Re: GNOME trademark authorization
Hi Daniel, On 05/16/2016 09:41 AM, Daniel Espinosa wrote: > How to avoid any organization or individual, could use GNOME trademark > to promote against GNOME? You cannot use trademark to stop someone from calling a thing by its trademarked name. For example, Mars cannot stop me from calling a Snickers a Snickers. They can stop me calling a different peanut, nougat, caramel and chocolate bar a Snickers. > Is the case of World of GNOME (WOGUE on G+). It recently has pushed > blaming, unsupported complaints (no data about his source is based on > real data from projects maintainers). Is the Wogue account talking about GNOME when they call it GNOME? If so, there is nothing you can do using trademark. In terms of things which are not GNOME, you can use the GNOME trademark if your usage is consistent with the GNOME trademark guidelines. (say, calling a website gnome-sucks.org might be a trademark infringement, since the gnome-sucks website is not GNOME, or consistent with the GNOME trademark guidelines). There are other forms of legal recourse, but I do not think it is appropriate to use them to stop people saying negative things about you, unless those things are: 1. Clearly and provably factually inaccurate 2. Actively harming the reputation and good standing of the project (say, if they are getting a lot of exposure) 3. Clearly not satire, humour, parody. In this case, you could try a defamation/libel case, but to what end? > While I'm not against he can publish his complaints on GNOME, I think he > can't use GNOME trademark to push negative, or few news to try to > support its negative ideas about GNOME. > > Sure, feedback is good, but while he is not part of GNOME Foundation, I > think, may he is unable to use GNOME trademark to blame and no positive > actions to help. I think this is a misunderstanding of trademark rules. And regardless of whether you *could* do this, I do not think that you *should*. Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary - Boston, MA @nearyd / http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh Ph: +1-978-486-0168 / Cell: +1-978-799-3338 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of October, 27th, 2015
Hi, On 11/02/2015 03:59 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote: >> This is awesome! So does this make the second trademark license >> agreement >> that we had? Allan and I were working with someone else, is it it >> the same >> person or is this a different one? > > Isn't 10% of profit extremely low...? 10% for doing nothing is not bad. A percentage of profit is harder to measure than a percentage of revenues, but it's harder to get someone to agree to the latter (because discounts, variable costs, etc can eat into margins). I think 10% of (fairly audited) profits is pretty good. Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary - Boston, MA @nearyd / http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh Ph: +1-978-486-0168 / Cell: +1-978-799-3338 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the ED search meeting of February, 11th, 2015
Hi, On 02/13/2015 12:05 PM, Stormy Peters wrote: I would recommend against just taking volunteers and instead pick people that you know are good hiring managers or who add a specific view point. (I recruited the hiring committee referred to in that blog post.) I agree with Stormy. The hiring committee which recruited Stormy was recruited from advisory board and former board members who all had experience hiring - in fact it was an excellent way to engage advisory board members in something which was very important to the foundation. Dave. -- Dave Neary, Boston, MA, USA Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of January, 23th, 2015
on the mailing list == * Midpoint payments to Outreach interns == Completed Actions == * Edward Swartz's philantropist donation: Sri to email him to thank, say we're getting a gift together, ask about reasons motivating his great donation, maybe offer an interview? And verify his mailing address. == Pending action items == * GNOME's CoC: Board to follow up in the upcoming meetings and prepare a version of the CoC to be finally considered final over all the GNOME yearly events * Kat to create a private wiki page on the web services accounts holders and passwords * Allan and Kat decided to go for a private git account instead for security reasons * Kat to draft a proposal for a privacy policy for review * Kat to draft a contract template for future use organizations for which we handle money * Karen to write the Privacy policy for GNOME services * Karen will look at gnome-software privacy issues from a legal standpoint * Karen to draft a proposal for the photography policy at GNOME conferences to discuss on foundation-list * Tobi to continue pursuing the fund collection in Europe * Tobi to talk to Andrea to move the PayPal data extraction scripts over to the GNOME infrastructure * Sri to investigate better uses of adsense/adwords on the GNOME websites * Sri to communicate to Rosanna and work on the donation for the West Coast hackfest * Sri, Marina, Kat to work on establishing criteria for drafting for the hiring committee for the ED role * Sri to investigate the GNOME gifts situation ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-annou...@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce -- Dave Neary, Boston, MA, USA Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections 2014 - Candidates
On 05/21/2014 12:25 PM, Stormy Peters wrote: I'm really excited about the number and the involvement of all the candidates. Thanks to all of you for supporting GNOME! +1 from me! Also awesome to see such a diverse candidate list, both in terms of geography and gender! Dave. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Fabiana Simões fabianapsim...@gmail.com mailto:fabianapsim...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Foundation Members, I'm happy to announce the following candidates for this year's Board of Directors elections: * Tobias Mueller * Oliver Propst * Jean-François Fortin Tam * Karen Sandler * Andrea Veri * Anish Patil * Emily Gonyer * Marina Zhurakhinskaya * Ekaterina Gerasimova * Sriram Ramkrishna * David King Please see https://vote.gnome.org/2014/candidates.html for details. Foundation Members are invited to ask questions to the candidates by sending them to foundation-list. Please try to avoid duplicates, and bear in mind that candidates invest a lot of time in answering questions. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at membership-committee at gnome.org http://gnome.org. Cheers, Fabiana - on behalf of the GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-annou...@gnome.org mailto:foundation-annou...@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Thanks Andrea, On 05/20/2014 05:23 PM, Andrea Veri wrote: snip What I would aim for is someone with great communication / marketing skills for attracting new advisory board members but most of all a strong passion and dedication for the free software movement, with these feelings being stronger than the desire to earn an high stipend. (at least until the Foundation finances are back on track again) So, how would you distribute your 25 pebbles? Seems like 7 each on fundraising, cheap and promotion, and 4 on philosophical alignment? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Oliver, On 05/18/2014 06:08 PM, Oliver Propst wrote: On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: when looking for a profile, there are a number of dials to twiddle: * Technical proficiency reputation in the community, including free software cultural alignment * Strategy experience - the ability to formulate and communicate a direction for GNOME * Administrative and organizational experience * Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem * Communication/marketing/evangelism experience * Cost Of these, which do you feel are the most important for GNOME right now, and why? Are there other criteria which you think are important that I didn't list? I personally believe a future executive director should have all the skills/experiences you describe and there is really no single skill that are more importent then ohter I am afraid that all of the above is not realistic. You may be able to get someone with a small base salary plus aggressive bonus plan if they have a history of boosting revenue for organizations like GNOME but that will come at a cost - a lack of focus on the direction of the project and cultural alignment with free software and open source principles, for example. You might get a great organizer who is not a very loud mouthpiece. You might get someone who does a lot of evangelism (with a resulting high travel budget) but a lot of travel will result in a lack of focus on revenue and organization. You might get someone who is great at process, getting invoices out and ensuring no future cashflow issues, but will that personality type be an effusive communicator? let me put it another way - if I give you 25 pebbles, and you can put 0-10 pebbles in each of the 6 boxes above, which ones do you want to optimise for? We might get lucky and get someone great in all areas, and also cheap. We might also have Microsoft and Apple decide that desktop software isn't really interesting and see them discontinue their products. But I think that's pretty unlikely. With that said, for me its very important that a future executive director are able to form, communicate and execute a direction for GNOME. Thanks - that's a better answer, I think. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi, On 05/19/2014 04:31 AM, David King wrote: Right now (taking into account the poor financial situation that the Foundation is facing), I think that a candidate for the executive director position would be someone who has experience of raising funds for not-for-profit organisations. For GNOME, the board does not exert strong control over the project, but tries to steer it in the right direction by ensuring that funding is directed appropriately, making the executive director role particularly challenging. My follow-on question, then: raising money for what? I do not think that technical proficiency is an essential quality for an executive director, if by that you mean ability to code. I meant understanding of the technology, ability to explain it, and ability to be articulate about what the GNOME project needs to do to stay relevant. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Current state of Foundation finances
Hi Kat, Has any thought been Hi en to charging an administrative handling fee for Women's Outreach? Clearly it is taking a lot of time to administer, it does not seem fair that the GNOME Foundation shoulder all of the financial burden of managing it. Cheers, Dave. On Apr 12, 2014 1:32 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Foundation members, Due to a shortfall in the budget, the Foundation board voted on 2014-04-08 to freeze all expenditure which is not essential to the running of the Foundation. This freeze affects sponsorship expenses which are unpaid at this time, but it does not affect the funds which we hold for other organisations. By keeping our expenditures to a minimum while we regain some delayed revenue, we aim to have things back to normal within a few months. All Foundation members who expect to receive reimbursements within the next three months have already been informed of the issue and most have responded positively. The board will prioritise these pending reimbursements over other expenses. The issue has been caused by a number of factors. These include increased administrative overheads in the last few years due to the increased turnover which has been caused by to the Outreach Program for Women (OPW), and the associated payments going out while the associated income has been slow to come in. The board expects that you may have some questions or would like to know more details about the problem, please read https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/CurrentBudgetFAQ and contact the board at board-l...@gnome.org if you have any further questions. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013
Hi, On 11/25/2013 10:35 AM, Tobias Mueller wrote: There is no Fedora GNOME, right? Then I think the situation there is different. Only because you declare it so. It is the same issue (what is GNOME? When do we desire/require differentiation?). I don't think that not shipping (some parts of) GNOME, or patched versions thereof is problematic. Phew. Thank god for that. For a while there I was worried GNOME might not be free software any more. /joke From my understanding, calling it GNOME is, from a trademark perspective. Especially if the name GNOME is combined with another product's name. The problem is, IIUC, twofold: Is it (legally) possible to have the GNOME brand diluted now while still being able to defend it later? And do we, as a community, actually want our brand to be diluted? In your question is a premise (a) that GNOME has a brand (whatever that is), (b) that this brand is valuable in some sense, and (c) that it is concentrated - ie. that we can clearly define what GNOME is, and point to something else as diluting the brand. I don't accept the premise. GNOME, for some people, represents a specific set of projects integrated together. For others, it represents an entire soup to nuts user experience stack, including themes, fonts, system components, etc. For others, it's basically a GTK+ based desktop environment. So I would dispute whether the GNOME brand is as concentrated or valuable as it was (say) 5 years ago. Next: Do Ubuntu GNOME or Fedora's GNOME represent dilutions of the GNOME brand? Only in the sense that people using our software results in dilutions of the brand. We called Maemo and Sugar GNOME-based a few years ago. Ubuntu was GNOME based until Unity. The hard line our way or the highway view of GNOME is a recent phenomenon. I suggest that this position has not resulted in the growth of the GNOME brand. I think maybe GNOME is now at a point where let a thousand flowers bloom, and welcome anyone who is happy to use the GNOME label who has any relationship with GNOME, would be a better strategy. Reaching out to Cinnamon, MATE, even XFCE, and welcoming them (if they want to come, and it's unclear that they would) under the GNOME banner may be the best way to make the GNOME brand relevant in future. My stance is that I am happy for them (or anyone) to include GNOME in their product. They have permission (IIRC) to name it something GNOME. So it's a different product, i.e. not GNOME. I am happy if they use our logo. I'd be more happy if they also silghtly modify the logo as they slightly modified the name. I assume it's relatively low effort and helps us to defend improper usage in the future and them to differentiate their product. If it's not low effor to slightly modify the logo, then I might come to a different conclusion. I totally agree Toby. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013
Hi, On 11/22/2013 01:33 PM, Allan Day wrote: Ubuntu GNOME isn't solely a product of the GNOME project, so I don't t think it's accurate to use the GNOME logo alone. In fact, I think that a different logo would be beneficial for the Ubuntu GNOME project, since it would help them to make themselves recognisable. I disagree with this. I think it does a disservice to GNOME not to include Ubuntu GNOME in how we think of the GNOME project, and community. It *is* GNOME, and the people who package it are part of the GNOME project - to make them go through a differentiation process is only going to reinforce for them that they are not seen as part of GNOME. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013
Hi, On 11/21/2013 09:01 AM, Vincent Untz wrote: Le lundi 18 novembre 2013, à 08:51 +, Ekaterina Gerasimova a écrit : Can they not use the GNOME foot at all? Yes, under nominative use when referring to GNOME itself. The logo and trademark guidelines are available at http://www.gnome.org/logo-and-trademarks/ So I guess I didn't notice the time where we started to enforce this. I do have issues with the guidelines, as I believe they're not working well for a community driven project (and product!). I agree with this. We do want to maintain brand integrity so that we can protect the trademark against *real* abuses, but clearly a very strict trademark policy has not worked for us (the cost of policing it has been very high). I mean: - Always ensure that the logo is black or white, depending on the background color (other colors are not permitted) = we fail at this, as we produced relatively recently stickers with a yellow foot, and I'm pretty sure there are still many cases where this is ignored - Always ensure that the logo is not embedded within other images or graphics. = we fail at this with the GNOME.Asia logo - the page seems to imply that we must always have the full logo (ie, not just the foot, but also the word GNOME). Clearly, this is not respected by way too many people, including ourselves. - we keep insisting about using the TM (which, btw, we don't use in the control center in the system details panel) -- that is a big pain and makes things ugly. My recollection of various debates about this from when I was on the board is that it's not even required, but just recommended. The TM is optional for the trademark (and I for one advocated for dropping it for purely aesthetic reasons in the past). The insistence on using it was, IIRC, a *recommendation* (not requirement) from our lawyers several years ago (also, I believe the GNOME foot is a registered trademark, so you can/should use R instead of TM). That said, for the first 2 points, I think you missed a nuance: The trademark guidelines are the set of things you can do with the logo by default *without permission from the trademark owner*. You can do pretty much anything with explicit permission from the trademark owner - trademark owners grant licenses for logos that do not conform with trademark guidelines/nominative use all the time. Ubuntu is one example. That was why we came up with the user group trademark license which was a click-through license which gives slightly more liberty with the mark. And I would encorage people like user groups to request permission to use hacked GNOME feet in their logos from the board, and would encourage the board to grant exceptions frequently for such community uses. This is, by the way, the alternative that Luis was looking into IIRC (this, and the concept of the Community Mark proposed many years ago by Chris Messina for logos that enter the zeitgeist). Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013
Hi, On 11/21/2013 11:58 AM, Dave Neary wrote: Mairin worked on logo brand guidelines back in 2006. That was the work (I believe that you based this page off. And all of the links to her work are now broken and point at this page. The archive is gone. The history is gone. I found the last revision of the guidelines before the recent changes: https://wiki.gnome.org/action/recall/BrandGuidelines?action=recallrev=51 As you can see, there is a section on colours, a section on submarks, and more. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org / Jabber: nea...@gmail.com Ph: +33 950 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Archiving wiki pages [was: Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013]
Hi, On 11/21/2013 12:12 PM, Allan Day wrote: Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Mairin worked on logo brand guidelines back in 2006. That was the work (I believe that you based this page off. Those old guidelines were seriously out of date and were desperately in need of a refresh. We have also been wanting to move the guidelines off the public wiki for (literally) years. I'm only embarrassed that it took me so long to get around to it. :) what was out of date about them? And all of the links to her work are now broken and point at this page. Links to our trademark guidelines shouldn't point to our trademark guidelines? I don't get your point... Links to specific revisions in email threads had stopped working, and on the page I landed on, I did not see the history of the page (as you saw later in the thread, I did find the history later after logging in, so the old content hasn't disappeared). I know we can't rely on wili pages being permalinks, by I for one would like to see ...if you are looking for the content which was here formerly, you can find it [archive link] here. [1] https://cloud.gnome.org/public.php?service=filest=a449c85c1f3af0d761eddb018e45388bpath=//BrandBook [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/action/info/BrandGuidelines?action=info Would it be possible to link to these when archiving/cleaning out content, please? The cloud.gnome.org stuff is great - but this is the first time I've seen it, it's not very findable from the wiki. Thanks! Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [worldof]gnome forums
I can tell you from experience that this forum software can be very easy for boys to post to. It looks like Vanilla. I have been on a very well manned forum that got a bad spam infection, two of us spent days cleaning it up after we blocked the attack vector. Forums really need a lot of care, and boys are a lot faster than humans. Cheers, Dave. On Oct 18, 2013 11:40 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me wrote: On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 2:46 AM, Christian Schaller cscha...@linuxrising.org wrote: Any explanation for why the forum is so unmaintained? I mean I am sure it would be possible to get community volunteers to help clean it up. Probably a lack of active volunteers. I didn't remember it being this bad. It can work if we get a large enough volunteer pool who are willing ot do spam filtering and also a better infrastructure. It isn't worth putting the effort unless we can at least get a minimal of 5-6 volunteers to manage the forums. sri On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 8:41 PM, Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org wrote: The worldofgnome.org's domain was renewed a few minutes ago and it should be live again soon. cheers, 2013/10/15 Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org I was suggested to give [1] a try and honestly speaking it really looks like a good alternative to the current forums at worldofgnome.orgwith a big plus: the platform will be maintained by the GNOME Sysadmin Team and possibly by a team of moderators. As a note seems the worldofgnome.org's domain wasn't renewed in time and the website went down, I'll try and poke Alex about that asap. cheers, [1] http://www.discourse.org/ 2013/10/14 Christian Persch c...@gnome.org Hi; we seem to promote forums.worldofgnome.org as our (semi?)official forums: we link to it from the homepage of https://wiki.gnome.org/under 'Communication', and also, more importantly, allow it to use the GNOME logo. However, those forums are overrun with spam: - *All* of the 'popular tags' (as seen on the right hand sidebar on the forums) are spam words. - Looking at the list of all 'discussions' at http://forums.worldofgnome.org/discussions shows that the content itself is all spam, as well. So those forums are of no use to our users. Therefore, I think we should remove the link from wiki.g.o to the forums, and we should rethink their authorisation to use the GNOME logo. Regards, Christian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to GNOME Foundation Board candidates
Hi, On May 20, 2013 10:33 PM, Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se wrote: I wasn't suggesting IRC meetings per se, but we need some kind of mechanism to report to the broader foundation what we are up to on a regular basis, similar to how we communicate with the Advisory board. If only there were a way to communicate asynchronously with foundation members - a mailing list or something - you could avoid an inconvenient real-time meeting. If something like a e-mail with a status report from the board to foundation-list would be a better mechanism, I would support that. That sounds like an excellent idea, except calling it a status report is a guarantee it won't happen regularly. Suggestion: when you could use help with something, send an email asking. When you finish a task, drop a quick email letting people know. If you're announcing things to members, they're not involved. If you're talking to them, they can be (see the difference?). Cheers, Dave. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Withdrawal of board of idrectors candidacy
What happened? Dave. On May 20, 2013 5:55 PM, seiflo...@googlemail.com seiflo...@gmail.com wrote: I hereby withdraw my candidacy for the board of directors. I think I will not bring to the table as much as what the other candidates can bring. I wish them all the best. Cheers Seif ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-annou...@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Memberships needing renewal (2013-05)
Hi, How long do people have to renew? I ask, only because: On 05/03/2013 12:52 PM, GNOME Membership and Elections Committee wrote: * Máirín, Duffy (2011-05-25) mizmo just had a baby, and I don't know how often she will be checking her email over the next couple of months. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boston Summit 2013?
Rt awesome :-) On 1 May 2013 20:53, Behdad Esfahbod beh...@behdad.org wrote: On 13-04-30 08:58 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: We are a quirky bunch of people. :-) We're almost like Bostonians except maybe a little more weirder. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBt4HlcDUDw ? -- behdad http://behdad.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Feature proposal process?
Hi, On 03/22/2013 06:29 AM, Allan Day wrote: I agree that this needs to be updated. We should have guidelines for the feature proposal process. Thanks Allan! I did find https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features but this page contains instructions warning people against modifying it, and provides no indication of where the features are being discussed. It says To add a task, create a subpage called ThreePointNine/Features/YourTask and it will automatically be listed here. I wouldn't describe that as a warning not to modify. It would be helpful if it could contain more extensive instructions though. It also says Note that task owners are mandatory as this is not meant as a random wishlist - which I had taken as a warning not to submit proposals unapproved (by who, I don't know). I would like to suggest that anyone adding a feature request here also mail d-d-l to start a discussion of it - the absence of any discussion of the features last release is rather disconcerting. I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested in implementing a feature to get in touch with one of the designers before formally proposing. That way we will have the opportunity to establish how the feature will integrate with the rest of GNOME 3. An informal conversation also seems like the best first step in terms of establishing the desirability of a feature and developing a shared vision about how it will work. (I wouldn't describe this as a hard requirement though.) In general, how does one get in touch with the designers? Is that a required step in the feature proposal process, or a suggestion on your part? If a feature proposal involves the inclusion of a new application in the GNOME project, does the procedure change? Dave: feel free to point this person in my direction. I'm happy to suggest they contact you (although that may have happened previously). The specific question here relates to the feature process as I don't have a good understanding of it - and, in general, I don't think Mail Allan should be part of the process :-) Thanks! Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@free.fr / Jabber: nea...@gmail.com Ph: +33 950 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Feature proposal process?
Hi, According to the calendar, with the upcoming 3.8 release, we will soon be in feature proposal again. I was recently asked how to propose a feature for GNOME, and my first instinct was to point them to https://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning - the Proposing new modules page is out of date, and has not been updated with the process for feature proposal. I did find https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointNine/Features but this page contains instructions warning people against modifying it, and provides no indication of where the features are being discussed. So I looked through the archives of foundation-list, release-team and desktop-devel-list for last September and October to see where the discussions for 3.8 feature additions (listed here: https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointSeven/Features) happened. Unfortunately, I did not find any discussions, except one contentious one related to fallback mode which mclasen brought to d-d-l. I know that there were discussions about this around the 2.28/2.30 timeframe but I have not found the discussions with an (admittedly brief) search. Can someone point me to where discussion of new features happens, please, and help me help this person propose a new feature? Thanks! Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@free.fr / Jabber: nea...@gmail.com Ph: +33 950 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Quarterly Reports
On 12/15/2012 04:47 PM, Andre Klapper wrote: On Sun, 2012-10-14 at 20:40 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote: As feedback is often slow (needs several times of nagging) I'd like to know if quarterly reports are still supported and wanted by the community, or if we should think of a better format (e.g. merging with news or journal activities). No answers, so I guess there is no interest. I don't think that's a fair assumption. Perhaps it means our current way of doing them is not successful, and we need to try something else. Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
Hi Philippe, On 11/29/2012 08:29 PM, Philippe Normand wrote: when you refer people to a youtube video would you please recommend a free download script people can use to view it without running nonfree software? I don't know what is that nonfree Javascript you mention. Much Javascript in web pages comes with a standard copyright disclaimer - it is not copyleft. Because it comes in source form, this has not stopped web developers from freely sharing code snippets and modules, and there are a great many Free javascript frameworks and modules, but much of the AJAXy javascript we use is not free software. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
Hi, On 11/28/2012 02:33 PM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: On 28 November 2012 11:02, Alan Cox a...@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk wrote: And if GNOME continues to bury all the configuration in secret corners without a UI, and even the basic stuff only by an add on (tweak tool) you'll continue to fail to empower users to modify their computing environment. yes, because we all know that Freedom means Tweaking configuration options, or *having* to modify your environment in order for it to work. Is that what Alan said? Sensible defaults and UIless options are two different things. I'd argue that an UIless option is just as much of a fudge as an option in the UI - if there's no UI for it, why is it an option? Just use the default remove the code paths handling the option. To put it another way: You don't have to weld to hood shut to sell someone a functional car. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
foundation.gnome.org
Hi, Foundation.gnome.org is currently showing the GUADEC welcome page - could it redirect to www.gnome.org/foundation instead, please? Thanks! Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@free.fr / Jabber: nea...@gmail.com Ph: +33 950 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions about the new GNOME Forums
Hi, On 11/21/2012 08:17 PM, Karen Sandler wrote: On Wed, November 21, 2012 1:14 pm, Bastien Nocera wrote: Are those new forums: http://forums.worldofgnome.org/ the official GNOME forums? If so, why does they not follow the GNOME web style used on gnome.org, and more importantly, why are they hosted on a fansite (worldofgnome.org) instead of gnome.org? These are unofficial forums (now labeled clearly as such), though I think we should consider making them official at some point, perhaps after a period of time where we can see how they do. I think newcomer users really expect to get information in the forum format, so I think it could be very useful. I guess we'll see what happens there in the meantime :) Forums require little up-front investment - you don't get email to your in-box when you join the forum, you can read forums without joining at all, the archives are often easier to search than mailman archives, there's no expectation on the part of forum members that everyone reads all the forum posts... When you're not part of the community, it's an easy way to interact with active community members, without committing. People inside the community, in general, hate forums for the same reasons people outside love them - there's no guarantee when you send a message that it will be read by the people who need to read it, you actually need to go there to read messages, notifications on most forums suck (with the exception of subscribe to this topic features) so you need to stop working, go visit a website, and see who's replied to your question/comment. The SNR is much lower, because the barrier to entry is lower. And you can't batch process forums the way you can emails. Forums also don't make it easy for you to flag certain content as important the way you can email threads/posts. So it doesn't surprise me to see people pushing back against forums here. And it wouldn't surprise me to see a lot of push-back from active forum posters to joining a mailing list. A StackExchange channel (or whatever they call them) might be a nice half-way house, but there's always going to be conflict between the low investment, high noise, sip from the firehose environment of forums and high investment, lower noise, batch process environment of mailing lists. Both are useful for different audiences. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes for the board meeting of November 6th, 2012
Hi, On 11/20/2012 03:04 PM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: == Board Meeting Agenda == * Future adboard meetings * We need to plan the next adboard meeting. Last meeting was at GUADEC. * When should we have the next meeting? * What topics should we cover? * Ideas for the next campaigns for Friends of GNOME * Newcomer event, Outreach efforts funding * cross-desktop collaboration * report on GNOME OS meeting at GUADEC, Boston Summit, and on the gnome-os-list * Discuss further ideas on the mailing list * When should we have the next adboard face-to-face meeting? Were there any answers to these questions? I'm not sure if these are minutes, or a CP of the agenda. == Completed Actions == * Bastien to notify the Strasbourg bid of the selection for GUADEC 2014 I haven't seen an announcement of this to guadec-list or foundation-list - is it official that Brno is the 2013 GUADEC location, and Strasbourg is the 2014 location now? If so, would it be possible/advisable to do as LCA does, and have some people from Strasbourg sitting on the organising committee for this year's GUADEC, to learn by observing the organisers what needs to be done? * Shaun - To contact Dave Neary and Ekaterina Gerasimova to get a list of attendees to get feedback for the summit. Can I get a reminder what this was about? Is this the Berlin Desktop Summit? is this still a live action, or can it be dropped? Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!
Hi, On 11/16/2012 11:43 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote: On Thu, 2012-11-15 at 23:54 -0500, Chris Leonard wrote: http://build.laptop.org/13.1.0/os11/xo-1/31011o0.packages.txt http://build.laptop.org/13.1.0/os11/xo-4/31011o4.packages.txt Do they have OpenGL acceleration available? You say that we should consider them in our decision making, but the majority (all?) of us don't have access to them, so we rely on people like you telling us about those things. Looking at the package list, they both have GNOME Panel 3.6.0 and Metacity, and no GNOME Shell, so it is fair to assume that they're running fallback mode without 3D acceleration. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!
Hi, On 11/14/2012 01:07 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: I'm looking for some charismatic, happy GNOME folks who can help engage with our community. We've had a bad run of late with a lot of folks getting the wrong idea of what we're trying to do. I'm looking for some talented folks who can help us engage with the press, on blogs, on mailing lists and explain our vision. Send me some email, I want to hear from you! While I don't quite like the title community managers, I appreciate the role and the sentiment. Would love to see people working inside and outside the GNOME community to do better at communicating our goals, vision, and work. I would hope that this doesn't end up being sit on Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and send happy messages to anyone complaining about GNOME. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!
On 11/14/2012 11:38 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote: On Tue, 2012-11-13 at 16:07 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: I'm looking for some talented folks who can help us engage with the press, on blogs, on mailing lists and explain our vision. I hope it's slightly better handled than Emily last 2 posts, which managed to say that the removal of fallback was badly communicated (!) without details of what was done wrong, and used a blog post by a troll to make false assertions about GTK+ 3.x's API stability. You might want to vouch for your community managers before you let them loose... Really? Your solution to we have a PR problem is criticise the only people trying to address that problem by publicly saying they suck at it? Sheesh. Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!
Hi, On 11/14/2012 01:52 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote: Telling X you'll teach them how to communicate with Y and then creating a problem with X because of the way you communicated with Y. I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here. What are X and Y? Tell me how exactly I should have brought this up privately. We have very few private mailing-lists in GNOME, and it wasn't discussed on any of those I would be on [1]. Maybe private email? Maybe bringing it up in a different way? Sri's initial email didn't mention Emily at all - were you just waiting for an opportunity to bring up your discontent? Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Og Maciel left the GNOME Foundation Membership Committee
Hi Andrea, On 10/26/2012 11:45 AM, Andrea Veri wrote: 1. Spend some time reviewing tickets and processing applications (~2 hours per week is more than enough!) 2. Attend meetings (we do plan a meeting when we have something urgent to discuss, all the other discussions happen on our mailing list) 3. Join the #membership channel when you connect to GIMPNET 4. Spend some time learning our policies and procedures That should be it! You forgot the most important bit! You get to welcome new members into the foundation :-) What's involved in processing applications? Preumably poking references to confirm that they vouch for new members, ensuring expiring accounts are reminded of the need to review, that kind of thing? Have you thought of inviting someone nice friendly to join directly? Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Google Code-In 2012?
Hi, On 10/22/2012 11:40 PM, Andre Klapper wrote: Assuming that not everybody reads this mailing list I've written a public call: http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2012/10/22/gnome-do-you-want-to-participate-in-google-code-in/ If nobody volunteers to become organizer, GNOME will not take part. In my experience this kind of public call for volunteers, combined with a threat, is not an effective strategy. How about if the board (or the mentors) got together, and put together a short-list of 3 or 4 potential organizers, and ask them individually? It would be a disaster (and rather ridiculous) if GNOME did not take part. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Changes to the GNOME Foundation Bylaws from 2002
Hi, On 10/01/2012 03:07 AM, Tobias Mueller wrote: Dear Foundation, I propose to change the current bylaws to the document attached. If you object these changes, please raise your voice until 2012-10-31. If 5% of the membership (20 members) object, we will have a vote. Otherwise, the changes will be accepted. Doesn't modifying the by-laws usually work the other way around (as in, we need a vote to change them)? Then again, if this is housekeeping and we're just applying diffs voted in previous referenda, there doesn't even need to be a discussion, does there? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes for the Board Meeting of July 13, 2012
Hi Emmanuele, Are you the secretary of the new board? Is there any way to get the minutes out in a more timely manner, please? Hearing about things 5-6 weeks after the event isn't very useful. Actually, even more useful would be notice of the agenda for board meetings to foundation-list a couple of days before they happen. Would that be possible? Thanks, Dave. On 08/24/2012 05:01 PM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: wiki: https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20120713 = Minutes for Meeting of July 13, 2012 = snip -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: US Members
Hi, On 08/04/2012 08:21 AM, Vincent Untz wrote: Le vendredi 03 août 2012, à 14:05 -0700, Luis Villa a écrit : Didn't we have a map of member locations at some point? Or was that just p.g.o blogs? https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide Not sure if the map is still being automatically updated, though. It hasn't been updated since 2005. The map was generated from the list of long/lat co-ordinates in xplanet, in the same way as the Debian developer map is/was: http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc Even at the time, the list was very incomplete, but served me on a couple of occasions for contacting people in rough proximity to conferences where GNOME presence was requested/offered. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Facilitating the Integration of Free Software into Academic Courses (was Re: Questions for the board election candidates)
Hi Joanie, On 05/25/2012 12:49 AM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote: snip Thoughts? I love it, from beginning to end! A great idea and one where we will have lots of help if we decided to open it up to other organisations too. And I love the idea of turning the professors into mentors as well - get the teachers teaching other teachers. All for it! Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
Hi David, On 05/25/2012 01:24 AM, gnomeu...@gmail.com wrote: In short, I have no plans to use GNOME as a platform to spread support for Free Software. Thanks for your frank and honest answers both to this question and the previous one. It's made it very easy to decide not to vote for you. And I mean that as a compliment - I much prefer knowing where you stand on issues that are important to me before the election, rather than being disappointed by you afterwards. Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question for the candidates
Hi, On 05/25/2012 09:24 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: On Fri, 2012-05-25 at 18:33 +0100, Allan Day wrote: Why do you think the Board of Directors is divorced from the project? I personally don't hear or see very much of what the board gets up to, and I don't feel like Foundation membership provides me with much in the way of additional influence. As a member of the board, you might be in a position to change that. On one hand, the meeting minutes should be a good way to know to be aware of what the board is doing (or not doing). In my first year, I pestered to make them public as soon as possible (3 or 4 days after the meeting). IMO, late minutes are meaningless. I blame myself for having the time and energy in the last year to pester the new secretary, but definitively that is something that any member can do and influence. The meetings are every two weeks and any member can add topics the agenda. I must admit, minute posting has been pretty lax this year. There have been a few occasions when a backlog of 3 or 4 meetings' worth has come out at once. I used to read the minutes every meeting to see if there was anything where I might be able to provide some historical context or help, and I have been doing that less this year, purely because (as you say German) late minutes are useless - by the time you comment on them, the decision's been made, announced, and everyone's moved on. And since the agenda doesn't get posted here before the meeting, it's hard to even know what the board are working on at any given time. Also, with the long actions list on the minutes, it's hard to know where things are moving, where they've been dropped, where they're on standby... for example, we still haven't seen an announcement of what's happening for next year's conference. I think that the transparency of operation is definitely something the next board can work on. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
Hi, On 05/22/2012 09:58 AM, Robert Nordan wrote: 1) Open Source or Free Software? This is about personal philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative or the political idealism of the Free Software Foundation? (Some of the candidates have already flagged a stance on this.) Please don't equate Open Source and pragmatism, and Free Software and idealism. This suggests that Free Software is not also pragmatic, or that Open Source developers are not idealists. This is a pet hate of mine, and frames anyone who calls themselves a Free software developer as not living in the real world. Free Software is all about pragmatic idealism - using the system against itself to give users rights we feel they should have as software authors. And, in fact, Open Source is also about pragmatic idealism - using a different brand for the same thing to avoid an unfortunate ambiguity doesn't change the fact that Open Source developers also care about giving users rights they would not otherwise have. Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Conference about Gnome in my french school
Salut, On 04/04/2012 09:29 AM, Vincent Untz wrote: This is a great idea! I'm not sure who would be able to go to Tours (it's likely easier for people in Paris than for others), but we can try to make it work. We can discuss all this on the gnome-fr-list, I suggest you join it and start a thread there :-) My thoughhts exactly! As my dad used to say to me, great minds think alike (and fools seldom differ). Tours is easily accessible from Orleans, Nantes and Paris - not so much from Lyon, Belgium, Alsace or the south (where most of the French GNOMEys I know are from). But I am sure we can work something out. Rendez-vous prise on gnome-fr-list Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Desktop Summit Planning
Hi Brian, On 12/14/2011 04:42 AM, Brian Cameron wrote: The board would like for the Foundation membership to help discuss and decide whether it makes sense to move forward with having a Desktop Summit. Although the Desktop Summit survey results indicated a strong majority were supportive of the current format, we want to want to understand what plans would engage GNOME Foundation members and volunteers the most. If we choose to have a Desktop Summit, we need to consider how the event needs to evolve to be more effectively collaborative and whether we think it should keep to the current 2-year schedule. It's been a few months since this thread - and (as I've indicated off-list) it's making it hard to figure out whether we're going to put in a Lyon bid this year without knowing what the GNOME conference will look like in 2013. Do you have an ETA on when we might have a decision on this, Brian? Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: European bank account for donations
Hi, On 03/11/2012 04:30 PM, Baptiste Mille-Mathias wrote: 2012/3/10 Germán Póo-Caamañog...@gnome.org: Does this make sense? It might need necessary to figure out the way to do it properly (I think that is what Baptiste is trying to figure out). Otherwise, for the tax office this sort of operation can look as money laundry or tax evasion. …and I don't want to go to jail. :) That might be a bit dramatic... Yes, we can receive money from people in Europe, and we can transfer that money to the US organisation with an invoice. And yes, we do need to be careful about falling foul of money laundering laws. We already had several issue due to the location of the Foundation in the past, like the tee-shirt design contest back on November 2010 [1] which excluded inhabitants of some countries due to the embargo decided by the U.S.A. It's perhaps the right time to think to have a legal representation in Europe (and perhaps on other continents). It is true that it has not always been easy to deal with the GNOME Foundation, because the foundation understandably worries about its 501(c)3 status and making funds available without a sufficient paper trail on how it will be spent (certainly the Libre Graphics Meeting guys will testify to that) - but the same should go for any subsidiaries working with the foundation. It's certainly much easier if money donated in the EU is spent on EU activities that are easily justifiable. I disagree that a US organisation conforming to US export regulations is a huge problem, though - IMHO this is a completely separate issue to the money issue we're talking about here. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: European bank account for donations
Hi, If all you want is a Euro account, most banks in the US can do that. But if you want an account in Europe, you need a European subsidiary. The easiest thing would be to talk to gnome fr or hispano bank rep and see what they say about passing money over and back. Cheers, Dave. Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: Em Mon, 2012-03-12 às 12:16 +0100, Dave Neary escreveu: Hi, On 03/11/2012 04:30 PM, Baptiste Mille-Mathias wrote: 2012/3/10 Germán Póo-Caamañog...@gnome.org: Does this make sense? It might need necessary to figure out the way to do it properly (I think that is what Baptiste is trying to figure out). Otherwise, for the tax office this sort of operation can look as money laundry or tax evasion. …and I don't want to go to jail. :) That might be a bit dramatic... Yes, we can receive money from people in Europe, and we can transfer that money to the US organisation with an invoice. And yes, we do need to be careful about falling foul of money laundering laws. We already had several issue due to the location of the Foundation in the past, like the tee-shirt design contest back on November 2010 [1] which excluded inhabitants of some countries due to the embargo decided by the U.S.A. It's perhaps the right time to think to have a legal representation in Europe (and perhaps on other continents). It is true that it has not always been easy to deal with the GNOME Foundation, because the foundation understandably worries about its 501(c)3 status and making funds available without a sufficient paper trail on how it will be spent (certainly the Libre Graphics Meeting guys will testify to that) - but the same should go for any subsidiaries working with the foundation. It's certainly much easier if money donated in the EU is spent on EU activities that are easily justifiable. In that case, the problem becomes that we have two separate entities, with two separate organisational structures, with separate budgets. Which is why I wanted the existing US organisation to somehow have a Euro account. The accounting and budgeting is complicated enough as-is... I disagree that a US organisation conforming to US export regulations is a huge problem, though - IMHO this is a completely separate issue to the money issue we're talking about here. Cheers -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: European bank account for donations
Hi, GNOME has at least 3 sister organisations, with bank accounts, in the EU: GNOME Hispanic, GNOME-fr and GNOME Deutschland eV. Why not create some kind of official relationship with one or more of them? Dave. Andy Wingo wi...@pobox.com wrote: On Fri 09 Mar 2012 11:39, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net writes: The GNOME Foundation is a US not-for-profit entity. We do not have any legal existence in the EU or the EEA, and thus cannot hold a bank account in the EU. I wonder if setting up a GNOME Foundation.eu wouldn't be a bad idea. Of course you wouldn't be able to easily transfer between the two organizations. But you could set it up with a similar governmental structure. Dunno, just throwing the idea out there. Andy -- http://wingolog.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - January 24, 2012
Hi Emmanuele, On 01/24/2012 07:06 PM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: = Minutes for Meeting of January 24 = snip * Events snip Is there any ETA on a decision/announcement concerning the Desktop Summit 2013? Has it been discussed in the last two board meetings or on the mailing list at all? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Could a few influential GNOME develoers join gnu-prog-disc...@gnu.org?
Hi, On 01/18/2012 07:32 PM, Michael Hasselmann wrote: The rejective attitude towards joining a GNU mailing list that I see here should then result in GNOME leaving the GNU project. Then above statement can be removed from the website. I know this is an old flamebait, but if no one here who is still active (influential) in GNOME is openly pro-GNU, then it's time to openly admit that. I must admit, I have difficulty understanding the rejective attitude you mention. It seems like we don't think it's OK to be rude to people in the GNOME project, unless that person is RMS. Was there an edit made to the code of conduct while I wasn't watching? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Desktop Summit Planning
Hi Brian, On 12/14/2011 04:42 AM, Brian Cameron wrote: At the October 26th IRC meeting, Jon McCann spoke about his concerns about the Desktop Summit.[2] At the November 23rd meeting, Dave Neary (who was also very involved in making the past Desktop Summit happen), highlighted that there are real benefits to sharing facilities and that concerns can be fixed.[3] Dave pointed out that it would be best if a decision could be made sooner than later, since it is hard to start putting together bids for 2014 if the scope of the event is not clear. It's useful to go back to what GUADEC is for, I think - and work from there to see whether a Desktop Summit supports or works against that. If we don't agree on why we have a GUADEC, we're not going to agree on the rest. Back in 2005, the last time we had this discussion (at the time, it was over maintaining User Day, or rather integrating end-user related content and inviting people from outside the GNOME community to participate in GUADEC) the goals we came up with, which are still documented in https://live.gnome.org/GuadecPlanningHowTo were: Primary Goals: 1. To have fun meeting friends 2. To allow developers and contributors to have high-bandwidth discussions. 3. To highlight new ideas and cutting edge developments. 4. To get new contributors and involve current contributors in a higher level. 5. To set the direction of the project for the coming year Secondary Goals: 1. To create media awareness out of the usual circles 2. To involve corporate partners and facilitate an approach to the community 3. To spread free software to the surrounding region I don't see how a Desktop Summit affects goal 1. In my mind, GNOME's gotten to the point where those high-bandwidth, planning the future discussions (points 2 and 5) have gone beyond what we traditionally thought of as the GNOME project. Just look at where key GNOME contributors are working now: Lennart Poettering is working on audio and system start-up with a clear focus on improving the desktop, the browser and web platform have become key components of the free desktop, Richard Hughes is working on making system-wide colour management a reality, there are kernel hackers and Xorg developers working at that level of the stack to improve the desktop end-user's experience. GNOME has long been good at fixing problems at the right point in the stack, rather than patching around infrastructure issues. In addition, applications like LibreOffice, Eclipse, Mozilla, and people buiilding on the GNOME platform (Unity and XFCE come to mind) all build on and use our platform, and I think it would be very beneficial to get people from these projects together to see what we can do to make that platform better for them. So it makes sense for us to have some kerrnel, Xorg, web, and application developers there. KDE is also looking down the stack at things like metadata, audio, voip, file sharing... - and so I definitely think it makes sense to have some relevant KDE people working with the relevant GNOME people on avoiding duplication of effort where it's possible. The other goals could potentially be compromised by a desktop summit. The bigger the conference gets, the more people will tend to stay in smaller groups of people they know - Dunbar's research on communities in action - resulting in it being a harder conference for project newcomers or peripheral contributors to attend and figure out what's going on and how to get involved. To address this, it would be possible to organise, in a way similar to (say) OSCON, dedicated tracks for smaller subsets of the desktop, which would still allow some cross-pollination, while providing a small enough surface for newer community members to get some traction. Also, the more stuff is going on in the conference, the harder it is for any one topic or theme to get attention. I tend to think that the cream will rise to the top, and that people will notice exciting work. Definitely, the main benefit of the conference has been the economies of scale for sponsors - both in organising attendance and in sponsorship. I think that potentially broadening the conference further will bring greater benefits - making the Desktop Summit *the* place to be to talk about the free software desktop would be a success in my mind. 2. It is hard to measure what specific collaborative benefits are being made possible by the Desktop Summit. It is hard to point to specific advances that have been accomplished. Some have concerns that not a lot of collaboration is actually being done. Specifically to address this criticism: let me remind people that a lot of this has come down to the mandate which the first desktop summit was given (GUADEC and Akademy co-hosted) which made the lives of the organising team harder, and also made the conference less successful as a whole. This is something which both the GNOME and KDE eV boards agreed
Re: Proposal - merge the Foundation blog into gnome.org
Hi, On 12/06/2011 10:39 AM, Allan Day wrote: Here's a rough plan for the transition: 1. Add gnome.org's feed to news.gnome.org [1] 2. Ensure that everyone who needs to be able to post news on the Foundation's behalf has access to gnome.org (just get in touch if you need access!) [2] 3. Add a post to the Foundation blog announcing the move 4. Enjoy What would you think about copying foundation blog posts to gnome.org retroactively also? I don't know if Wordpress has an export/import posts option, but if it did, in addition to the we're moving announcement, that might provide consistency in the archives. If it's not straightforward, it's not vital. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal - merge the Foundation blog into gnome.org
Hi, On 11/30/2011 10:32 AM, Allan Day wrote: For a long time we have had a news feed for gnome.org and a separate Foundation blog. I'm proposing that we combine them both into the gnome.org feed. I definitely think that moving to a unique GNOME News feed news page is a great idea. I wonder: how will this structure allow the evolution of handling news for GNOME? Is there a way to submit a story or contact the editors? How does one become an editor? And, just to be clear, when you talk about the gnome.org news feed, you're talking about http://gnome.org/news (the wordpress blog) and not http://news.gnome.org (the Planet aggregator), yes? A bit of background. First, I think we should be moving in a direction where the Foundation isn't considered to be a separate entity from the GNOME project. The Foundation is a vital part of our project, there shouldn't be much of a difference between 'The GNOME Project' and 'The GNOME Foundation' in terms of membership and identity. I'm sure there are a few people who would contest this - who are consciously not foundation members for some reason, while being GNOME hackers - and there is also the technical difficulty of where you draw the line for membership rights like having a vote in elections, but I think by and large, defining the membership of the GNOME Foundation as people involved in the GNOME project is fine. The gnome.org news feed and the Foundation blog are almost identical in scope. The gnome.org feed provides 'official', generally non-technical, news about what is happening in the GNOME project. The Foundation blog is exactly the same, except that it is restricted to the Foundation. There is a large class of subjects that I would like to see on both streams, including board elections, fund raising campaigns, new members, release announcements and initiatives such as the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Both the gnome.org news stream and the Foundation blog would benefit from having a higher frequency of posts. It might be hard to lose the Foundation blog, but I think we'd be stronger if we united our feeds. Thoughts? Opinions? I don't think the Foundation blog is being read by anything except the GNOME announcement aggregator right now, to be honest. Occasionally people would point to foundation announcements in other blogs, so it's important to ensure old links keep working or redirect, but I'm all in favour of simplifying and consolidating foundation news sources, on condition that the result is interesting for people to read. I'd also be happy to see notes pointing to significant news stories about GNOME written on other sources going into this news feed, by the way (as I think I've said before). Presumably what to do about the Journal? and what to do about news.gnome.org? are separate discussions? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal - merge the Foundation blog into gnome.org
Hi, On 11/30/2011 05:28 PM, Allan Day wrote: I wonder: how will this structure allow the evolution of handling news for GNOME? Is there a way to submit a story or contact the editors? How does one become an editor? Personally, I don't think it should be the role of gnome.org to be a generic news service. It should be more 'official' than that. That isn't to say that we could not establish such a service elsewhere, of course (this was discussed on the marketing list not long ago [1]). We're on the same wavelenth. I'm thinking: how will the official news team scale over time? I've seen maintainers for various official GNOME things go away over time, and it would be nice not to bake that in here too - Planet, the website, the GNOME software map and the original sysadmins come to mind. It would be good to have a way to easily spread the load, and have as little as possible of the resources be under 1 or 2 people. I'm sure there are a few people who would contest this - who are consciously not foundation members for some reason, while being GNOME hackers - and there is also the technical difficulty of where you draw the line for membership rights like having a vote in elections, but I think by and large, defining the membership of the GNOME Foundation as people involved in the GNOME project is fine. I'd be interested to hear why people don't feel they want to be Foundation members. I think it would be beneficial for the project if there is a closer relationship between being a contributor and being a Foundation member. So would I! But I know that in the past when we've talked about the value of foundation membership, there have been one or two people who said I don't want to be a foundation member. Presumably what to do about the Journal? and what to do about news.gnome.org? are separate discussions? Yes, again, check the marketing list archive. OK - thanks. I don't know if I mentioned here that I wasn't following the list for a few months. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation IRC Meeting: November 23, 2011
Hi Shaun, I just saw your email today, for example (due to weekend a busy day yesterday), and one of the topics I'd like to discuss should probably be brought up on the mailing list first to set some ground work for in-person discussion in the IRC meeting. I have a bunch of questions after reading the last public board minutes in the wiki: https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/2001 - but they haven't been pushed to foundation-list yet (I found out about them last Friday through Vincent Untz when I mentioned the work I've been doing on our conference bid). When do you think they might get sent out? As you know, I was behind the Lyon bid last year, and have already had a couple of meetings to try to work out infrastructure for a Desktop Summit in 2013 - but we obviously need to know whether that'll happen or not. I also have lots of feedback inside information on some of the questions information that got minuted. Do you know who's in charge of posting minutes, and when they expect to send them out? It seems like it's important to do so before any IRC meeting. Cheers, Dave. PS. Personal opinion here: The lack of engagement in the IRC meetings might be because the membership is usually at least a month out of date on the topics the board talks about... the last board minutes sent to foundation-announce were for the meeting on October 18th. On 11/20/2011 05:28 PM, Shaun McCance wrote: It's time for another Foundation IRC meeting. We'll hold an IRC meeting this Wednesday, November 23rd, at 16:00 UTC. Information and agenda can be found on the wiki: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MeetingAgenda If there is anything you would like to discuss with other members or ask the board, please add it to this page: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MembersAgenda We will try to hold these meetings every two weeks from now on. We look forward to seeing you there. Thanks, Shaun ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-annou...@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation IRC Meeting: November 23, 2011
Hmmm... I guess this is a case of reply-to considered harmful, since the email wasn't intended to go to foundatioon-list. Never mind... On 11/22/2011 11:49 AM, Dave Neary wrote: I just saw your email today, for example (due to weekend a busy day yesterday), and one of the topics I'd like to discuss should probably be brought up on the mailing list first to set some ground work for in-person discussion in the IRC meeting. I saw from the raw IRC log [1] that there was a lively discussion of the Desktop Summit at the last IRC meeting (which, by my account, included only 3 non-board members though) - a meeting I missed. On top of the minutes of the debate at the Nov 1st board meeting, it looks like there's a potentially big decision in the works - and yet I hadn't seen the topic in the foundation-list minutes at all in October or November. I'd hate for the decision to be made based on the opinions of the people who turned up at one IRC meeting. Would it be possible to add DS to this IRC meeting again, or even potentially open a debate on it on foundation-list? I have a bunch of questions after reading the last public board minutes in the wiki: https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/2001 - but they haven't been pushed to foundation-list yet (I found out about them last Friday through Vincent Untz when I mentioned the work I've been doing on our conference bid). My questions: * How does the board plan on deciding whether or not to co-host a Desktop Summit in 2013? With or without consultation of the foundation membership? * When do you think you might know? * If there is a Desktop Summit, how big a room will we need for plenary sessions? This is the hardest thing to organise when you go past ~500 attendees, and we'll need to work on it soon if we want to do a Lyon bid for 2013 (and we do). * I'm interested in why Bastien is against, and what Emmanuele and Ryan would like to see happen differently. Would you like to share? Having been involved in the organisation of both Desktop Summits to date, I have lots of suggestions on how the GNOME board might encourage change in the next edition. Who should I be talking to? Do you know who's in charge of posting minutes, and when they expect to send them out? It seems like it's important to do so before any IRC meeting. Obviously there's not time to have a discussion at this point, but I'll be at the IRC meeting today, all going well (although I do have to leave at 18:30 CET). Cheers, Dave. [1] https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20111026?action=AttachFiledo=viewtarget=GNOME-20111026.log -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
Hi, On 05/31/11 01:12, Andrea Veri wrote: I wasn't aware of this bad situation so I can't provide a good and well-motivated comment, but I can tell you that I will do my best to fulfil my duties, I'll take care of critic situations where needed and I won't leave anything behind: what happened with the LGM group should never happen again within the GNOME Foundation, that's for sure. Since a number of candidates aren't aware of this situation, perhaps I should give a few details. LGM has an annual budget which is pretty tiny - in the region of $20,000 to $30,000 per year, including a big chunk going to sponsored travel. For a number of reasons, a small number of the sponsored attendees at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal were not reimbursed their travel costs until May 2010. Then in 2010, a number of attendees were not reimbursed until just before LGM 2011, which was held in May this year. In addition, there were issues in 2008 which had nothing to do with the GNOME Foundation (but I believe the foundation helped resolve them at the time), due to dealing with a Polish non-profit for the event. In the light of these continued difficulties, Louis (lead organiser for the past 5 years of LGM) proposed that the Quebecois LUG of which he's president could take over the management of the funds. And finalising the transfer of funds from the GNOME Foundation took several months of over back with the board the lawyers. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
Hi German, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: On Mon, 2011-05-30 at 16:11 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Jeff Schroeder already did this question, my answer is here: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-May/msg00147.html Not *quite* the same thing - you talk about open meetings and recording what happens in meetings. I'm specifically asking for accountability on email discussions, which you don't really address. 3. I think financial transparency is important. If you plan on applying for the treasurer position, what changes (if any) would you propose for the budgeting process? How often would you publish financial reports for the foundation? Are you happy with the level of transparency in the board's finances now? I think the budgeting process is not a one-person task. Teams need to think ahead. For instance, the accessibility team has done a great job planning their activities 1.5 years ahead. The same I could say from the Women Outreach Program, where Marina is already thinking in the next editions of WOP. Do you have any ideas on how the budgeting process can be improved over previous years? I offered to help draft the initial budget in previous years, but in the end discovered the budget when it was announced on foundation-list. Do you think it would be a good idea to have a small group of people like the ED hiring committee or GUADEC organising committee working on a shared file to come to the initial draft? Regarding to transparency, my perception is we have four kind of foundation members: 1. Those who read the budget and formulate questions 2. Those who read the budget and does not know what to ask (or how to read the budget) 3. Those who look the big number, and trust in the board (and/or the treasure) 4. Those who do not care, because this is just a flipping administrative thing. There are two aspects to financial transparency: the budget, and the actual expenditures. Publishing a draft budget and revising it based on feedback is one thing, but it's also important to publish regular updates on what has actually been spent, so as to foresee any budget over-runs or to show when allocated funds have not been used. KDE eV, for example, includes a small section in every report with the expenditures and income since the last report. I notice that you have also done this for the quarterly reports - and this is good and useful. However, the last report was in Q2 2010, as far as I can see, a year ago. I know this is kind of a pain to do, so perhaps there's a way to improve the process to make it easier? Also, one thing I'm missing is the actual relationship between income expenditures and the budget. We don't see the balance forward for the foundation, and we don't see whether expenditures came in under or over budget. Nevertheless, the fact you ask for more reports means to me that the annual reports are fine, because you have higher expectations now. I am not necessarily asking for more reports, but I think the budget drafting process could be (as you suggest) spread out a bit. Also, I think that the financial reports that we get could be a little better. And I was just wondering if candidates thought the same, and had ideas for improving them. Managing external accounts that gets bigger and bigger are also an issue to our non-profit status, because they increases artificially the funds we carry from one fiscal year to the next one. We can not earmark those funds. I don't believe that this is a big problem - especially not for LGM, which has only had a surplus of a few thousand dollars (which is not a lot for an organisation with an annual budget over $300,000). In the future, it should not happen with external accounts according to the minutes https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110412 : The board decided to no longer manage funds for external organizations. It is too much work, especially now that there is more of an interest for GNOME projects to get more involved with fund raising. I'm actually really disappointed at this decision, and it's one of the decisions where I would have liked to know who proposed this, and who was in favour. My personal position would be to work out on a case by case basis whether projects align with our mission, and figure out how to make the process work and set the management fee to an appropriate level. For instance, a process could be stalled because is required that board members vote, a legal review, a verification with the accountant, any other external variable. When there is a delay, keeping saying still waiting for votes, still waiting for review, and so on do not help to deal with people's frustration; specially when they have put a lot of effort to get their part of the work done as fast as possible. Does this perhaps point to a problem with board processes? If a board decision can't be made because
Questions for candidates - board processes significance
Hi all, I was away last week travelling, so I'm coming late to the election campaign. I have almost decided who I would like to vote for, but there are still a few things which are important to me when considering a prospective board member. 1. If elected, will you seek a named position (chairman/treasurer/secretary) on the board? If so, why? 2. Board meetings are minuted, and these minutes are published regularly. However, the board also increasingly makes decisions on board-list with the Apache +1/0/-1 convention. Would you support the minuting of these votes, including recording any -1 votes? 3. I think financial transparency is important. If you plan on applying for the treasurer position, what changes (if any) would you propose for the budgeting process? How often would you publish financial reports for the foundation? Are you happy with the level of transparency in the board's finances now? 4. Our relationship with a number of groups has suffered this year - and one of the lesser known ones (but one I'm involvedd in) is the Libre Graphics Meeting organisers (a group of people representing a couple of dozen free art projects). Are you aware that the LGM organisers withdrew all the funds that the GNOME Foundation was managing for them this year, because they have been unhappy with the responsiveness and quality of communication with the foundation over the past 2 - 3 years? Do you have any thoughts on why this particular relationship degraded? And will you commit to handling or delegating answers to all time-critical queries which come to the board during your term? 5. In general, as a board member communication is vital to keep people outside the board informed whenever there is a delay or when extra input is needed on something they're working on. For incumbents, are you happy with the level of communication reactivity in the current board? For new candidates, what would you like to do to ensure that the communication reactivity of the board improves in the coming term? 6. Board members are ambassadors for the foundation. I think it's important that board members be social, and be nice. Are you nice? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
Hi, Shaun McCance wrote: On Mon, 2011-05-30 at 16:11 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: 2. Board meetings are minuted, and these minutes are published regularly. However, the board also increasingly makes decisions on board-list with the Apache +1/0/-1 convention. Would you support the minuting of these votes, including recording any -1 votes? As I mentioned in another email, I get the impression that most decisions don't even come down to a vote. Board members seem to just come to an agreement. I don't think there's any benefit to mandating more process in those cases. When things do come to a vote, yes, I believe votes should be publicly recorded (unless the entire topic has to be kept secret for some reason). Board members act on behalf of the foundation membership. Their votes should be representative of what the foundation wants, so I don't think they have a right to a secret ballot. I bring this up, because there have been 1 or 2 things in which I've been involved this last year where I have heard on the grapevine that some board members disagreed. Disagreement in a board is healthy, and I definitely don't want to have an expectation that everyone follows the party line. However, when deciding (for example) whether to vote for someone or not, I think it's important that I know where they stand on the Big Stuff (like budget allocations, hiring decisions, etc). So I think it's important that if something happens by majority decision that those decisions be reported back to the membership. Thanks for your answers Shaun! (and Emily Lionel). Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Stock trademark licensing agreements?
Hi all, In one project I work with I have been trying to convince the project, which has a very traditional all rights reserved trademark policy, that it is worthwhile lowering the bar for certain classes of community activities. My arguments that we should have a broader fair use statement has apparently not gained traction - my next idea is to have a small number of pre-cooked trademark licenses for common activities (like: I want to run a local event, I want to run a fan website, I want to get some merchandise printed) and have these on the website so that all concerned are aware up front what the expectations are when you do these things, and to give very simple click-through agreements to lower the overhead of dealing with things like these. A community website, for example, might have a guideline that there be a clear disclaimer that the site is not official, and that content on the site does not adversely affect the reputation of the project. A community event license might have guidelines for event naming, visual identity, etc. This was the idea behind the GNOME user group agreement. Has anyone else done anything similar? Did it help the community feel more control over the project brand? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Stock trademark licensing agreements?
Hi, Vincent Untz wrote: openSUSE has trademark guidelines: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Trademark_guidelines The guidelines explicitly authorizes some common uses for the openSUSE trademark, with no form to fill. Good guidelines for what the holder is OK with are great - but not quite what I was hoping for. I'm thinking more along the lines of http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/usergroup/ This is stuff which falls outside of the normal guidelines, that we won't let everyone do, but which we're happy for some people to do, under certain conditions. By giving a license, we deal with the Trademark law requires you to police your mark constraint, while also allowing people to do stuff we're OK with without putting too many barriers in their way. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 15th, 2011
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: * Hardware o The System76 laptop will be made available to the new ED when hired. o A new laptop will be purchased to replace Rosanna's aging one. o ACTION: Paul will follow-up to acquire a laptop for Rosanna. Have you considered asking one of our advisory board partners to donate a laptop for the Executive Director? I believe that Tim Ney's laptop was donated in the past. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Website content licensing
Hi, Vincent Untz wrote: I think you're referring to the footer on the web page? I believe the GNOME project being marked as copyright holder here is just a way to say copyright held by many contributors to the GNOME project. I don't think anybody signed any paper to assign copyrights for the website changes that were done to the Foundation. So to answer your question: it is probably more complex than what you're hoping :/ While I don't wish to ride slipshod over copyright law, I think you're over-thinking this. We can cover 90% of the contributors with one mail to f-l, and unless anyone objects to the licence change, Just Do It. If someone objects, then we need to either remove or re-write the content they contributed. If after the relicencing someone comes out of the woodwork to object, then we can rewrite or remove their contribution, or convince them to relicence. Since most of the content of the site is being rewritten or edited, and I believe that everyone (including myself) who has contributed content to gnome.org did so on the understanding that the content was being given to the project, I do not think that in practice we will have any issues. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: desktopsummit registration forces gnome users to have a kde identity
Hi, Frederic Muller wrote: It seems that there are 2 options and the identify.kde.org choice was taken out of convenience for one party. Why not chose the neutral option being fair for both sides instead and avoiding the issue of GNOME asking it's user to register at identify.kde.org instead? That's seems to be a much more logical choice, no? The people who advocated for this decision when it came up felt that the domain name would not make a big difference, and that the important thing was to use a well established architecture. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: desktopsummit registration forces gnome users to have a kde identity
Hi, Olav Vitters wrote: What is the problem exactly? The problem was setting up registration for the Drupal instance which will be the conference website. In December, we agreed to use Drupal and COD (a Drupal conference organisation module) for the website. KDE have a well-established Drupal server sysadmins who knew the system inside out, and we agreed that it'd be an instance on their servers. Their Drupal uses identity.kde.org, which is an LDAP server, to handle accounts for the website. At the time, there were two choices: require everyone to create a Drupal account just to register for the conference, or use the authentication system which KDE already had in place. After some discussion, for the sake of expediency (this is an existing, well tested authentification system, and many of the conference attendees have accounts on it already) the KDE identity LDAP server was used for authentification. Some concerns were raised, and one potential solution suggested by one of the KDE admins (Jeff Mitchell) was to use OpenID or something similar, to allow people to authenticate with whatever service they already had an account for. This didn't get implemented, as far as I can tell, purely for lack of manpower. If the identify.kde.org could have: * another 'frontend' with a desktopsummit.org layout (a theme) * call it identity.desktopsummit.org (serveralias + theme only) * guarantee that my details are only used for Desktop Summit (e.g. hidden field which stores this only for identity.desktopsummit.org so details can be deleted afterwards) I don't see the benefit of doing something like this outweighing the costs. This may not be visible from the outside, but getting the website online was already much slower than we'd hoped, purely because we did not have people committing to getting it done - Kenny Duffus basically took on the configuration of the conference site on his own. * some kind of privacy policy explanation + guarantee (from KDE towards Desktop Summit -- I mean this in a legal sense, no problems trusting KDE... but you could theoretically have legal issues. Usually you cannot just share privacy related information with another organisation) A privacy policy sounds like a good idea. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 15th, 2011
Hi, Vincent Untz wrote: Le mardi 01 mars 2011, à 14:11 -0600, Brian Cameron a écrit : * Dave Neary's Advisory board request o ACTION: Paul to send email to the Advisory Board to request for help. What is the request? :-) There is no context, so it's hard to know. Maybe it's a private item, though? Scott Berkun agreed to give a speaker's workshop a few weeks before the desktop summit this year, on condition that he just had to turn up we'd take care of ensuring the appropriate webinar infrastructure - and I thought that one of the members of the advisory board might be able to help. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 15th, 2011
Hi Richard, Richard Stallman wrote: Dave is looking for help in hosting a webinar type session (and you've reminded me to ping the AdBoard). The choice of codec is a crucial issue here. To avoid pressuring GNOME supporters to use nonfree software, the codec needs to be free. Also the site should not use Flash and it should work with Javascript disabled. While I agree that we should not encourage the use of proprietary technology like Flash, in the context of a webinar I will be satisfied if attendees can access the content with free software such as Gnash. I am not aware of any webinar platform which requires neither Javascript or Flash. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: SFC, GNOME Foundation (WAS Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 1st, 2011)
Hi, Vincent Untz wrote: Le vendredi 18 février 2011, à 10:24 -0700, Stormy Peters a écrit : I think we should be willing to do for GNOME projects what the SFC does for their projects. Big +1. That's one of the goals of the Foundation, imho; and as Stormy points out, we already do that for some projects. ...including some projects which are not GNOME projects, like GIMP the Libre Graphics Meeting. I concur with the very wise Stormy Vincent. The foundation should be providing services like this to our projects. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 1st, 2011
Hi, Lefty wrote: On Feb 17, 2011, at 6:50 AM, Andrew Savory wrote: By chance is the desktop environment for the Motorola Atrix laptop accessory based on LiMo? The desktop seems to have a strong resemblance to a GNOME desktop. It may be GNOME, but it's not LiMo that I'm aware of. Whatever it's based on, it's not LiMo. Motorola hasn't been active in the LiMo Foundation in probably two years now. Looks like Android to me, if it's the same Atrix Google shows me. Which is in line with Motorola's public strategy. But what I found doesn't look like a laptop. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 1st, 2011
Hi, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Gregory Leblanc Any details on this? Are they leaving for financial reasons, or philosophical ones? There's still a big banner on their website regarding the partnership with Gnome. Did they not just join the advisory board back in July? LiMo just made some announcement on LiMo4.. is GNOME no longer a possible strategy for them ? Like Gregory I'd be interested in hearing why they pulled out and what effect it might have on our embedded device strategy? As the GNOME person quoted, I have a little more info (but the board is better placed than me). LiMo uses GNOME technology. They continue to support the foundation's activities on a case-by-case basis, but their executive director did not consider that the advisory board position was giving the foundation value for money. We have been informing their advisory board representatives of the great stuff we have been doing around hackfests, training programmes, GNOME 3 plans, support for GTK+ on mobile, etc. but Mr. Gillis was not convinced that the foundation was sufficiently focussed on mobile to make the $20K a year worth paying. Obviously, I disagree with him. In any case, the quote I gave to the press release for LiMo 4 still holds true - we love to see people using our code, and I'd be happy to see LiMo members working more closely with the GNOME foundation in the future. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Fwd: GNOME Developer Survey]
Hi, Michael Meeks wrote: These people are irritating ... three spams from the same group. They shot themselves in the foot in the third paragraph with the twenty minutes IMHO. I've also seen it on other forums. As far as I know, they approached the board so it's sanctioned. Grin bear it has been my approach. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: sponsoring a GNOME developer training session at Fedora Action Day Ghana
Hi Ben, Your reply today popped this back to the top of my TODO list - I've been meaning to reply since you sent this. Ben Konrath wrote: Here are suggestions for sessions I would like to see but it really depends on the person/people going: * tour of GNOME 3 * hands on session working through the GNOME development work flow (bugzilla, git, fixing real a bug or two, etc) * hands on developer training - work through adding a small feature to a GNOME module I have some training materials for some of these. Specifically, I ran a session at the MeeGo conference in November where we took people through getting code out of git, making changes, commits, pushes and merges, fixing bugs using gdb, and identifying and fixing a profiling issue with valgrind. The material is all in github is reusable: https://github.com/dneary/linux-devel-tools-tutorial I also have the training material I used from the GNOME developer training at GUADEC last year, which included an overview of the GNOME platform from Fernando Herrera and a review of developer tools from Xan Lopez and Claudio Saavedra. I need to get them online somewhere still... One of the challenges I see with this proposal is that Ghana is a long way to travel in terms of time and money for only a one day event. One of my personal goals for my outreach activities is to make this kind of situation disappear by having GNOMErs in Sub-Saharan Africa. But since we're not there yet, we're left with this situation. I agree that's a great goal. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - December 23, 2010
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: New Items * GTK+/MeeGo project call for bids. o A bid was chosen and will be announced soon. Those who submitted bids have been contacted and told if their bid was selected or not. It's been 3 weeks since the meeting now - is there any chance of getting more information on the winning bid - ie. what will be done, by whom, and when? As a Maemo/MeeGo guy, this is *very* interesting to me. Thanks! Dave. Status of action items * Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering. How about Ari Jaaksi? * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this. I suggest looking at the MariaDB trademark guidelines for a good starting point. I especially like that they have outlined overall goals that inform the policy (kind of like the GPL preamble) - this is the check-list by which the trademark policy forms' success can be measured. o Paul highlighted that KDE The Document Foundation join OIN. Just FYI: GNOME was one of the first non-profit free software foundations to join OIN, back in 2007-08: http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/licensees.php There was a press release draft at one stage, but I don't exactly recall what happened to it. For the record, the GNOME Foundation was the first community run organisation to join as a licensee. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Media training at the LF Collaboration Summit
Hi all, I was talking to Jennifer Cloer from the Linux Foundation recently, about the possibility of having media training at a conference somewhere so that people involved in free software projects could train up on dealing with the press. She was very enthusiastic about the idea, so we asked Amanda (hi Amanda!) whether she thoughht it would be a good fit with the Collaboration Summit. She agreed, so we've started planning it. Jennifer has agreed to teach a half-day module during the summit (we still need to figure out the details syllabus, but you can assume it will cover things like framing your message, growing your media contacts, drafting talking points, interview press release best practices) targeting participants in free software projects. When the foundation opens registration, I will be encouraging anyone who wants to attend to register. In the meantime, I'd really like to get an idea of how many people from this list are interested, to gauge interest request the right sized room. Thanks! Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 11, 2010
Hi, Juanjo Marin wrote: Is there already any page with a list organizations ? We can work it out in a dossier about what is GNOME and about a11y GNOME tecnologies. Not that I know of. I just started one in the wiki. http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/HandicapAssociations Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME trademarks
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: http://www.gnomehazelnutfactory.com/ I don't believe there's generally any problem with two companies having the same name for a product if those products are so different. If we ever try to sell nuts then we may have a problem. Of course there isn't - trademarks are limited to fields of use. We have quite a broad field of use, but selling hazelnuts is not part of it :) I just thought GNOME hazelnuts sounded cool :) Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 11, 2010
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: * Joanmarie Diggs joined the meeting to give an update on GNOME accessibility. snip o A $40,000 budget for FY2012 would help the a11y project. o The GNOME Foundation currently has a $20,000 a11y budget. Half is allocated for travel and half is allocated for contracting work. This includes roughly a $5,000 surplus from previous year, $10,000 from Mozilla, and $5,000 from F123-Mais Diferenças. * Possible solutions: o Perhaps a Friends of GNOME campaign could target a11y. o Perhaps we could revisit funding a11y tasks via bounties (e.g. The GOPA program). That project did not work so well since the bounties were too small. Perhaps a $40,000 budget would allow for larger bounties. o We should do more PR, blogs, and publish more clear plans about what work we want to do to raise awareness. o Can plan to do a targeted FoG campaign. Plan to do a campaign for servers in Spring, 2011. So, an a11y campaign could follow. o Can we work more closely with advisory board companies to get more people allocated to a11y instead of, or in addition to, raising funds. o Perhaps we could determine a more consistent way to allocate some money from the yearly advisory board fees to programs that need money every year such as a11y. Further ideas: Based on the Orca (or even a more general a11y) roadmap, it may be possible to get some funding from companies or associations interested in seeing Orca get better (although a lot of the associations seem to be focussing more on NVDA because it works on Windows). Where is the Orca roadmap? Are any of the features being requested by specific identifiable groups? And can we pitch some of the roadmap to associations representing those groups? Do we have people who can get entry points put in project proposals for the likes of HI, AFM, APAJH other non-profits (those 3 are French). Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME's logo been incorrectly used
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: The GNOME Foot could only be licensed by the copyright holder. I'd think any licenses assigned without permission by the copyright holder would not be considered valid. So, how can there be images in the wild? I'd think the copyright holder should know how it has been licensed with permission. If, for example, the GNOME foot (which is in the wiki) were released to one person by the original author under by-sa or fdl, and then redistributed from there, we'd be SOL. If, for example, the foot's creator never did such a thing, but someone else marked the foot file as CC by-sa or fdl, and then that got shipped around, then the original author could certainly ask for correction. Is it not The GNOME Foundation who owns the copyright to the logo? I thought the author of the foot logo image provided the artwork as a part of a contest. No - as far as I know, the foot is copyright jimmac. jimmac can confirm. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 11, 2010
Hi, Joanmarie Diggs wrote: Aha, well, yes. For starters: * Speech recognition would be useful for at least some people with print learning disabilities as well as for certain people with physical disabilities. * Caribou, especially were its functionality further expanded, would be useful for people with physical disabilities. Could we begin there? And if so, who is we and how do we begin? :-) OK - Caribou is the gok replacement, right? I guess we is us - the GNOME Foundation. I'm sure the board will help, I'll help, I'm certain the a11y team will help... we'll figure this out. I guess begin begins with build a list of organisations we could contact for grants - organisations should include non-profits, foundations, universities, and government agencies. We could use a wiki page for that, or Etherpad, or Google Docs, perhaps SugarCRM? Open to discussion. Then, for each one, we try to get a good entry point. Then, we contact them, with a general informal first approach - do you know GNOME? We're pretty cool. We do cool a11y stuff. and if they have heard of us, and are maybe using us a little, we can then pitch the roadmap for grants. For sure, it's a long shot approach, and we'll probably only ever get 10% response to initial queries, and less than 10% of those interested in funding us (and there, let me turn that question around to you - who's us? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME trademarks
Hi all, While browsing the USPTO trademark database (as you do...) I found the GNOME trademark: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=docstate=4001:mi6n4v.2.43 and also this second live GNOME trademark: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=docstate=4001:mi6n4v.2.40 The second one is interesting! Word Mark: GNOME Goods and Services: IC 029. US 046. G S: Processed Hazelnuts for human consumption. FIRST USE: 19970331. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20010203 Owner: Lindsey Family Farm, LLC CORPORATION OREGON 7505 Windsor Island Rd. Salem OREGON 97303 I don't suppose someone living near Salem in Oregon has seen GNOME hazelnuts flying around local farmer's markets or health food stores, and would care to post a photo? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 6, 2010
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: * Executive Director Hiring Process ... o Discussion about whether we should hire other staff (event manager, fund raiser, marketing for GNOME 3) in addition to or instead of an Executive Director. Perhaps hiring someone to work on marketing for GNOME 3 would make a lot of sense with the release date approaching. I would hire the ED first, and have them make a proposal. I don't think we have the resources to hire someone to do marketing, perhaps a one-off agency contract. But we could definitely take on a couple of marketing interns once we have an ED to manage them. I'm definitely in favour of a part-time events person - sionce we're doing a lot of events, there is more than enough work for them, and I think that they will make their own money back by making things even more efficient better structuring our conference sponsorship offerings. * For Libre Graphics reimbursements, The GNOME Foundation is waiting for receipts. Do the LGM organisers concerned attendees know? :) * Justin Colannino from the Software Freedom Law Center sent the board an email with the form to register the GNOME trademark to review before submission. Have you talked to Luis about the trademark registration process he went through some years ago? He spent a lot of time regularising the situation in 2007/2008. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Announcing the GNOME T-Shirt Design Contest!
Hi, Andreas Nilsson wrote: I can make that as a design separate from the contest. :) With LEDs! Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Dates format for Desktop Summit 2011 announced
Hi Gil, Gil Forcada wrote: So criticism was expected? I understood as a set-in-stone decision :) Feedback was expected... some of this *is* set in stone, but I definitely prefer hearing concerns now, so that we can try to address them. Just from an organizational PoV: having the core days in the first day (aka August 2nd) with the joint conference (so ~1000 attendees) I think it's a terrible idea! This year's GUADEC with the two pre-conference days were wonderful in terms or setting everything up, not just the registration desk per-se, but the network, the signaling, getting all the volunteers around and up to speed ... So in short, one day as registration/pre-conference/hackfest/BoF day it should be a must for all conferences that everyone expects to run smoothly. We won't have access to the venue before 5pm on the Friday (another event preceding us), unfortunately, and for the bigger halls, we can only have them from Friday to Monday - so this part is indeed set in stone. We anticipate getting the network well planned in advance and getting it up running early - we are hopeful that the CCC will help us plan our network infrastructure, and for those of you in the know, you're aware that there could be no better way to ensure everything works well. For welcome desk registration set-up, volunteer co-ordination and other issues you mention, we will definitely have some issues to work around... we plan to gather brief volunteers group leaders on Friday night (both for the set-up to help ensure smooth running during the conference) and Saturday morning before the start of the conference, we are thinking about having someone help with on-site logistics (running on-the-ground operations communications, ensuring that everyone who needs volunteers has them, and ensuring that no volunteers are being overworked). There is one additional complication which will make things fun interesting - the rooms we have for BOFs hacking from Tuesday through Friday are in a different building (literally just across the street) from where the bigger talks will be. So we also need to co-ordinate a tear-down set-up on Monday evening, where we will need a lot of help. You're dead right to raise these concerns. We will of course try to mitigate the effect you mention, and will do as much as possible to ensure that everything is ready for Saturday morning. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Dates format for Desktop Summit 2011 announced
Hi, Johannes Schmid wrote: I know that we discussed in the first meeting to have a pre-registration the day before and don't start the first day before 12 to allow smooth registration. Don't know if they changed everything back in the second meeting... I don't think it makes sense to start the conference at 12 on Saturday. 10, maybe. But we only have 3 days of talks - sacrificing a half day seems a lot. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [guadec-list] Dates format for Desktop Summit 2011 announced
Hi, Olav Vitters wrote: 1. Conflicts with the schedule for GNOME 3.2 (feature, API, docs are @ Aug 15, UI one week later). Basically the proposed freezes are right after the desktop summit. There is not much that we can do regarding scheduling GNOME as GUADEC has consistently been later and later in the year. We need a shorter release cycle for GNOME 3.2 (release date is proposed for Sep 28), so not sure what can be done. Generally there is almost no development activity during GUADEC. Note that above dates are still not final. Thanks for the feedback, Olav. Indeed, this is a point I had not considered, and it is an important one. I have forwarded it on to the desktop summit team list for discussion. 2. Conference start on a Saturday is I think unusual for GUADEC? I thought it always was a weekday. Not sure if everything can be ready in such a short timeframe. This is essentially the same format we had in Gran Canaria, and is now confirmed. This was partly the university's availability, and partly a preference of the local team (as Johannes says, this was discussed before I got involved). On getting the venue ready, we have a large motivated local team, and we can get into the venue on Friday night, and from 7am on Saturday morning, so we might be OK, if we are well prepared. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Dates format for Desktop Summit 2011 announced
Hi, Dave Neary wrote: snip Three things are worth singing out to GUADEC attendees as significant differences from previous events. First, the conference will be held later than usual, on 6-12 August. snip Second is the conference format. snip Third, following a lot of feedback after Gran Canaria, the desktop summit will have one papers committee made up of people from GNOME and KDE this year. snip This the Free Desktop Conference - it seems like a natural place for people from Xorg, freedesktop.org and desktop applications to gather and address common problems. snip Just wanted to say I'm glad that there seems to be no opposition/criticism of these core issues. The call for content for the Desktop Summit will open in February, and hopefully we will be able to start announcing sponsors and keynote speakers very soon. Looking forward to seeing you all in Berlin! Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Events and merchadising
Hi Luca, Murray Cumming wrote: On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 12:44 +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote: we are organizing a FOSS related event in Siena (Italy) on October 22 and 23 and we'll have a little stand dedicated to GNOME. I know it could be late, but it could be really great to have some marketing and/or merchandising material. Not the big and fat event box[1] (we don't need the included hardware), but just the flags or posters to expose. Murray, do you think you can send the roll of posters only? I think we only have the blue canvas poster: http://www.murrayc.com/blog/permalink/2007/07/08/gnome-event-box-flag/ I have some posters that I got printed for JDLL a couple of years ago: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2008/10/17/gnome-at-jdll-2008/ I might be able to send you an official desktop of happy people, a blue GNOME one, and a couple of the nature ones (te sky grass posters you see here), if you'd like. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Dates format for Desktop Summit 2011 announced
Hi all, As some of you may have noticed, the Desktop Summit dates, format and location were announced today [1] - and we have an updated website online [2]. Three things are worth singing out to GUADEC attendees as significant differences from previous events. First, the conference will be held later than usual, on 6-12 August. This was a constraint imposed by the university, related to German university schedules (students have classes in Germany right up to mid July). This week was the earliest we could hold the conference. Second is the conference format. We will be following roughly the same format as we did in Gran Canaria - three days of organised talks and keynotes, which will be held in four big lecture halls, and four days of BOFs, hackfests and related activities. The foundation annual general meeting is provisionally scheduled for Tuesday 9th, and teams will be invited to schedule BOFs, team meetings, hackfests and related attendee-generated content on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday - there are a selection of rooms of varying sizes available for sessions every day. The conference closing will thus be on Monday evening, before the BOF days, since we expect that some people will decide to leave before the end of the week. Third, following a lot of feedback after Gran Canaria, the desktop summit will have one papers committee made up of people from GNOME and KDE this year. There will be one call for content, and the content committee will decide on the presentations to accept together. This should help overcome the impression that many people had last year that Gran Canaria felt like two different conferences held in the same place at the same time, but with no real interaction between the communities. We also welcome proposals from outside KDE GNOME this year. Personally, I would love to see application developers building on the platform giving us feedback on what they need, *and* core OS developers whose work *we* build on come along to hear what we're missing. This the Free Desktop Conference - it seems like a natural place for people from Xorg, freedesktop.org and desktop applications to gather and address common problems. I've been told reliably that the board is planning on publishing the feedback they received from attendees from this year's GUADEC soon - and we have definitely taken this into account so far when planning the next year's conference, within the constraints which we have. I'm looking forward to a great conference! Cheers, Dave. [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/foundation/2010/10/06/kde-and-gnome-desktop-summit-2011-from-6-to-12-august/ [2] http://www.desktopsummit.org -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Hires a System Administrator
Congratulations Christer, and well done to the board (and esp. the previous board) the interview panel for handling the fundraising, interviews hire in such an efficient manner! Cheers, Dave. Paul Cutler wrote: The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the hiring of Christer Edwards to fill the position of system administrator. Christer joins the GNOME Foundation in a part-time role and will be responsible for working with GNOME's volunteer sysadmin team in mantaining GNOME's infrastructure. The GNOME Foundation would like to thank all the candidates who applied for the system administrator position. The Board of Directors would also like to thank the interview panel of Jonathan Blandford, Bradley Kuhn and Brad Taylor. Jonathan, Bradley and Brad conducted numerous interviews and we are grateful for the time they spent during this process. Welcome aboard Christer! Paul Cutler ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - August 19, 2010
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: * GNOME Trademarks o TM can claim without formal registration o Do we want a (R) registered trademark on the correct GNOME foot / logo? o GNOME foot (old) has a registered trademark o French website + ACTION: Bastien to send the French website a follow-up email about GNOME Trademarks Luis worked on cleaning up GNOME's trademark story around 2006-07 - it would be worthwhile asking him the current situation, since he is the one who took charge of the issue back then. As far as I know, we registered the GNOME foot + wordmark in the US through Wilson Sonsini. * Bastien - To contact some international banks for the possibility of a US-based dual-currency account (probably will not work, as Stormy already did research. Just a data point: Louis Desjardins mentioned to me recently that he has opened a CAD/USD/EUR account in Canada. I *guess* that international bank transfer charges will still be expensive. * Jorge - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent. Look at the archives in 2005 and try to determine which companies can use the GNOME trademark. Know what kind of contracts we had with them. I can help fill in some gaps here - there's Killermundi, Hackerthreads, a jewellery creator (although I think his license has lapsed now). While I was on the board, I worked with James Vasile on a trademark license contract, which should be part of the material the board has, for that jeweller, and James tried to make something modular that could be reused. That contract has no automatic renewal clause, and ran for an X year term (X=2 is set in a prefix). I have the last revision we came up with (Stormy should have it too, and it's in board-list archives). Let me know if you want me to send it on. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - July 25, 2010
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: * GNOME Mobile work funded by Nokia. o If Nokia continued with Maemo 5, then we could just port GNOME apps and they would likely just work. o With Maemo 6 and Moblin neither Qt nor GTK+ apps just work. This doesn't sound right... Qt apps and stock GTK+ apps should Just Work in both Maemo 6 and MeeGo 1.0. The issue, as I understand it, is that Hildon Nokia GTK+ apps developed against Maemo 5 currently have no migration path to Maemo 6/MeeGo. o The board is considering funding making Maemo 6 integrate more nicely with GTK+. In the context, it seems like the task should be Ensuring that Maemo 5 apps work well with upstream GTK+? o ACTION: Bastien to discuss technical Nokia plans with regards to Meego for Handsets. o ACTION: Stormy to send Bastien contact details for Nokia Advisory Board. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - August 5, 2010
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: * GUADEC o The board will create a Wiki page with tips to better manage GUADEC/event planning in the future. The Wiki will start as a private Wiki page and will be made more public when it is fleshed out. I just wanted to point out that this would be at least the 3rd such effort at documenting GUADEC planning - separate checklists have been created during after Villanova Gran Canaria previously. I would prefer to make existing resources more useful, rather than starting from scratch (again). Please see http://live.gnome.org/GuadecPlanningHowTo http://live.gnome.org/GuadecPlanningHowTo/CheckList http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/GranCanariaDesktopSummit http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2010/Planning Also, guadec-planning archives should have lots of useful advice. The major difficulty with GUADEC has always been having a very clear idea of who is doing a given task early enough, and having someone to answer questions like how many X should we buy? or How many rooms do we need? and getting things like events organised sufficiently early so that we're not rushing at the mast minute. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - July 25, 2010
Hi, Bastien Nocera wrote: This is what we've been told by the people we talked to. MeeGo 1.0 for handsets uses a new compositor, with a new set of hints. Those are not compatible with existing desktop implementations. Trying to use a stock GTK+ or Qt application on MeeGo 1.0 for handsets will result in a black screen. Do you have any other information that contradicts that? After looking into it, I've been told that this is a bug in mcompositor, rather than a design issue: http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2953 o The board is considering funding making Maemo 6 integrate more nicely with GTK+. In the context, it seems like the task should be Ensuring that Maemo 5 apps work well with upstream GTK+? The first step would be fixing the compositor and/or adding support for this new compositor in GTK+ itself. The second would be to start porting some of the Maemo 5 GTK+ and Hildon features to GTK+. Yes, this certainly seems reasonable. But the bug in mcompositor seems sufficiently serious that it will have a high priority in mcompositor also (as mentioned in that bug report). Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
unsubscribing
I'm unsubscribing from foundation-list. Bye. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME
Hi, Jud Craft wrote: In other words, I think I have to be an alpha-dog developer, and nothing I've seen convinced me otherwise... There's some confusion about what I meant by alpha dog developer which I caused, obviously, so I should clear it up. To make your platform successful as a developer platform, you need the Cool Kids building for it. Platforms that have had Cool Kid vibes going in the past are OS X, the iPhone, Ruby on Rails, Web 2.0/AJAX/REST/... and even at one stage C. GTK+ (or more generally GNOME) isn't a Cool Kid platform in the way Android, for example is today. To succeed we need the Cool Kids getting excited about us, because they bring lots of useful stuff - cool applications, other developers that follow the Cool Kids, media attention from all the Cool Kids watchers, etc. When I talked about alpha dog developers I'm not talking about guys who eat kernel device drivers for breakfast, I'm talking about developers who get other developers excited about the stuff they're working on. The alpha dog in the pack. The gang leader. The Fonz. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Richard Stallman wrote: Software freedom is a means to furthering our vision of providing technology to all, regardless of means, physical and technical capability or culture. Freedom can lead to more available technology, but it is vital in its own right. It is little benefit to have technology available if the price of using it is your freedom. That is why we write free replacements for existing proprietary software. To draw a parallel with slavery (hyperbole, I know, but humour me): Is it enough to say you're free now for a society to be just? Is the goal of freedom for all a sufficient vision, especially when that goal is (more or less) accomplished today? Freedom from slavery is a means to an end, the end being a just society with no racial discrimination and equal opportunity for all. I am speculating, but I imagine there were a great many slaves who, once they had obtained their freedom, were reminiscent for the day when it was their owner's responsibility to take care of them. In the same way, freedom for computer users is a means to an end - that end being that we provide a better computing environment than proprietary alternatives, and not simply a functional free environment. If a computer user can be free, but will end up with an inferior computing environment because of it, he may welcome returning to a proprietary environment, as many Mac OS X users free software developers have. I'm just saying, that while user freedom is vital, it is insufficient as a vision for the GNOME project. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 11:07 +, Martyn Russell wrote: I think it is important to do releases when you have progress in the project not just because you have some new shiny feature to give to people. Yes, releases are good, but we don't have to call them stable. While the abstract stay stable vs innovate discussion is interesting, I'm interested in hearing what kinds of features people would add if, tomorrow, someone said OK - out with the crack-pipes, let's turn the funky feature dial up to 100. What features/removal of bugs are desired for GTK+? I've been hearing: * more flexibility for the developer * easier theming (CSS theming, nice effects, make it easy to ship get themes) * easier creation of new widgets * a great canvas widget * enable rendering of widgets in a scene graph * integration of Webkit * enable easy animations (whatever this means) * a rocking IDE that makes it as easy to create visually attractive apps as it is on Mac I'm not sure if any of these are sufficiently well defined to be easy to accomplish - nor am I sure if doing all of these would make it really nice for a developer. I don't know if I'm an outlier, but what's always annoyed me about UI programming in GTK+ is container widgets, and the need for me to worry about them in the IDE. I don't understand why I can't drag drop widgets, and have the IDE take care of deciding what container widgets I need, and integrate basic concepts like alignment HIG compliance the way the Mac form builder works. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Juanjo Marin wrote: Possibly Alberto is right. Anyway, the original message of this thread is that GNOME doesn't have long term goals. It seems that the improvement of GTK attact a lot of attention. Proposed short-to-mid-term goal: Make the GNOME platform exciting to alpha-dog application developers thought leaders. Proposed community mantra: Beautiful computing freedom Proposed project vision: Hidden in plain sight: Everyone using GNOME, no-one noticing The thing about a vision (which is missing here) is that it easily makes it easier for you to choose the right path at the fork in the road. Think of the vision of the Palm Pilot as a great example - easy to remember, and informs every decision: Fits in a shirt pocket, syncs seamlessly with PC, fast and easy to use, no more than $299. What functionality is crucial? Seamless sync. Do we need to include a certain component? What's its effect on the BOM? Can we still retail at $299? Effect on size? Will it still fit in a shirt pocket? If not, no. The hidden in plain sight vision has an element of that, but then it doesn't provide any use vision, which is the biggest part of the problem we have on the user interface. Are we a middleware platform project? Or do we still produce compelling user interfaces? If so, for whom, in what circumstances? We probably could have had moblin be GNOME Netbook. We probably could have had Maemo be GNOME Smartphone. Or Sugar be GNOME Education. We probably could have had MeeGo be GNOME Mobile, but the project wasn't the obvious place to go, because we don't seem to know what we're providing any more. And so we're losing stewardship (and control) of these great GNOME-related projects to the Linux Foundation, or to Intel Nokia, or to the distributions. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Martyn Russell wrote: On 22/02/10 19:27, Dave Neary wrote: Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, I don't think that's so true. Just because Nokia decided to buy Trolltech because it could be bought, doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees. Well, not just Maemo/Nokia. MeeGo, for example, uses Qt as the preferred toolkit, although GTK+ and Clutter will remain as supported platform components; moblin2's interface was primarily Clutter based, from what I can tell; OpenMoko moved away from GTK+ toward Qt Enlightenment during their self-destruction; Android is not based on anything GTK+-like. GTK+ is hanging in there in the LiMo stack, though. Are there any in-production to-be-continued GTK+-based software platforms out there besides ALP and Samsung's LiMo phones? Dare I say that the developer engagement from both of those platforms has left something to be desired - and the good citizens of mobile GTK+ (Nokia Intel) appear to be moving away from the toolkit as a core component of the platform. Objectively, the number of companies interested in GTK+ on mobile appears to be decreasing from the very promising situation we found ourselves in 5 to 6 years ago. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Richard Stallman wrote: What's important to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access, The philosophy of GNOME is that the user should have freedom. If we talk in terms of open or access then we omit what is most important. Software freedom is a means to furthering our vision of providing technology to all, regardless of means, physical and technical capability or culture. This is why the GNOME project has always been concerned about design, usability, internationalisation and localisation, accessibility, and as you point out, user freedom. Freedom is not useful unless people have the means to benefit from it. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Juanjo Marin wrote: * GTK is losing popularity. It is perceived by a lot of people as old and difficult. I think we need any kind of action on this area because is a cornerstone issue. Less programmers means less applications and contributions. We need to care of our platform users in the same way we care of our desktop users. Some people has pointed this in the past, eg [1] Perhaps the fact that GTK+ is seen as a cornerstone issue is a cornerstone issue... there's no specific reason why GTK+, FLTK or EFL would do the job just as well of providing a toolkit. What's important to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access, but that vision has somehow lost the hustle that comes from homesteading. * It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about it or simply retreat?. I like the idea of creating more components and some of this components can be added to the GNOME mobile platform. Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not an easy problem. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: 2009 Annual Report - Help Needed
Hi Paul, Paul Cutler wrote: I'm looking for help in writing the 2009 Annual Report, especially with articles about GUADEC, GNOME user groups, and hackfests. If you're interested in writing an article about your GUADEC experience or help in recapping all the usergroup activities last year, the help is needed! Do you have a table of contents with a list of articles you want, and a rough word count you need? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
