GNOME In The Year 2004

January 26, 2004 10:41 pm General

We had the first GNOME Foundation board call today – a 100 minute phone call for a mixture of the new and old boards. It seemed like everyone was suitable charged up and ready to kick arse for another year. I’m pretty sure with people like Malcolm to keep us in check, we can probably maintain this initial momentum. It was so amazing that the call was at 9:30am for me, although spent much of the time just listening, rather than actively participating. We all agreed that we need to make things more open, and start leveraging the community and getting people more involved.

One of the items we really need to focus on is the roadmap that was mentioned in Nat’s blog a while back, but really never officially announced. While this document was a useful idea of potential features, it never really give a good broad picture of where we wanted GNOME to be. Jeff, Nat and Malcolm volunteered to rethink the document and give it a more mission statement type of feel. We need to get away from the ‘What are we doing?’ types of questions and focus in on the ‘Why are we doing this?’, so it will be a better resource for the various marketing groups within the community, and the advisory board. Best of all, the guys are going to orient the document towards various areas of interest, like ‘Collaboration’ and ‘Universal Access’. The plan is to get a working draft by next week so that we can get other people on board to help out.

Because seemingly I’m not getting enough action, Jeff suggested that I tag-team on getting some sort of presentation and photo infrastructure online. We have heaps and heaps of presentations scattered around various people’s personal websites. We need to coordinate these, and get them online for people to see and reuse. There is also another plan to aggregate some of the international sites, so that finding a GNOME site for your country becomes a little easier.

We also talked about the idea of ‘Strike Teams’, a Jeff term to mean having people on the board responsible for specific tasks and being able to report back to the board and foundation list on their progress at regular intervals.

These are just a few items of the call and hopefully Malcolm’s minutes will be available soon – by the end of the call they had grown to 5+ pages. I’m going to try and regularly blog some of the crazy board action in the future so that we get some transparency – apparently it also makes Jeff do his Steve Ballmer impression.

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