GNOMG

Help GNOME reach its accessibility fundraising goal!

We just posted this item on gnome.org:

We’re closing in on our goal of $20,000 for our accessibility campaign. If you haven’t already, take a look at the testimonial by Diego Sánchez that we’ve been lucky to include. As Diego says, GNOME 3 has really helped him: “I’m happy because I can now use the computer in my classroom without any assistance.” Our accessibility team‘s work has made a big difference in many people’s lives, but we still have a long way to go. Help us make our goal and donate now via our Friends of GNOME program!

If you haven’t given the our accessibility campaign already, I encourage you to do so! I am so inspired by the work that Alejandro Piñeiro, Joanmarie Diggs, Juan José Marin and the rest of the team do. Thanks again to Robert Cole and Diego Sánchez for allowing us to highlight how much GNOME and GNU/Linux has meant to them.

Texas Linuxfest

Nathan Willis just filled me in about the Texas Linux Fest, which is going to be on August 4th in San Antonio. It’s right after GUADEC (and I won’t be able to go since travel will then be off limits for me!) but the CFP is open until June 15th. I hope that some GNOME folks are able to submit talks or go!

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.

GNOME 3.4 is here!

I’m so excited that GNOME 3.4 has been released. There is a lot of good information in the press release and the release notes that were published today. GNOME 3.4 is great – it’s much more polished and also fixes a number of small things that make a much better user experience (including some users found annoying in the previous GNOME 3 releases).

Some of the improvements include:

• Smoother scrolling, better systems settings
• Document search
• Video calling added to Empathy
• More intelligent pop-ups and message tray
• Better accessibility support
• Sleek and zippy Epiphany (which is also renamed to “Web”)
• Better hardware support
• A lot of small enhancements made through our Every Detail Matters effort

Since version 3.2 six months ago, GNOME received 41,000 contributions made by 1,275 people – incredible! Many thanks to the whole GNOME community for working together on this release, and to Matthias Clasen, Allan Day, Andreas Nilsson and Andre Klapper for working so hard on all of the coordination to get the release out the door.

See you later at LibrePlanet

I’m off to UMass today for the FSF’s LibrePlanet! I’ll be there all day today and tomorrow. There are a lot of great speakers lined up, so if you’re in the Boston area, you should come by and say hello. The conference is free for FSF members. I’ll be speaking tomorrow afternoon along with the amazing Joanmarie Diggs.

See you there…

Update on my recent activities

Here’s what I’ve been up to since my last update:

• We had an advisory board meeting, at which Alejandro Piñeiro presented on the current state of GNOME’s accessibiltiy work. We discussed a few other things, such as our progress so far this year with hackfests.
• I followed up and talked to advisory board members who couldn’t be at the meeting
• I pursued a new donation for the GNOME Foundation (more news on that to come) and followed up on working with existing donors.
• I worked a bit on the annual report – Juanjo Marín, Emily Gonyer, Christy Eller and Daniel Galleguillos are all working hard!
• I helped with trademark advice for a GNOME project, working with Red Hat lawyers
• I gathered documents to help renew our SSL certificates (thanks av and SEJeff!)
• I worked with jrocha and dneary to prioritize our keynote invitations for GUADEC and get to the actual business of sending out invitations.
• I participated on a call and did some prep work for a panel I’m on at sxsw on free culture
• I wrote and submitted a proposal for the LF’s Collaboration Summit
• I worked with Juanjo Marín to publish a new story on the a11y campaign – the announcement is coming soon!
• I reviewed and discussed our Form 990 with our accountants
• I participated in a GUADEC organizational meeting and a GNOME.Asia one too. These teams are really pulling together to get the conferences organized well and on time. I also helped edit various related documents, like the calls for papers!
• There were various other housekeeping matters, of course!

Some things I’ve been up to

It’s been an exciting and busy couple of weeks. Here are a selection of things I’ve done, so that you can see what I’ve been up to!

• worked with Chun-Hung Huang (sakanamax) and the GNOME.Asia committee to choose a bid for GNOME.Asia, get emails and announcements ready, etc. This year GNOME.Asia will be in Hong Kong!
• worked with Walter Bender and the nice folks at MIT about reserving rooms for the Boston Summit. It won’t be official for a little while, but it’s looking good.
• participated in our GUADEC organizing meeting. We definitely need some more good ideas for keynoters so let me know if you have any ideas!
• worked on some interviews, followed up with journalists. I’ve been so happy that my LCA talk continued to get press, but I’ve been sad that it’s meant that I’ve had to turn down some speaking opportunities – I’ve just been doing way too much travel and need to stay put at least for a little bit to get some work done (I feel like I’m always playing catch up). The next public speaking I have lined up is a free culture panel at SXSW, which I’ll be taking some vacation to attend (it feels funny to be taking vacation to speak at yet another conference, but it’s work for QuestionCopyright not GNOME, and besides I can attend a lot of the music performances! The next GNOME related speaking I’ve got lined up is LibrePlanet2012!
• worked with Rosanna on GNOME’s Form 990 (and asked a lot of questions of our accountant!)
• started fundraising for the next OPW round with potential new sponsors
• worked on the biannual report
• contacted schools for the blind and deaf to see if we could develop any partnerships with our accessibility campaign. Worked with Juanjo Marin on another story for the FoG campaign (coming soon!)
• worked with Aaron Williamson of SFLC about fixing a bug in GNOME’s bylaws.
• did some research and looked into trademark implications of uses of logos in Boxes for Zeeshan
• contacted Hylke Bons, who confirmed explicit permission to use the adorable robot logo he designed for GNOME 3
• nagged various people about various things
• thanked various people for various work. I’m always astounded by how awesome our volunteers are! We have to estimate the number of volunteers GNOME has for our afore mentioned Form 990 report, and it’s amazing how quickly the number adds up – thank you to volunteers who organize events around the world, who spend their time staffing the booths at those conferences, who compose our awesome sysadmin team, and our dedicated marketing team, who volunteer to be on our board, who run the outreach program for women and who mentor new contributors in all all out outreach programs, who write documentation, who contribute articles for our reports and press, and of course, who contribute on a volunteer basis to our code base!
• recorded and published an oggcast on Ambjörn Elder’s talk from FOSDEM entitled Methods of FOSS Activism. I apologize for the crummy quality of my audio – I didn’t realize my gain was so high
• helped coordinate getting GNOME Do their freenode channel, with SEJeff and Sri’s help!
• communicated with a few advisory board members, and a potential advisory board member
• followed up on overdue invoices to the GNOME Foundation
  

FOSDEM, part 1

My day started out bright and early, meeting Tom Marble, Richard Fontana and Bradley Kuhn to get breakfast and prepare ourselves for the legal issues and policy devroom. I have to credit Tom, there really was a demand for the room and I thought we had some really interesting conversations. I did slip out throughout the day to get to various GNOME related things, but the devroom was my anchor, which was sometimes difficult when it was stuffed to the gills!

I held two sessions today. One was was an unexpected talk I gave with Bradley about fiscal sponsorship organizations when one of morning speakers let us know that he was stuck on a train and wasn’t going to make it. The second was moderating a panel on software patents, which is always interesting.

The whole track was good, but I have to admit that one of my favorite things was having Harald Welte in the room while Philippe Laurent described the German case law.

I also made it to the cross-desktop room to see a few talks including Dave Neary’s talk on mentorship and Allan Day’s talk on Every Detail Matters. The rest of the day was jam packed with intense conversations and meeting people, which was capped off with a really fun time at the GNOME beer event. I even met a few GNOME hackers I’d not met before. It was also great to hang out with my mentee, Emily Gonyer who not only is experiencing her first conference, but also manned the GNOME booth most of the day!

Must get some sleep to prepare myself for tomorrow’s FOSDEM craziness.

In Brussels!

I’ve arrived safely and soundly in Brussels for FOSDEM, despite a weird back injury (I didn’t know you could get those from sneezing…) I’ve had a nice time talking to folks already, even if I’ve gotten a couple of rants about GNOME. There’s been some really great positive discussion too.

I’m excited for the Legal Issues devroom I’m cohosting with Tom, Bradley and Richard and also for the Crossdesktop devroom. I’ll also try to hang around the GNOME booth. Please come and say hi. See you there!