GNOME Foundation

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.

Worked on the quarterly report.Got 11 updates out of the 15 we’d like to include. (And if I forgot a team, please let me know!!) Working on two more with the team leads. Waiting on two additional ones. Editing them and working with Paul Cutler and Vinicius Depizzol on the layout.

Wrote final draft of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit press release. Vincent and Cornelius released it.

Met with the GNOME Asia Summit planning committee. Good stuff happening there but I’ll wait for them to announce …

Recruited Denise Walters to help with GNOME marketing, in particular the customer success stories. I know Denise from HP where she worked on Linux and open source marketing.

Summarized the information I got while interviewing all the advisory board members and sent it out to the advisory board members. Will send out to the GNOME Foundation list on Tuesday.

Created a very rough place holder of a wiki page for the new GNOME press team we’d like to create. (I realized I didn’t really know what to put in the page – hopefully people will ask questions which will make it obvious to me what’s missing.)

Had a short interview with Todd Wiess, a free lance reporter for an article he was writing about whether the economy is affecting free software projects. What was interesting is that he thought laid off people would have less time to work on free software while they looked for a job whereas I would have thought they’d have more until they found a job. (While looking for a job is a full time job, few people who like coding like all the stuff involved with finding a job, so I’d think they’d need a coding break!)

Finalized 401K plan! Sent signed documents off to SocialK folks.

Booked travel for Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference and Utah Open Source Conference – both events are covering my travel.

Sent a thank you note to all the Desktop Summit sponsors with links to press about the Desktop Summit. (Press links compiled by Dave Neary.)

Got the Zoom2’s from Texas Instruments for our usability study! Talking to folks about how to move forward.

Sent thank you notes to those that donated through Friends of GNOME. Personalized them where I could.

What I’m planning on doing this week:

This week I’ll be at OpenSource World, running the desktop track, moderating a panel and giving a talk the Desktop or the Browser: Is the Netbook Escalating the Issue? (Plus I still have to create the talk and slides.)

The following week (August 17th) between a camping trip and my parents coming into town, I will probably take some time off.

Here’s my list of things I’ll work on in between those events: (Things that are missing from the list have been passed on to somebody else or are in progress.)

• Get the 2009 Q2 Quarterly report published!
• Advisory board/sponsors work:
  • get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC (I think I’m going to need to ping them individually.)
  • get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME (Missing one signature – from the sys admin team.)
  • Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
  • send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• Marketing team stuff
  • Start marketing list thread about raising advisory board fees and the communication around that
  • Update GNOME marketing wiki pages with Paul Cutler
  • Get the press team created and started
  • find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
  • write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to help with sponsors?)GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• Partnerships:
  • Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
  • follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner
• Recruit others to help:
  • Figure out how to get a team started to get GNOME working more closely with governments.
  • find someone who can help create a list of recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for enterprise customers
  • Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
  • Automate things. In past lives I’ve found the best way to get tedious tasks automated is to give them to someone who (a) finds them tedious and (b) has the skills to automate them. Tasks that I think could be improved somehow by automation: (Let me know if you fit (a) and (b) and would like to give them a try.
    • Getting Friends of GNOME names onto the website.
    • Sending thank you notes to Friends of GNOME. (Could be done by CRM.)
    • Getting Friends of GNOME data into gnucash. (One of the board members is looking at this.)
    • Scrubbing confidential Friends of GNOME data from gnucash so we can publish the gnucash file.
    • Reimbursing contributors whose travel we pay. (While the travel committee is helping with receipts and reminders, it still takes Rosanna 20 minutes per wire transfer to transfer money to someone. That means it takes her several weeks of work time to reimburse everyone for GUADEC travel. Every year.)
    • Putting feedback we get through Friends of GNOME onto a website.
• follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board, Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.) Dave Neary offered to install a CRM for us, so this might be more about picking the right one now.
• follow up with the sys admin team on setting up better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans. (They are working on this one.)
• follow up with International Cooperation group from the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
• Create policies for the GNOME Foundation to comply with new US nonprofit regulations. (Things like conflict of interest, travel, whistle blower, compensation and records retention.)

In the month of June we raised $1,530, for a total of $20,483 since January 1, 2009.

Great news:

• We passed the $20,000 mark which was our original goal for all of 2009!

Good news:

• July 2009 is much better than all other July’s in documented history.

OK news:

• Numbers held steady with June.

The GNOME Accessibility team will be using some of their earmarked funds to have a booth at 2010 CSUN – set up by Eitan Isaacson. I think this is great as it’s a way to reach users who may not already be using a free desktop. Accessibility is an area we are good at and an area our sponsors are willing to invest in, so we should leverage that strength to bring the benefits of the free desktop to more people.

Requested status reports from teams for the 2009 Q2 quarterly report and have 8 of 14 of them on time! With two more promised today. (Which considering this was the first time we’ve done this and I didn’t give them very much warning at all, is awesome!) Got updates from the Bugsquad, localization team, GNOME Marketing, web team, usability team, GNOME Accessibility, documentation team and art team. Missing updates from the release team (promised), sysadmin team (promised), GNOME Mobile, local events, membership committee and finance. (Trying to get this one out by 8/15. In the future these should go out no later than one month after the quarter.)

Talked to Funambol about putting their GNOME related grants on the GNOME jobs wiki page and doing an interview about their experience with grants.

Worked on recruiting someone to lead case study activity.

Followed up with the GNOME Mobile member company looking to get more involved.

Apologized personally to the journalists whose travel we were offered to fund to GUADEC (through the Cabildo) but never actually bought their tickets. The board will also follow up.

Talked to one of our current sponsors about the benefit of GNOME Mobile to them.

Talked to a different sponsor about an issue they were concerned with and wanted our input on.

Presented/talked to the Colorado Springs Open Source group around businesses that can be created around free software. Used the GNOME ecosystem as an example. I met a lot of interesting people there including Michael Hammel who wrote a couple of GIMP books.

Found some GNOME folks to respond to an invitation to the 2nd International Symposium on Computers and Arabic Language forwarded by Richard Stallman. (Thanks to Dave Neary for the pointers to how to find the right people.)

Got first set of GUADEC 2008 finances this morning.

Met with Scott Weiss who is in charge of the Symbian UI. We talked about the challenges of having a UI and allowing partners to differentiate in the UI space. He had some interesting things they’d done to get UI feedback, like submissions that had to include a screenshot, posted unattributed to a Symbian UI blog under creative commons and all advertised over twitter. The UI council then picked the top 10 and they voted on those.

Chatted briefly with Peter Brown, the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation about FSF and GNOME Foundation and ideas for future projects we could work together on.

Filled out the Google Adwords Grant Application – it could take six months to be approved. Thanks to Claus Schwarm who worked on the sample ads, keywords, audience and slogan!

Found companies for the Desktop panel I am chairing at OpenSource World – now need to identify individuals.

Figured out how to contribute to the new GNOME web pages thanks to an email from Paul Cutler but haven’t actually contributed anything yet.

Started sending out personal thank you’s to everyone who contributes to Friends of GNOME within 48 hours. (I read that after 48 hours people see the thank you as a new solicitation.)

Proposed a final draft for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit press release that will hopefully go out this week.

My priorities for this week: (Too many repeats. Hoping for bigger blocks of uninterrupted time this week to get some of them done.)

• Meeting with GNOME Asia Summit planning committee.
• Thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Dave Neary compiled a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit!)
• Continue to work on recruiting someone to lead case study activity:
  • Publish case studies/success stories from the foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can use.)
  • ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
• summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
• summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
• get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC (I think I’m going to need to ping them individually.)
• create wiki page for GNOME press team
• get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME (Missing one signature – from the sys admin team.)
• finalize 401K plan with attorneys (pinged attorney again)
• Start marketing list thread about raising advisory board fees and the communication around that

More stuff that needs to be done:

• Meeting with Paul Cutler to talk about updating GNOME marketing wiki pages. (We didn’t meet in person as his trip to Colorado was canceled.)
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
• Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
• GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
• follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner (Dave Neary met with them at OSCON and followed up with an email)
• Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
• talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
• figure out how to work with Spanish government
• Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
• continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
• Finance stuff (We have a treasurer and vice-treasurer now!):
  • add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
  • Work on budget with new treasurer
• Figure out how to get product news from News Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to press team when it is created)
• find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
• Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
• write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to help with sponsors?)
• find someone who can help create a list of recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for enterprise customers
• GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
• follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board, Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
• follow up with the sys admin team on setting up better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans. (They are working on this one.)
• follow up with International Cooperation group from the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
• send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
• Help Rosanna recruit someone to help automate some more of the Friends’ process – like getting Friends of GNOME donor names on the website as they come in

Thanks to everyone who helped get things done this week!

I think we could have a bunch more roles in GNOME. We could have someone in charge of customer case studies, someone responsible for GNOME presentation materials (slide templates, business cards), someone in charge of potential sponsor identification, etc.  If anyone sees a common thread of tasks and thinks they are up to, suggest an appropriate title and let the Foundation know you are interested!

We now have a donate section on the right hand side of the GNOME home page thanks to Andreas Nillson, Paul Cutler and Andre Klapper.

Touched base with John Carr about how the system administration team is doing. They have a team formed that’s been hard at work and have posted minutes from their last meeting. New requests can be logged in bugzilla now.

I emailed Hackerthreads about our GNOME store plans but didn’t get a response. (I’ve never gotten a response from them about anything I’ve emailed them but they email Rosanna every once in a while and they send us a percentage of all the proceeds they get from GNOME merchandise.)

Added June numbers to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet and posted a Friends of GNOME update to the Foundation blog. (June numbers weren’t great but it was good to see the subscription revenue hold steady. We are almost at our initial annual goal of $20,000! Thanks to all our Friends of GNOME!)

Asked all GNOME teams for Q2 results for the Q2 quarterly report that will come out in a couple of weeks.

Pinged a couple of times about GUADEC 2008 finances and heard that Baris is working on the tax situation in Turkey.

Prepared slides for my OSCON talk on the role of users in free software projects.

Paul Cutler set up a microblog@gnome.org email address so the identica/twitter team can post from email. (Let us know if you’d like to help identica/twitter or set up a plan for how best to do that.)

Went to OSCON in San Jose for two days.

• Gave my talk on users in free software projects – it started some good discussions.
• Met with potential GNOME partners like FOSSFA.
• Met with a GNOME Mobile member who would like to get more involved.
• Put lots of faces to names. Hopefully I can remember them all.
• Attended Open Source for America launch party. The GNOME Foundation is a founding member!
• Met Stefano Maffulli very briefly in person and discussed where to advertise Funambol sponsored GNOME related projects (that they are willing to pay for)
• Interviewed with Paul Hudson from TuxRadar. He posted some snippets. Full interview to come later.

Met with another advisory board member to get their feedback. (And to encourage them to pay their way overdue advisory board fees.)

Met with a large financial company who is trying to move to GNOME/Linux desktops. Talked about ways to get their issues in front of GNOME developers for discussion. Look for blog interviews or GNOME Journal articles or something similar!

My priorities for this week:

• thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Still hoping someone from the marketing team will help compile a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit.)
• Identify someone to lead case study activity:
  • Publish case studies/success stories from the foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can use.)
  • ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
• find someone to help Dave Richards with the usability hackfest he’d like to hold in the City of Largo (Lucas Rocha is helping to find someone.)
• summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
• summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
• fill out Google Adwords Grant Application
• apologize to invited journalists who didn’t make the Desktop Summit because there travel wasn’t booked
• get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC
• create wiki page for GNOME press team
• get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME
• Find speakers for the Desktop panel I am now chairing at OpenSource World. (In addition to my talk.)
• Meeting with Paul Cutler in person to talk about updating GNOME marketing wiki pages.
• Speaking at a Colorado Springs Linux User Group.

More stuff that needs to be done:

• finalize 401K plan with attorneys (pinged attorney again – I know she’s been traveling as I saw her at OSCON. 🙂
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
• Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
• GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
• follow up with OIN – they list GNOME as a partner (Dave Neary met with them at OSCON and followed up with an email)
• Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
• talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
• figure out how to work with Spanish government (Janjo Marin sent me some ideas.)
• Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
• continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
• Finance stuff (waiting on a treasurer):
  • add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
  • Work on budget with new treasurer
• Figure out how to get product news from News Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to press team when it is created)
• find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
• Find out how to review new gnome webpage content so I can help
• Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
• write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) – for our website (Maybe someone would like to help with sponsors?)
• find someone who can help create a list of recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for enterprise customers
• GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
• follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board, Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
• follow up with the sys admin team on setting up better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans. (They are working on this one.)
• follow up with International Cooperation group from the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
• send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• Figure out who could attend a conference in Saudi Arabia to discuss potential financial support for adabizing programs
• write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
• Help Rosanna recruit someone to help automate some more of the Friends’ process – like getting Friends of GNOME donor names on the website as they come in

In the month of June we raised $1,585, for a total of $18,953 since January 1, 2009. We’ve almost reached our goal of $20,000 for 2009! However, donations in June were down significantly.

While donations have been increasing for the past four months, June saw a return to February levels.  What June does show us is how important the Friends of GNOME subscription program is. We were able to count on those monthly donations which held steady when the one time donations dropped.

Here are some graphs that show some of the data visually.

Subscriptions held steady but overall donations dropped in June:

June 2009 was still better than previous Junes, thanks to the subscriptions to Friends of GNOME!

And year to date we are very close to our goal of $20,000 for 2009!

Help GNOME and sign up for Friends of GNOME‘s monthly subscription. (You’ll also get a set of stickers and a tshirt to help spread the word about GNOME!)

First thing Monday morning I went to the doctor who determined that I had a sinus infection. (For fellow travelers, if your cheekbones ache and your teeth feel like they are going to fall out every time the plane takes off and lands, you may have a sinus infection. Not only did I have the scheduled 3 takeoffs and landings on my trip home from the Desktop Summit but when our plane got hit by lightening, they threw in a bonus landing and takeoff in Wyoming!)

Followed up on some Desktop Summit stuff:

• Sent co-locating survey results to both KDE and GNOME boards. Attended GNOME Board decision meeting about co-locating in the future. (You’ll have to wait for them to say what the decision was …)
• Pinged sponsor companies about banners that were left behind.
• Helped draft co-located press release.

Pinged attorney about 401K plan. (Our attorney did meet with the plan’s attorney.)

Trying to help figure out a board meeting time – with seven board members around the world with jobs and school, it’s hard to find a time that works. Our current time doesn’t work very well for folks in India, like Srini. (He did stay up until 3am last time though to dial in!)

Read the GNOME Annual Report 2008. Nice job, Lucas, writers and photographers! It was a good year for GNOME.

Created a Zazzle account for the new GNOME Store. (Got permission to have a 5 letter login and store name, gnome.)

Set up a press interview about my talk at OpenSource World.

Wrote my Friends of GNOME post cards. They went to Finland, Australia, Cyprus, and Canada as well as several US states! Sign up to support GNOME with a Friends of GNOME monthly subscription and get a postcard from your favorite hacker!

Created some Amazon affiliate accounts in US, UK, Canada and Germany so that Jaap can set up stores and a Firefox widget that will enable people to direct Amazon referral fees for their purchase to GNOME.

Talked to a couple of sponsors (Canonical, IBM) about things they’d like to see done and things they are willing to sponsor.

Met with Sally from HALO Worldwide. She helps the Apache Foundation with their press and marketing and teaches a class every year at ApacheCon. We talked about how she could help with GNOME marketing and pres. I’d love to have a marketing hackfest and have her come teach a press class.

Met with Paul Cutler about all the things we’d like to get going on GNOME marketing, following up on all the conversations from the Desktop Summit.

Went through all my email and notes from the Desktop Summit and created an enormous todo list.

For next week:

• Create slides for my OSCON talk, the Role of Users in Open Source Projects.  It will be based on [Correction] The Role of Consumers in an Open Source Community. Speaking of OSCON, I really like the system they have set up for identifying which talks you want to see, what other talks people interested in those talks are interested in and identifying who will be at the conference and who you’d like to meet. It would be great to have something like that for GUADEC.
• Attending two days of OSCON. (Short trip this year to save on hotel stays and to minimize time away from home as I’ve already spent 10 days away from home this month.)
• Tackling as many items from the rest of my todo list as possible.

The rest of my to do list. (Let me know if you’d like to help on any of the projects!) These are not in any particular order here.

• thank all the Desktop Summit sponsors (Hoping someone from the marketing team will help compile a list of all the press and blogs that came out of the Desktop Summit.)
• finalize 401K plan with attorneys
• blog about travel committee – they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• ask all teams for input on Q2 report
• follow up with potential sponsor who was at GUADEC
• follow up with people who had good ideas at GUADEC that they mentioned to me
• Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foudnation
• GNOME 3.0 launch plans? Include advisory board companies
• publish June Friends of GNOME data
• Publish case studies/success stories from the foundation (This was an idea that came up on the marketing list and Novell has already sent us a great GNOME customer story that we can use.)
• ask other sponsors to help Sun, Red Hat, Canonical for customer stories
• find people to help with the customer testimonials (case study article, quotes, slides, sidebar)
• find someone to help Dave Richards with the usability hackfest he’d like to hold in the City of Largo
• find sponsors for GNOME foundation booth in 2010 CSUN
• apologize to invited journalists who didn’t make the Desktop Summit because there travel wasn’t booked
• talk to OIN – they list GNOME as a partner
• Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
• summarize advisory board feedback for foundation list
• summarize advisory board feedback for advisory board (close to ready)
• fill out Google Adwords Grant Application
• talk to Mozilla about their  Accessibility Strategy
• figure out how to work with Spanish government (Janjo Marin sent me some ideas.)
• Fill out paperwork for 401K insurance
• add checks to Friends of GNOME spreadsheet
• continue to ping about GUADEC 2008 finances
• continue to ping about automating Friends of GNOME data input process (paypal to gnucash to webpage)
• Work on budget with new treasurer
• Figure out how to get product news from News Foundation blog to press and advisory board (will probably give to press team when it is created)
• find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
• get back to Funambol on where to advertise GNOME related projects that they are willing to pay for
• Find out how to review new gnome webpage content so I can help
• Amazon mp3 download uses GTK – contact them about sponsorship
• write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) – for our website
• find someone who can help create a list of recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for enterprise customers
• GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship – put in wiki
• follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board, Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.)
• follow up with the sys admin team on setting up better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans.
• follow up with International Cooperation group from the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
• get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC
• send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• Figure out who could attend a conference in Saudi Arabia to discuss potential financial support for adabizing programs
• write up notes from marketing BOF at the Desktop Summit
• get identica@gnome.org email address so identica/twitter team can post from email
• create wiki page for GNOME press team
• get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME
• Make sure we get donate button on gnome.org front page
• Find speakers for the Desktop panel I am now chairing at OpenSource World. (In addition to my talk.)

Spent the week at the Desktop Summit/GUADEC.

Met with a ton of people. Putting lots of faces to names. (Some people need new hackergotchis, identi.ca and twitter icons. Me included.) Managed to see a couple of talks too. 🙂 I have to admit I was most interested in the questions and discussions that the presentations generated. I was very excited that many people reported interesting KDE/GNOME conversations.

Realized that while this year I don’t have several hundred GNOME people to meet for the first time, I suddenly have several hundred KDE people to meet … I met quite a few at the Nokia party as I was one of the first (if not the first) GNOME person to show up.

Igalia sponsored the GNOME party and didn’t forget our traditions: ice cream death match and jam session. It was a great time! (The whiskey thing happened another night. I decided it was wisest not to attend that party. 🙂

The board of advisors meeting went well. We had a round table in the morning followed by a finance update and a call for help with hackfests. (Almost all the sponsors would very much like to see us do more hackfests we just have to figure out how to get the funding.) We also got some great commitments to help with Friends of GNOME, GNOME customer success stories and hackfests. After an excellent lunch in a Persian restaurant that Rosanna, Owen and Blizzard found, we returned for a discussion with the GNOME 3.0 projects. (All those projects involved in GNOME 3.0.)

I had breakfast with some local government and university officials. I sat next to Jose Miguel Santos Espino, the director of the computer science department, and I happened to tell him about the GNOME and KDE folks in Nigeria that couldn’t get visas to come. A couple of days later he contacted me with an excellent proposal. He suggested that we work with their International Cooperations Department to find ways to bring free software to countries in Africa as well as Latin America and Asia. We had a good conversation with Josefa de la Rosa Cantos and we will work with them during their next conference of Spanish and African universities.

I also got a chance to talk to Antonio Jose Saenz Albanes who is working a project to deploy 2 million laptops to students in Andalucia. His main problem is accessibility so I introduced him to the GNOME accessibility team.

The GNOME Mobile BOF started out the same way that so many GNOME Mobile BOFs do trying to define what is GNOME mobile but we actually progressed during this one which was awesome. GNOME Mobile is a place for people using GNOME Mobile technologies to collaborate. However, we’ll build on the GNOME brand, not the GNOME Mobile brand. We also brainstormed quite a few ideas, like inviting the maintainers for key GNOME technologies to join the GNOME Mobile mailing list.

AGM. The AGM went really well even though we competed with many other attractions. All the teams gave an update. We’ll be posting minutes and slides but in the meantime you can check out the GNOME identi.ca feed where the AGM was broadcast live: http://identi.ca/gnome.

The marketing BOF was late Thursday afternoon in a really hot room but people had some great ideas. (We were hot! 🙂 We discussed things like marketing campaigns, audiences (existing GNOME users, not developers), having regional presence on the to-be-formed press team. and we decided we’d put together 4 case studies (GNOME success stories) by the end of the month. Anne Ostergaard suggested the Andalusian school project. Guy Lunardi provided a Novell customer story. I took notes and we’ be publishing soon.

Survey. If you haven’t already, please take the co-locating survey. We’ll be deciding next week whether we are co-locating again or not next year. One thing I’ve noticed about the respondents so far is that of the people that collaborated with a KDE person, 95+% think the co-located Desktop Summit was a success. Among those that didn’t collaborate with a KDE person, only 35% think the Desktop Summit was a success.

Starting the 20+ hour trip home tomorrow at 4am.

Answered several sets of email interview questions for articles about the Desktop Summit.

Interviewed several more advisory board members. Tried to get the writeup out before GUADEC but didn’t quite manage.

Wrote one last invitation letter for the Desktop Summit/GUADEC attendee who needs it for visa/work reasons. (Sadly a couple of Nigerians and an Iranian didn’t make it for visa reasons.)

Wrote a press release that was delayed for a while … hopefully it’ll come out in a couple of weeks.

Booked travel for OSCON. Short trip to save on hotels and because doing two long trips (GUADEC and OSCON) in one month is too much for my family, especially during the summer.

Looked for other GNOME speakers, especially in Europe, to help out with events where GNOME is invited to speak. (Let me know if you’d like to nominate someone to be added to the list.)

Traveled to the Canary Islands – a long trip. Almost missed my connection in Madrid but thank fully I didn’t and I got to see Chema in the airport.

Attended the press interview for the local Spanish press at the Desktop Summit on Friday. They had questions like what is free software, is it as good as proprietary software, could our government be using it, why isn’t our government using it? The local politician we’ve been working with, Roberto Moreno, is a computer science professor at the local university.

Worked on agenda and location for GUADEC board of directors and board of advisors meeting. (Didn’t finalize board of advisors location until the day before with Rosanna’s help. It was all “mañana.”)

Went to the board of directors meetings. It was productive even if we were all a bit jetlagged. We welcomed Germán and Diego to the board. (Also, because of flight delays, Diego wasn’t able to join us until later.) We talked about logistical things like minutes and roles as well as things like an agenda for the AGM and other things. Minutes will probably come out shortly after everyone gets home from GUADEC.

Went to the opening party sponsored by Canonical. It was good to put faces with a lot of people I’ve met over the past year. (Including a few faces I met last year but didn’t remember since I met so many hundreds of people in that first week on the job …) Also talked to the keynote speakers, Walter Bender and r0ml, about their keynotes …

Pinged about a lot of last minute Desktop Summit details. Most of them are turning out well.

Attended the first day of the Desktop Summit. Went to the keynotes in the morning and then spent the afternoon in the press room. Walter Bender and r0ml’s keynotes were great. Walter has a great project and cause and r0ml is a very entertaining speaker. Richard Stallman’s keynote caused a lot of controversy. (It also had  a lot of old content and when keynoting, it’s generally understood that you show something new unless specifically requested to regive an old talk.) The local media was extremely interested in speaking to Stallman and I think he probably helped promote free software in the Canary Islands quite a bit.

Had lunch with the board of directors and Richard Stallman. He reminded us to use free software instead of the term open source software in order to show support for the free software movement. He also wanted to discuss C#/mono. (This was before the latest Microsoft announcement. I don’t know if the conversation would be different now or not.)

I have a very long to do list. This is only part of it. (Anyone is welcome to help out too!) I’ll publish the entire list in an update after the Desktop Summit.

• Attend the Desktop Summit!
• Apply for Amazon accounts in other countries so people can direct referral money to the GNOME Foundation.
• Fill out Google Grant Adwords application with data from Claus Schwarm.
• Send out summaries of the meetings with Board of Advisor folks.
• Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop and Jaap’s feedback in mind. Hopefully with the new treasurer.
• Update Friends of GNOME spreadsheet data with the checks we’ve received. (It’s currently Paypal data. We don’t get many checks.)
• Work on the new GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan, like premium sponsorship.
• Work with marketing list to figure out how best to report and act on Friends of GNOME survey data. (John Williams is looking at it now.)

Short week as I got back from vacation mid-week. (The lab setup went really well. Hopefully people will start to blog on http://www.kidsoncomputers.org.)

Caught up with a ton of email. Only sent out two redundant emails I think.  (That’s emails that I wouldn’t have sent out if I read all my mail before I answered any of it.)

Met with four more members of the Board of Advisors. Sent notes to Board of Directors. Next week I’ll write it up for the Board of Advisors and the GNOME Foundation. I believe their feedback is some good stuff for discussion at GUADEC.

Sent out a mail to some of the team leads (like travel, sys admin, etc) to talk about how we can standardize on reporting. Early consensus is to have standard documents and reporting times and places.

Got press contacts from advisory board members and Desktop Summit sponsors for the press at the Desktop Summit.

Pinged on the status for a couple of the sponsored parties at the Desktop Summit.

Gave input on agendas for board of advisors, board of directors and AGM meetings at GUADEC.

Still working on getting a meeting room for the advisory board meeting. (Thought I had it all until they told me that the speaker phone and projector were going to add 600 euros to the price!!)

Was very excited about all the progress Paul Cutler and the marketing team have made on mission, goals, wiki pages, etc. Contributed a few ideas to a couple of pages.

Exchanged email with someone who put in a bid to host this year’s GNOME.Asia summit.

Talked to TI who is donating some Zoom 2‘s to the GNOME usability team.

Sent 401K plan guy’s answers back to our attorneys for another round of review.

Next week:

• Answer some interview questions for an article around Desktop Summit.
• Write another invitation letter for a Desktop Summit/GUADEC attendee who needs it for visa/work reasons.
• Write a press release! (Watch for it!)
• Fill out Google Grant Adwords application with data from Claus Schwarm.
• Send out summaries of the meetings with Board of Advisor folks.
• Send out agenda for advisory board meeting at GUADEC.
• Make sure sponsored Desktop Summit and GUADEC parties happen.
• Travel to Desktop Summit/GUADEC. (24 hour trip)
• Board of Directors meeting.

Post GUADEC:

• Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop and Jaap’s feedback in mind. Hopefully with the new treasurer.
• Update Friends of GNOME spreadsheet data with the checks we’ve received. (It’s currently Paypal data. We don’t get many checks.)
• Work on the new GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan, like premium sponsorship.
• Work with marketing list to figure out how best to report and act on Friends of GNOME survey data. (John Williams is looking at it now.)