GNOME Foundation

Project:Possiblity just hosted the first ever SS12: Code for a Cause. SS12 is a programming competition where teams of students compete to code open source software for persons with disabilities over the course of a weekend.  Teams of students working with GNOME’s Caribou took first place at UCLA and second place at USC!

Thanks go to Stanley Lam and Steve Lee for not only making the project happen but getting GNOME involved. Thanks go to GNOME accessibility hacker Ben Konrath for mentoring the students over the weekend.

You can read more about it in this newspaper article, the “existing on-screen keyboard” is GNOME Caribou.

And some pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/projectpossibility/UCLAVsUSCSS122010Day1#
http://picasaweb.google.com/projectpossibility/UCLAVsUSCSS122010Day2#
http://picasaweb.google.com/projectpossibility/UCLAVsUSCSS122010FINAL#

The students from the winning teams will be at CSUN,  the 25^th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference, where they will meet with the GNOME developers attending CSUN and the GNOME a11y hackfest.

I hope they decide to continue their work on GNOME accessibility – they are doing a great job!

Magnatune is an independent record label that aims at treating both its musicians and its customers fairly. There is a Rhythmbox plugin that enables users to browse the Magnatune music store, listen to full tracks, and purchase albums. Our friends at Magnatune decided that 10% of every purchase made through Rhythmbox will go back to the project, and after some discussion, the Rhythmbox team decided to donate this money to the GNOME Foundation.

John Buckman announced yesterday that he will therefore send a $614.20 check to the GNOME Foundation, which was a great surprise! John’s post has some more interesting statistics about how many albums were purchased.

We’re really grateful to Magnatune for their support, and we’d like to also thank the Rhythmbox team for choosing to donate this money to the GNOME Foundation! We think such inventive ways to help fund free software projects are promising, and we will make sure to use this money to help make a difference for the GNOME project. Christophe Fergeau, one of the Rhythmbox hackers, has a post on how you can contribute to improving Rhythmbox with hardware donations.

Followed up on several sponsors for GUADEC. It is looking good from a sponsorship perspective! (Don’t forget to submit your talk proposal!)

Michael Meeks joined the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board representing Novell, replacing Gary Ekker.

Set up some surveys for the board directors to give feedback on each others’ performance.

Way too much time and energy on Foundation List threads. Really liked Dave’s post about consensus driven conversations. Hopefully everyone follows Vincent’s advice and refocuses on making GNOME rock and making the GNOME project a fun place to work.

Short meeting with Jorge Castro who’s been really busy in his new board role!

Board meeting.

Meeting with Rosanna. She’s adding info to the CRM system. I’m trying to help her with Friends of GNOME. Planning a trip to Boston to get on the GNOME Foundation’s bank account.

Looking for someone to help out with the GNOME booth at Texas Linux Fest.

Meeting with Jeffrey Altman about the Meet the Funders event in New York.

Set up some meetings for my trip to San Francisco and Open Mobility next week.

Helped/asked/pushed for some press releases. Hopefully you’ll see some of them soon. (Thanks to Zonker for leading the GNOME press team!)

Wrote thank you emails to people that donated to GNOME.

Generated Google Adwords Campaign Tracking code. Gave it to Jaap and Claus to add to our Friends of GNOME pages.

Sent questions to advisor interviewee for Board of Advisors GNOME Journal interview.

Generated Friends of GNOME February data. Need to blog about it on Foundation blog.

Tried to take a day off to deal with doctors’ appointments and dentist appointments and accountants among other things.

Next week:

• Trip to San Francisco. Speaking on a panel at Open Mobility.
• Get the Meet the Funders event planning moving. We’ve scheduled them for May.
• Continue to work on GUADEC sponsorships.
• Try to touch base with a few GNOME Board of Advisors folks.
• Write letter for annual report.
• Blog about February Friends of GNOME data.

This last February 27th Chile was hit by a 8.8 magnitude earthquake.
GNOME is not removed from this tragedy since it has always relied on the invaluable friendship and collaboration from developers and users in Chile.

This value became evident when just moments after the earthquake when people in the GNOME community first started to express concern and worry about our friends in Chile.

From GNOME we would like to send all our sympathy and support to our friends in Concepción, Curicó, Talca, Santiago, Viña del Mar, Valparaíso and everyone in Chile.

Fuerza Chile.

El último 27 de Febrero Chile fue golpeado por un terremoto de magnitud 8.8.

GNOME no es ajeno a esta tragedia ya que por años el proyecto ha contado con la invaluable amistad y colaboración de desarrolladores y usuarios chilenos.

Esta gran importancia fue evidente cuando apenas a momentos de sucedido el terremoto los mensajes y llamadas de preocupación por ustedes comenzaron a circular y no se han detenido aún.

Desde GNOME queremos enviarles todo nuestro cariño y apoyo a nuestros amigos en Concepción, Curicó, Talca, Santiago, Viña del Mar, Valparaíso y todo Chile.

Fuerza Chile.

I think the number of different projects and conversations I am having has maxed out my multiprocessing capabilities. This week I am going to spend more time logged out of email and working on one project at a time.

• Presented at IASA. Great conversation. Very interactive group. Made a couple of local government contacts – people involved in promoting open source in government IT infrastructure.
• Attended OSS Watch phone Advisory Board Meeting.
• Worked on GUADEC sponsorship. It’s coming along well. Still waiting for a lot of people to finalize plans through.
• Advisory board meetings. Met with several more adboard members – still haven’t met with everyone though!
• Board meeting.
• GNOME Foundation IRC meeting.
• Several good meetings with Rosanna.
• Updating the Friends of GNOME gifts spreadsheet for Rosanna (ping her a lot with questions.) I sent her the list of Friends of GNOME Adopt a Hacker folks who have earned their tshirt!
• Sent new Adopt a Hacker folks contact info to people that will send them post cards.
• Settled on date and location for Meet the Funders in California. Need to finalize date for New York.
• Looked into adding conversion tracking to our GNOME ads on Google Adwords.
• Attended Women’s Caucus meeting. They will have an all day track Sunday at Libre Planet.
• Attended the Grace Hopper Open Source track committee meeting.
• Didn’t attend the OpenWorld Forum meeting as they only dial in number was an international number.
• Agreed to give GNOME keynote at LinuxTag. Johannes Schmid agreed to put together the GNOME track. Please contact him if you are interested in speaking about GNOME at LinuxTag.
• Sent out thank you email to Friends of GNOME.
• Worried about all the GNOME folks in Chile.
• I think we are almost ready to launch the Friends of GNOME ruler. At least it looks very good and I wrote an intro email for the launch!
• Students on Project Possibility picked several GNOME projects – work on Caribou and Orca.
• Worked on GNOME’s participation at Idlelo 4.
• Had a gazillion email conversations on a trillion different topics.

This week:

• Letter for annual report.
• Friends of GNOME & Google ads: conversion tracking codes and landing pages.
• Finish Friends of GNOME gift spreadsheet update.
• Make sure all GNOME events are on track and well represented by speakers. Help if I can. (Finding people, not attending them all!)
• Catch up on all my email conversations and make sure nobody is waiting on me …

I get very little feedback to these updates. Feel free to leave feedback, ideas or comments!

Attended the FOSS Workshop. This was an event of mostly university researchers with some invited industry and project attendees (like myself.) The goal was/is to come up with proposals for NSF grants to study free and open source software. The discussions and writing took place over 2.5 days and evenings and I was impressed at the discussion that happened and the proposals that were starting to take shape. I pushed for less studying how projects work (I feel like we know that) and more studying how people (including students and companies) can get involved. There were also proposals for studying how the open source model can be applied to other industries (other than software), how different cultures get involved, business models, etc. I was also impressed at how long all the professors could focus on the project. I could have used some more email/voice mail/blog/twitter breaks. 🙂

Met with a few more GNOME advisory board members. A few more meetings to go. It’s good to catch up with everyone and their plans so far. (No big secrets.)

Exchanged email with FOSSFA about an event they are doing in Africa and about how GNOME could participate with some training.

Talked to several people about GNOME a11y, usability and the hackfests in London and at CSUN.

Provided quote for XIPWIRE press release. They are accepting donations for free and open software projects like GNOME free of charge.

Welcomed Gary Ekker as Novell’s representative to the GNOME advisory board.

This week for sure:

• Presenting at IASA.
• Attending OSS Watch phone Advisory Board Meeting.
• Working on GUADEC sponsorship.
• At least 4 more meetings with advisory board meetings.
• Board meeting.
• Meeting with Rosanna.
• Pinging a lot of people about a lot of things …

This week hopefully:

• Settle on dates for the Meet the Funders events.
• Letter for annual report.
• Catching up on email.
• Landing pages for Friends of GNOME hits from Google ads.

Edited a GNOME Journal article. Check out the latest issue with its multimedia focus!

Published the GNOME Q4 2009 Quarterly Report! Thanks to all the teams that wrote things up – we have some great write-ups about some awesome work.

Submitted the GNOME Google Adwords account for approval. I was bummed when the automated response says it could take up to three months to get approval. However, it was approved within a few days! We’ve been running ads for Friends of GNOME and Women’s Outreach for the past week or so. I’ve played with the keywords and ads some and gotten some feedback from the marketing list as well. Anyone with experience with Google Adwords would be appreciated!

Conversations with several board members about how things are going for the Board and how things are running with the GNOME Foundation.

Many one on one conversations with GNOME Advisory Board members. These were mostly brief chats 20-30 minutes about how things were going for them and how we could best work together. Discussed things like hackfests and GUADEC as well.

Friends of GNOME update for December 2009 and January 2010. We had a stellar 2009! In 2009, Friends of GNOME raised $29,578 for GNOME! That is the same amount raised by 3 large companies. From community contributions. It’s enough for several hackfests and close to the amount needed annually for a part time system administrator. In December we raised $2,663, more than any other December. Spread the word!

Sent thank you’s to people who donated money to GNOME. Sent a few postcards out for the Adopt a Hacker program. Sent on addresses to others who also owe thank you postcards.

GNOME Jobs. Heard about several GNOME jobs and asked people to post them on the GNOME Jobs board.

Had 1:1 meeting with Rosanna. Still working with her to try to get her workload balanced.

GNOME Board of Directors meeting.

Pinged a lot of people about a lot of things. Including GUADEC sponsorships.

Checked on getting a Euro account for the GNOME Foundation. Found one option that is good for large amounts but has excessive wire fees for small amounts.

Attended the Women in Free Software IRC meeting.

Attended a “Benchmarking Women Leadership” event put on by the White House Project. I was expecting more data about the new report but instead I met a lot of interesting people that may be able to help with contacts for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.

Started planning a “Meet the Funders” event with other free software projects. We’ll invite people from Foundations and other funders to learn more about free software projects.

This week:

• Attending the FOSS Workshop.
• Hoping to meet with Rosanna and a few more advisory board members.
• Blogging about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.
• Pinging lots of people about lots of things.

Finally wrapped up the very long thread on the Foundation list and most of the side conversations.

Met with a couple of advisory board members (via phone, email and IRC) to discuss funding and GUADEC.

We are partnering with Project::Possibility! Look for updates from the GNOME accessibility folks.

Got all the GNOME Q4 report updates in the report and edited except for one … actively waiting on that one!

Read all the Google Grants instructions, set up an Adwords account, set up campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords. Was ready to submit and the checklist says we need at least two ads per adgroup, so going back to fill in today. (Also got a login on our Piwik account from Jaap Haitsma to see gnome.org web page traffic to help evaluate our adwords usage.)

Sent out requests for sponsorship for the usability hackfest.

Attended GNOME board meeting.

Met with Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation. Briefly discussed Collaboration Summit, GNOME participation, mobile, Moblin and fundraising/memberships.

Sent out thank you’s for Friends of GNOME.

Worked with Grace Hopper (a women in computing conference) on FOSS (free and open source) plans for the conference. They were already working on it and they’ve added me to the group discussing the plans. It’s looking promising.

Attended Snowy (Tomboy Online) IRC meeting.

Talked to Gregoire Gentil from Always Innovating. Their Touch Book uses GNOME technologies. They’d love to see better touch screen support for GNOME. (Right now you have to use a stylus instead of fingers.) Set up tentative plans to meet in person at the Collaboration Summit.

Helped with a couple of things (panel, lightening talks, schedule) for OSCON and for the Women in Open Source miniconference at SCALE.

Luis de Bethencourt is going to represent GNOME at FOSS Nigeria. Thanks to Agustín Benito Bethencourt for recruiting him.

Chuck Payne and Zonker will represent GNOME at the Texas Linux Fest.

Worked on planning my travel for the year. I’d love to see more people officially representing GNOME at events.

Started out my week late as it turns out that Amtrak can randomly cancel trains – like for a whole weekend.

We had a GNOME Advisory Board meeting about GNOME Foundation 2010 goals. We got a lot of good feedback. After adding another level of detail, I think we are ready to send them out. Look for them soon from the board. (My goals and the Foundation goals are very much aligned at this point, so I am looking forward to getting everyone’s feedback on them.)

Attended a Women in Free Software IRC meeting about our day long event at the Libre Planet event in March.

GNOME Q4 Report. Got some of the write-ups for the Q4 report – still need to ping some people.

Worked with a couple of the advisory board members on how best to help them support us this year. Agreed on amounts and dates, divided some of the payments up, filled out some paperwork, …

Sent out request for funding for things like GUADEC, the accessibility hackfest and the other machine that the sys admin team would like to have.

Had a few conversations around GUADEC. If you’d like to help with GUADEC this year, please send an email to gmc@sonologic.nl.

Looking for people to represent GNOME at the Texas Linux Fest, FOSS Nigeria, Grace Hopper, Educational Technology Day at Ithaca College. Let me know if you are interested!

Pinged to find out why I/we are not being included in Open Source for America conversations. (Being an advisor is a lot of work if you’d like information.)

Our Google Grants application was approved! Google Grants allows us to advertise through Google AdWords. It’s basically like a grant of advertising money. Now I have to figure out how we can best use Google Adwords.

KDE sent a transfer over for the Desktop Summit so we could close the books. All looks good!

Participated in the very long thread about free software, open source software, proprietary software, GNOME and companies on the Foundation list. Had a lot of side conversations about it too.

Attended the GNOME marketing IRC meeting which was very well attended and generated lots of good ideas which people signed up to follow up on.

Worked with James Vasile from SFLC and another organization on some agreements.

• Worked a bit on CiviCRM. Could really use some more volunteers. (A big thanks to Jeff Schroeder, Dave Greenberg and Donald Lobo.) Put in sponsoring companies, adboard members, (Dave Neary also added some contacts), put in tasks, added Rosanna and we can track things including sent invoices, added the board so we can all track todo items. (Although todo items may sound like a simple thing it’s really nice to be able to see who owns it, who’s involved and what artifacts are associated with it. So if I’m curious if we’ve invoiced a company for an event, I can open that company’s record, the event record or Rosanna’s and I can see a copy of the invoice attached if she’s invoiced them. So now we have a shared record of paperwork too.) Next big step is to import all data from Paypal and set it to track all of our donors.
• Had a meeting with Project:possibility to talk about the option of them including GNOME projects in one of their weekend code contests for university students. It would require us to find the right size projects (for teams of 4-6 people for a weekend) and provide mentors. The goal is to introduce university students to free software projects for people with disabilities.
• Zonker is now leading the GNOME press team! Zonker has a lot of experience working with the press (and being the press :). He’s also already been doing the role of press team lead – he coordinated and wrote the GUADEC 2010 press release and is working on another one as we speak. He’s interested in re-establishing our regional press contacts, getting more people involved and planning for GNOME 3.0!
• Worked on goals and vision. The next advisory board meeting will also discuss GNOME Foundation 2010 goals and we should be starting a discussion on the Foundation list soon to discuss the Foundation’s goals and my own goals.
• Sent some thank you’s for both donations and help.
• Pinged people about things.
• Answered a whole bunch of email and got myself back down to my normal Inbox. (And then went offline this weekend and I now have twice as many as I did last week …)
• Accepted an invitation to attend the 2010 Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). Booked travel.
• Scott Reeves joined the GNOME Advisory Board, replacing JP Rosevear. Scott and Zonker will now be representing Novell. Scott works on openSUSE desktop related areas such as the gnome-main-menu and PackageKit. We’re happy to have Scott on the board! (Although we’ll miss JP!)
• Met with a GNOME Foundation partner to discuss how we could work more closely together.
• Sent out call for Q4 Quarterly Report.