GNOMG

Some things I’ve done so far

July 24, 2011 5:17 pm karen stuffdone

So we’re just over 3 weeks into my full time stint at GNOME. I feel a little bad about the fact that it’s taken me so long to get a blog going, but it took some time to settle on a name and make a hackergotchi that looked at least ok! (I won’t list these as accomplishments…)

I think for the next couple of weeks I may just post a few things now and again as I remember them so you can get an idea of what I’m working on as I get oriented. I’m still very new, and even though I’ve been involved with GNOME as a lawyer for a couple of years, I’m really still learning about the Foundation, the community and the software (though I should note that I have been a user and fan for over five years).

So, in no particular order, a few of the things I’ve done:

* I set up quite a lot of calls with people in the GNOME community – some contributors and some advisory board member representatives. There will be many more of these to come I think. (I hope! So far it’s very helpful to hear from people what they’re thinking about GNOME)

* I contacted someone using the GNOME name in a domain name and reminded them of our trademark guidelines. After some initial fuss, they agreed to transfer the domain name. I’ve got a few more of these to do. They take some research to be confident that you’ve got your facts right before writing. And hopefully these people will channel those efforts to contributing to GNOME.

* I got the foundation unsuspended in the state of California (this is where being a lawyer helps!) Due to I think a very old situation of missed filings, this needed to be corrected. Thanks to James Vasile and Marc Miller at SFLC and Rosanna Yuen at GNOME

* I read up on git. Yes, I’ve been an svn user primarily in the past, so it was time. That and I need to update GNOME’s website.

* I did some prep work for the panel I’m moderating at the Desktop Summit on Copyright Assignment, a very hot topic these days.

* I talked to Marina about the great work she and Stormy and a lot of others have done with the GNOME Women’s Outreach Program. I was totally inspired by the program and its success so far. We talked about what we can do at the Desktop Summit, and we contacted Claudia, Lydia and Celeste at KDE, about setting up a joint Women’s Networking BoF. I’m really looking forward to it.

* Attended my first board meeting and my first advisory board meeting (the advisory board meeting was on my first day). I also got to my new role just in time to welcome the new board to *their* new positions. The old board deserves a lot of thanks for their hard work, and I hope to learn from both the outgoing and incoming board members.

* I set up some interviews and other speaking engagements. I’ll post about those here as they happen! for now you can read the interview I did with Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier.

I’ve of course been up to more than that in these three and a half weeks — these are just a few of the things that come to mind. Now that I’ve got a space to talk about them, I’ll try to write about things more as they happen.