GNOMG

Exciting personal news!

As some of you know already, I’ve got good news – I’m pregnant! I’ve put off blogging about it, as I hate sharing personal information online (yes, I really hate talking about my heart condition but I feel like it’s worth it to underscore the importance of software freedom). It’s time that I informed the whole GNOME community though, so that you all know what’s going on. I’m due in September, which means that I’ll be pretty pregnant at GUADEC.

If you do the math and count back, you’ll notice that I was extremely busy during my first trimester with loads of travel and major projects. Luckily, I felt great so it was easy to work whole-heartily on stuff I feel so passionately about. For some reason, the past month hasn’t been as easy so there have been times that I’ve struggled to stay on track for GNOME. While I’ve been forced to cut down on my travel during this time and turn down talks that I would have loved to give, I’m definitely planning on going to GUADEC. I’m also going to try to make it to OSCON, but I’ll have to see how my health is. I don’t think I remember seeing any pregnant speakers at other free software conferences, so I wish I could go to more.

I thank you for your understanding and support, and will do my best to put in that extra effort through the rest of my pregnancy.

On a geekier note – I’m excited to bring another free software and GNOME user into the world!

Throw your hat in the ring!

This Sunday is the deadline to decide to run for the GNOME board! While it can be a lot of work, serving on the GNOME board is a great way to contribute to the community and make sure that things are run in the way you think they should be. (Plus, you’d get to be one of my bosses!) I’ve only seen a couple of candidacies announced, but I’m hoping to see a lot more this weekend – we need seven directors in total. The details are all here.

More stuff I’ve done recently…

I lost a little time to being sick but in the past two weeks, I:

• did some final revisions on the GNOME’s 990
• looked into the ongoing UK open standards discussion, and discussed preparing a comments with SFLC. Thanks to Glyn Moody for letting me
  know about it and to SFLC for working with me. I’ll keep you posted as to our comment (the deadline’s been recently extended a month).
• worked on some trademark issues for GNOME
• finished fundraising for our Outreach Program for Women, and started to put together a press release with Marina – that should be coming very soon. I also helped wrap up the tough decisions about which applicants to accept and took care of some paperwork related to the program.
• discussed keynote invitees for GUADEC and got to invite a couple of speakers! I hope they come! I also started working on looking for sponsors for GUADEC.
• attended a couple of GNOME.Asia planning meetings and worked on a few action items too. That group is working so hard to put the conference together, despite being thrown quite a few curve balls along the way.
• followed some of the important discussions going on in the GNOME community and participated in a number of backchannel discussions. I’m glad that the substantive discussion is being talked about openly and I’m glad we’re committed to improving as a community. One thing I would recommend doing (and I think I might make this its own blog post) is taking the time to positively react to good emails and discussion points that go around. When we see something negative we’re quick to react but in general we rarely thank those who take the time to be good communicators. Just a thought! So if you liked an email that you read, or thought the tone was good or supportive or something like that, quickly write the person a private email to tell them so!
• guest lectured a class on free culture and free software with Justin Colaninno at Columbia Law School. I’ve been doing it ever semester for the past few years, and it’s very fun to see how much the knowledge about the topics has changed and gotten broader acceptance.