Category: foundation

GNOME Foundation Annual Report 2007 released!

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In 2006, Dave Neary and others started this new tradition by producing the first GNOME Foundation annual report which has got very positive response from community. So, we decided to follow the new tradition by preparing the GNOME Foundation annual report 2007!

I’ve been slowly working on it for a few months with invaluable contributions from several people. The report is now available (1860 KB, PDF) in GNOME Foundation’s website.

We’ll soon send nice hard copies of the report to the Advisory Board members and existing GNOME event boxes. Our plan is to also print a bunch of extra copies to be used for promoting GNOME on events around the world. Feel free to request some copies for your local GNOME event.

This year, we chose Lulu.com as the printing service in order to allow us to easily print more copies on demand and to make it possible to anyone to order personal hard copies by just paying for the printing (the price goes 100% to Lulu.com, no revenues to GNOME Foundation). You can buy a hard copy of this report directly from Lulu.com here.

Many thanks to:

  • the writers: Federico Mena-Quintero, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Vincent Untz and Behdad Esfahbod;
  • the photographers: Frederic Crozat, Michael Dominic, Vincent Untz, Kushal Das, Juan Carlos Inostroza and Garrett LeSage;
  • the designer: Andreas Nilsson;
  • the text reviewers: Paul Cutler and Stephanie Watson;
  • the adviser: Dave Neary.

I hope you enjoy it!

Update 1: In the first paragraph, when I wrote “Last year”, I actually meant “In 2006”. I fixed this to add clarity. :-)

Update 2: The price for printing the report at Lulu.com doesn’t include any revenue to the GNOME Foundation! That’s the price of the printing service which goes 100% to Lulu.com! Yes, it’s relatively expensive.

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility

As Behdad has already said, we’ve been working on this cool GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility for the past three months. The program organized and promoted by the GNOME Foundation and sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Canonical, Google, and Novell. Read the program’s press release. The tasks will be published on March 1st.

This is a very nice opportunity to contribute to a highly relevant part of GNOME. Participate!

GNOME Foundation Board, 2008

Now that the final results of the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors Elections were published, it’s a good time to thank everyone who voted in me. I’m really surprised about the number of votes I got! Be sure that I’ll give my best.

I think we’ve got a very good team on Board and I’m very excited about our 2008 plans. We’ve already started to work on some really cool things!

People menu: online desktop and instant messaging in GNOME

Just after GUADEC, I made some general comments about this whole “online desktop” idea that was nicely presented by Havoc and Bryan in Birmingham. My main argument is that we should not have a separate “online desktop mode” but try to turn our desktop into a web-aware environment.

Now that Empathy has been proposed for GNOME 2.22, I think it’s time to start thinking about interesting ways of integrating the instant messaging stuff and online desktop stack in the desktop (note that there’s no garantee that Empathy and online desktop will be accepted as official modules but, as a strong supported, I still think it makes sense to bring those ideas at this moment). In my opinion, we should take advantage of the fact that Empathy is a framework-ish aproach for instant messaging (not simply a standalone application) to bring a seamless integration of its features in the desktop environment.

So, I had this idea (that should be more detailed and discussed) of a possible (and feasible) way of integrating Empathy and online desktop stuff in the desktop: a People menu in main menu bar.

People menu

People menu mockup

Some general comments:

  • The People menu should be optional and only activated if online desktop and/or Empathy are available. There will be many users who still want to use their favorite messenger and don’t want to use this online desktop thing anyway
  • The “About me” would run the “About me” capplet which would need to have some additional features for setting up messenger accounts and defining your web presence on several online services (online desktop integration)
  • The “Contacts” menu item could run an application like Soylent with easy access to your messenger and Evolution contacts to start different communication ways (e-mail, chat, video call, etc)
  • The “Messenger” menu item would connect you to your configured messenger services and show an icon the notification area
  • The “Home page” would open the browser in your GNOME online desktop home page
  • The “Web activities” would start the now called Mugshot client which notifies you about the web activities of your friends
  • The “Web board” would activate the Bigboard sidepanel with lots of cool web stuff (I think Web board is a more appropriate name from the user point of view)
  • The “Recent talks” is obvious :-)

This is just an initial/rough idea with the aim of setting some kind of direction on how we could integrate instant messaging and online desktop in GNOME. There are still many things to discuss and decide.

Comments?

GNOME Annual Report Kickoff

It’s time to start working on our 2007 annual report! Last year we had a very nice report. So, let’s make it even better this year! I’ve created a wiki page to organize the work.

Any kind of contribution is welcome! There are several ways to help:

  • Assign yourself to write one of the sections
  • Add links, references and other information sources to help writers to produce the content
  • Add new ideas, suggest, review the content
  • Anything else! :-)

If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Annual Report Team (Silvia, Sayamindu and me).

Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0.