GNOME Foundation

November 26, 2003 11:21 am General

So I realized today that dealing with stuff on the board is every bit as frustrating as dealing with stuff within Sun. The plain and simple fact is that you can not have your way all the time. It’s very much team work and having as much reliance on someone else as they do on you.

So is the GNOME Foundation still a relevant body? Yes, I believe so…now more than ever. If it was so relevant, why didn’t more people want to get involved? And this is the crux of the issue. From my perspective, although I’m heavily speculating, it’s because the board isn’t exactly very good at communicating what it does. For such a successful open source project, we’ve rather failed at the first hurdle.

So, what do you want the GNOME Foundation to be?

I came on to IRC today, saying that the GNOME Foundation is going to seriously kick arse next year. Now is the time to shine – no more fuckups about missing conferences, missing potential press release opportunities, beating about the bush on real and important issues. We’ve had 3 years to get this right and although there has been a certain amount of churn among the board members, we really haven’t set down concrete foundations. Sure, we have a good idea of where we’re going and where we need to be, but *so* many things should just be second nature by now.

So, next year I’m going to try my damndest to make this ‘Just Work’. We need to make foundation-list@gnome a useful mailing list, and not just a mailing list that receives traffic once or twice a year. We have 336 people registered to vote in the 2003 elections. I want to grow that number. I want to reply to the posted minutes and explain what we’re doing, so everyone is on the same page. I want to ensure that we come up with a list of 10 big goals for the Foundation. I want Jeff’s marketing-list initiative to succeed – not just succeed but be one of the most active arse kicking teams in GNOME. I want to see an organized plan for the year and to stop all this reactive work, and transform it into pro-active work. I want to make sure that the board meets at the end of this year for a wrap-up before the new board kicks in, to make us aware of all the fuckups during the year, but also aware of the successes. I want to make sure that we don’t have candidacy statements like ‘Not as much as we wanted to’ next year.

Quite simply, I want us to rock next year and I hope that we’re open enough for someone outside to call us on any shortcomings and willing to listen.

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