & HFOSS meetings. We are working with several universities this summer that will have students working on GNOME a11y projects. The GNOME a11y team is coming up with potential projects and mentors for the students to pick from.

Board meeting. The board met. The minutes will come out soon. Brian’s doing a great job of taking minutes and making sure we all track and update our action items.

Rosanna. Met with Rosanna for our regular weekly meeting but the meeting was eclipsed by our discussion of the fake check that someone tried to cash against the GNOME Foundation. Everything’s fine but we are working with our bank to make things as secure and safe as possible.

Silicon Flatirons Patents and Free and Open Source Software event. Spent Thursday afternoon and evening at the CU law school at a legal event about patents and free and open source software. I was on a panel that talked about some interesting data that shows most startup software companies don’t pursue patents but they think VCs value them. The VC on our panel, Jason Mendelson, said he didn’t.

1:1 with adboard member concerned about GNOME 3.

Wrapped up a few last minute details around the marketing hackfest. Many thanks to Agustín Benito Bethencourt, Ignacio Correas, Alberto Capella for organizing it. Thanks to the Zaragoza Municipality, Aragon Regional Governmen, Technological Institute of Aragon (ITA), ASOLIF, CESLA and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring.

Travel to Zaragoza for the marketing hackfest.

For the last 6 years our good friends at Oregon State University Open Source Lab have been doing an incredible job of providing mirroring services for many big Free Software and Open Source projects.

Right now the Open Source Lab is looking for funding, and they are just asking for $6, one per each year they have been online.

GNOME already signed up with $60. Every user of this fantastic mirror and hosting service is encouraged to donate. Give them 6!

http://osuosl.org/give6

• Quarterly report. Put together the GNOME Q1 2010 quarterly report. Thanks to all the team members who wrote up the actual updates, Vinicius Depizzol who worked on the design and Vincent Untz who published it on the website during his vacation.
• Review. Wrote up first half of fiscal year 2010 results for the board to review.
• Orbitz. Worked with Orbitz to see if a business account would help the travel team. Still working with them.
• 1:1’s. Met with Brian and Rosanna (separately.)
• Marketing hackfest. Booked travel for the marketing hackfest. (Was waiting on some final scheduling before booking.)
• Odds and Ends. Weighed in on a few discussions, had a few discussions with board members, pushed a few things along.

Overall, it was a very productive week. Here’s hoping this one is too!

Logistics:

• Spent Monday traveling home from the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans.
• Tuesday I caught up on a ton of mail. Like a lot of mail. Got back down to 10 mails in my inbox.
• Wednesday-Friday I traveled to and attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. I hope everyone from Europe makes it back home soon!

What I actually did:

• Had a lot of great conversations with existing GNOME Foundation sponsors and members at the Collaboration Summit about things we are working on and GUADEC. I talked with (some in depth, some very briefly) Robert McQueen(Collabora), Phillippe Kalaf (Collabora), Quim Gil (Nokia), Juan Jose Sanchez (Igalia), Ryan Singer (InitMarketing), Amanda McPhearson (Linux Foundation), Alan Clark (Novell), Rob Taylor (CodeThink), Jono Bacon (Canonical), Dave Neary, Paul Cutler. And if I talked to you and you aren’t on the list and want to be, just leave a comment. I talked to a lot of people!
• Had a couple of great dinners. Yorba hosted a great GNOME dinner (Adam Dingle got  us all together!) and I had a great time catching up with the Yorba folks, Philip from Igalia, Christian Schaller, Paul Cutler, Phillippe Kalaf and Robert McQueen. (There were more people there but I wasn’t able to hear them from down the table. 🙂 Had dinner the night before with Ryan Singer, Jonathan Corbet, Jake Edge, Paul Cutler, Dave Neary and Josh Berkus. Don’t ask me who all I chatted with at the evening event on Wednesday …
• Spent most of the day on Thursday in the MeeGo talks … when I wasn’t meeting with people individually.
• Ran the Desktop track on Friday morning. Many, many thanks to Dave Neary and Zonker Brockmeier for helping put it together. We had some good sessions and great discussions about web applications and the desktop. (Talks about Snowy, KDE web apps and Mozilla Weave.) We wanted a controversial panel and we got one. I think the whole room shouted through the whole thing but I think I kept it enough under control that we got a few questions answered. It was exciting if not 100% productive.
• Heard my favorite idea so far with what to do with the funding that Nokia has given to GNOME Mobile. Robert McQueen suggested that we do like a Google Summer of Code but for mobile. And not limit it to students. I really liked the idea and ran it by several others like Quim and Juanjo and everyone seemed to like it.
• Got a free Nexus One phone from Google. (They gave one to everyone that attended their keynote!)
• Attended the GNOME Board meeting.
• Sent thank you’s to people who donated to Friends of GNOME through Paypal.

• Friends of GNOME ruler was a great success! We met our goal for hiring a sys admin. (My work was just to provide updated numbers frequently and to dent and twitter. And sending thank you notes to all our generous supporters!)
• Talked to InitMarketing with Paul Cutler about how they might be able to help us with some of our marketing tasks.
• Planned the Desktop Track at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with Zonker and Dave Neary.
• Attended the board meeting.
• Met with Rosanna.
• Met with Jonathan Corbet from LWN.net to discuss partnership opportunities.
• Met with Jeremy Allison, our newest GNOME Advisory Board member.
• Had a meeting with the folks going to the events in Africa representing GNOME and some of the other board members.
• Started a conversation on the mobile list about how best to use the funding from Nokia.
• Had lots of exchanges with events looking for me to speak at them. (In all cases I asked for lots more info. In one case I offered to speak in exchange for a donation to the GNOME Foundation.)
• Started working on my write-up for my 6 month evaluation.
• Spread the word to recruit a few people for the GNOME press team.
• Created the GNOME wish list.
• Agreed to pay Texas Linux Fest a nonprofit $100 booth fee. (Zonker and the Ubuntu team will be running the GNOME booth.)
• Followed up with a few potential GUADEC sponsors.
• Sent and received a record amount of email!
• Taking some vacation – going to the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans!

Next week:

• Catch up on email from vacation.
• Attend the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and chair the Desktop Track along with Zonker and Dave Neary.
• Continue to follow up with GUADEC sponsors.
• Help Paul Cutler with prep work for the marketing hackfest.

• Friends of GNOME ruler launched. The campaign has been a great success so far – thanks, everyone!
• Jeremy Allison joined the GNOME Advisory Board representing Google.
• Worked with a potential sponsor.
• Met with Rosanna to discuss the things she’s got going on (invoices, reimbursements, bank stuff, etc) and the Friends of GNOME gifts. Proposed that maybe we could send gifts via a supplier like Amazon. Having too many gifts to send out is a good problem to have!
• Met with Brian Cameron to discuss my work. It’s about time for a midyear review.
• Sent lots of thank you’s to Friends of GNOME who donated. Thanks, everyone!
• Discussed a couple of GUADEC things like press. Need to wrap up the sponsors.
• Attended GNOME Foundation IRC meeting.
• Discussed who could attend FOSS Nigeria as the person who was going to attend on GNOME’s behalf had to cancel for work.
• Organized a Women in Technology happy hour with Julie Bort in Fort Collins. Not GNOME related all though all GNOME women are welcome!
• Reviewed GNOME 2.30 release notes and Project Accessibility & GNOME press release.
• Wrapped up an advisory board interview for GNOME Journal.
• Decided to move the Meet the Funders event to the fall. That will avoid conflict with lots of summer conferences and enable us to plan in person at OSCON.
• Interviewed with a Northern California radio show on women and Unix and Linux.
• Met with an analyst trying to figure out how many Linux mobile devices there will be.
• Attended FSF Women’s IRC meeting. Sounds like the women’s track at Libre Planet was a great success!
• Attended Open World Forum committee meeting. Haven’t yet committed to helping any particular track.

For this week:

• Review my very long todo list and make sure I’m working on the most important stuff.
• Start a conversation on GNOME Mobile about what to do with the Nokia funding.
• Try to close with all GUADEC sponsors.
• Work out a schedule for the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit desktop track.
• Annual report letter.

Attended Open Mobility. Was on a panel about the desktop and the cloud. There was lots of audience participation and the conversation took a couple of strange turns with Google and Google apps being a good piece of the conversation.

While I was there I met with Gabi Schindler from Azingo and Morgan Gillis and Andrew Shikiar from the LiMo Foundation. Plus quite a few other people.

While in San Francisco I also met with Adam Dingle and Jim Nelson from Yorba and had lunch with the whole crew. I was really impressed with their mission to create easy to use multimedia software (for GNOME!) for artists. Check out Shotwell.

Blogged about Friends of GNOME results.

Simon Phipps left the GNOME advisory board as he left Sun. Thanks to Simon for all the help over the years. Good luck to him in his future endeavors!

Got access to our Google Checkout account and added Jaap so we can add it to Friends of GNOME. We can receive donations without fees through Google Checkout thanks to our Google Grant.

Blogged about GNOME and Project:Possibility – students are working on GNOME accessibility!

Attended Board meeting. (Didn’t attend the advisory board meeting as I was on a plane.)

Thanked new subscribers and one time donators to Friends of GNOME.

Talked to InitMarketing about GNOME and marketing and how they might be able to help.

Reviewed Juanjo Marin’s GNOME SWOT Analysis which should be published wider soon. Please comment on it when it is.

Worried about GNOME representation at Texas Linux Fest and Idlelo – looks like all will be good! (Backup plan would be for me to go to Ghana.)

Announced dates for marketing hackfest.

Attended marketing IRC meeting.

Did some paperwork – some to officially get on GNOME’s bank account, expense reports, etc.

Reviewed several press releases. Very glad we have Zonker on board!

Was on multiple threads about the event box – glad we have Larry Cafeiro on board!

Met with Fluendo and Flumotion to talk about GUADEC.

Met with Bharat Kapoor and Paul Cutler to talk about the mobile texting donations campaign, reviewed agreement from company, got legal review on it, setting up a meeting to discuss concerns.

Met every week with Rosanna.

Met with several board members individually. Some to discuss my goals, others finance, and some other topics.

Experimented with Inbox 0. Usually I use my inbox as a todo list, even emailing myself action items. The last two weeks I’ve played with keeping my inbox at 0 at keeping my todo list more uptodate. I think it’s resulted in a different set of things getting done. Things that are more of a pain to add to the todo list than they are todo get done quickly. Those that are a little more involved get moved to my todo list where they are less visible in some way. Maybe I need to spend more time studying and rearranging my todo list! I’m going to continue the experiment for a bit.

Took an extra long weekend to hang out with family from out of town.

Good news:

• From last year: 2009 was an awesome year thanks to our Friends of GNOME. We brought in $29,578!!!
• February 2010 was an outstanding month. We brought in $2,826. (Compare to $1,587 in January and $2,663 in December.)

Challenge:

• A large part of February’s donation was do to one, one time $1500 donation from an individual. (Thank you!)
• We lost 12 subscribers. I asked them all why they cancelled. Few have responded but I imagine that it’s because they finished their year and they are getting a tshirt.

Corrections:

• These reports currently don’t include $100 a month that we receive in donations via checks.

And some graphs so you can see what is going on …

Percentage from subscriptions:

We did really well year over year in February. (Not so much in January – but last year we launched the Friends of GNOME subscriptions in January, so that was an unusual month.)

And as you can see, 2009 was a stellar year. We have a lot to live up to!

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