The Creator has a Mastertape

Another year has gone by and it is yet again another year I promised to blog and didn’t.  With social networking its hard to bother.  Besides, you always feel that if you’re going to post to planet that it should be something insightful.

Anyways, this post is about recognizing people in the community who have worked hard in the background in support of all our releases in 2012 and in community outreach.  The list is of my own compiling and mostly consists of people involved in marketing and sysadmin.  It’s my hope that others will also step up and recognize people for the great work they’ve been doing in their own areas.

So onwards.. here is my list of awesome from the list of the awesomest!  I’ll attempt to write a little something about that person so it’s not just a static list.

Karen Sandler – Karen has been such the hanger that we put our clothes on.  Without it, things just drop.  (yeah, crazy metaphor huh? 🙂  Karen has been helping fundraise, leading the efforts on Friends of GNOME, and communicating with our board of advisors and generally the person we all like to talk to if we’re frustrated or have some anecdote we want to share.

Emily Gonyer – there are few who have that kind of passion in GNOMEt that Emily has.  She started as a GSOC candidate and has stayed on and continues to be very much involved in the marketing team.  She’s been involved in community outreach and getting the forums started and is an outspoken critic in the true open source fashion.  Emily also worked on the quarterly reports and has gone to GUADEC and FOSDEM.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya – Marina has been managing the GSOC and this year she has been able to expand GSOC to several other projects.  Marina is responsible for wonderful diversity that we have in GNOME.  Setting the standard that other open source projects should compare themselves against.  The fact I get to put so many women on this list is a testament to her time and investment into this project.  You rock!

Christy Eller – Christy spent her GSOC project helping us put out a new friends of gnome pages and a news.gnome.org site redesign.  There has never been such a rapid and focused development on a web project.  We joke about how long it’s taken us to do a new gnome.org.  We had more things accomplished in that short time than I’ve ever seen in the history of GNOME.

Andrea Veri – Andrea started working as a part time sysadmin this year.  If Christy was successful with web it was because Andrea was there supporting her and the rest of us.  Andrea has been doing most of the sysadmin’ing for GNOME this past year and doing it with enthusiasm.  We are fortunate to have such a dedicated person helping us.

Allan Day -He’s everyone’s mentor.  He helps us understand the various designs that GNOME is working on.  Help us gets our messaging together.  Helps figure out how to react to various criticisms that are happening in the community.  He’s been put through the emotional wringer with all the various criticisms that we face from our community.   The marketing team is in his debt almost daily with his advice and commentary.  Thanks Allan!

Sebastian Keller  – Known as ‘borschty’ on IRC, Sebastian has spent a lot of his free time hanging out in #gnome on freenode and gimpnet answering questions and providing most of our visible support on IRC.  It always amazing when people are willing to spend their time that way and helping out especially answering questions which as a lot of people can tell you takes a lot of patience.  Sebastian also is one of two ops persons for #gnome as well.

Juha Sahakangas – Known as ‘Juhaz’ on IRC, Juha is the other person who spends a lot his time answering questions on #gnome on freenode.  Again, a big thanks to him for both answering the questions and administrating the channel.  It’s because of him and Sebastian that we have the visibility on freenode that we have.

If I missed you, it’s because I haven’t learned too much of what you’ve been doing.  If you think I’ve missed someone then please write a blog post and tell us your heroes that deserve to be recognized for the year s that all of us know what they have done.  These are just my personal ones.

Best wishes to the GNOME community and hope for a prosperous New Year! 🙂