from:"Karen Sandler"

Re: Board of Directors Elections 2019 - Candidacy - Jeremy Allison

2019-06-01 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2019-05-31 19:34, Jeremy Allison via foundation-list wrote:

Name: Jeremy Allison
Email: j...@google.com, j...@samba.org
Affiliation: Google
IRC: Don't use it - I'm too old so I use email instead :-).


Hi Jeremy! I'm so excited to see you running for the GF board!


I'd like to run for the Gnome Foundation Board of Directors
on behalf of Google.


Because GF is a 501c3 and a charitable organization, board members serve 
in an individual capacity and not on behalf of any company. I know you 
were probably just being casual with your wording choice when you wrote 
this, but I felt I should double check that you probably mean that you'd 
like to run for the GF board on your own behalf but bring with you the 
perspective of being a Googler... is that right?




I've used Gnome for as long as it has been available
as a GNU/Linux desktop.

I don't currently contribute other than helping the
gnome-vfs maintainers use one of the libraries (libsmbclient) of
my primary project, Samba to access SMB1/2/3 servers.

I have a long (25+ years) experience with Free and Open
Source Software, mostly to do with my primary project
Samba.

I am on the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom
Conservancy, and on the Advisory Board of the Document
Foundation (LibreOffice).

We've very much appreciated your contributions over the years on 
Conservancy's board!



I perform my board duties diligently as required.

I'd like to help support Gnome and promote it as a
desktop environment within Google and outside of
Google.

I've had my differences with some of the design
decisions in the past (as Karen Sandler can attest :-),
but I would really like to help add my experience
and enthusiasm for Free and Open Source Software
to the project.


:D

karen
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Re: It's time again for pants nominations

2018-06-03 Thread Karen Sandler





* Sriram Ramkrishna for his community work, which is a list too long to
summarize here


+1, and just to be effusive about why... Sri has continually contributed 
to GNOME's PR, bringing life to the engagement team and looking out for 
newcomers generally. He's always enthusiastic and the fact that he's 
maintained this for so many years in the project is incredible. He's 
willing to do the work that other people aren't - he's spend countless 
time at GNOME booths, writing GNOME materials, and running interference 
for the project.


On a very personal note, Sri took the time to be present on so many hate 
threads about GNOME, OPW about me, bringing irrefutable truth (with 
back-up links) when the internet was full of lies, exaggerations and 
threats. Without him and other GNOME volunteers who jumped into the fray 
on multiple occasions, I surely would have left free software.


karen
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Re: Yorba Foundation looking to pass on copyrights

2016-03-25 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2016-03-25 05:19, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:

Hi Adam,

On 25 March 2016 at 08:46, Adam Dingle  wrote:
If GNOME itself could accept these copyrights, that would be ideal in 
my
opinion.  GNOME board members, I assume you are on this list - would 
you be

willing to consider this at the next board meeting?

I've added it to the agenda, we will discuss it at the next board
meeting, which is scheduled for Monday.



Great! As we've discussed privately, Conservancy could also be a home 
for the

copyrights now that we have infrastructure in place to accept such
assignments. I'm also happy to help GNOME do the same, though it's more
work to get set up.

karen
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Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of January, 19th, 2016

2016-02-18 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2016-02-18 11:20, Tobias Mueller wrote:

Hi!

On So, 2016-01-24 at 16:33 +0100, Andrea Veri wrote:
 * Unixstickers
  * They're selling GNOME branded items
  * No trademark licence agreement has ever been signed with them
Are they offering anything related to computers under the name "GNOME"?
So far I only see stickers and pins:
https://www.unixstickers.com/tag/gnome

Are we having trademarks outside the realms of "Downloadable computer
software tools and libraries used for the development of other software
applications; downloadable computer software development tools;
downloadable computer software for creating and managing a computer
desktop; downloadable computer software for use as a graphical user
interface; downloadable computer software for word processing, database
management, and use as a spreadsheet; Computer software development;
computer software design; computer programming for others; technical
consulting services in the field of computer software; licensing of
intellectual property." ?


I note that the website unixstickers.com only sells stickers and pins 
related to computer software :)


karen

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Re: Questions for candidates

2015-05-29 Thread Karen Sandler

On 2015-05-29 19:35, Magdalen Berns wrote:

Hi Karen,

Thanks for your input.

Also, we are not allowed to work for or against specific candidates
for office.

I think you are correct about this. Am I right in assuming that only
applies to political parties in the USA, then?

I don't know -- for that you should check with a lawyer.

As I recall the regs are silent as to whether the restriction on
endorsing or
opposing political candidates is limited to the US. I once found some
IRS guidance
that said that that it is applicable internationally too. I would
definitely consult a
lawyer before any United States c3 charity takes on any political
activity.

I think we signed up to the EU fix my documents initiative and I
would really hope we could continue to support work like that without
it being an issue. My guess would be that putting our name to that
sort of campaign should be okay, since advocating a legislative
amendment does not cost us anything, is not strictly endorsing a
specific political party and is hopefully not likely to be considered
a significant enough kind of lobbying activity, but do you think it
would be a good idea for us to check with a Lawyer before doing that
sort of thing, in future?

I think it's a good idea to check any lobbying or political involvement
of the charity by a lawyer. As Richard said, there is a difference
between non-partisan education and lobbying or political activity (and
there's some amount of lobbying that can be permitted). Here are two
brief summaries from the IRS:

http://www.irs.gov/Charities--Non-Profits/Lobbying

http://www.irs.gov/Charities--Non-Profits/Charitable-Organizations/The-Restriction-of-Political-Campaign-Intervention-by-Section-501%28c%29%283%29-Tax-Exempt-Organizations

I am now also wondering whether I should write to the California
Department of Justice to double check that directors are allowed to be
a member of a political party outside the USA just in case I manage
get elected onto the board. Does this seem like a sensible idea? As
disclosed in my candidacy statement, I am a member of the Scottish
National Party who run the Scottish Government which can sometimes
mean being personally involved with election campaigns, proposing
amendments and voting on proposals as a delegate on behalf of my ward.

These restrictions are US federal rules related to GNOME's 501c3 tax
status, not the CA rules (there are different kinds of rules that CA
imposes on us).

Your personal views and other affiliations should not be problematic so
long as they are not connected to your role within the GNOME
Foundation... but do you intend to make political statements or lobby in
your capacity as a GNOME Foundation director if you are elected? That
would be very relevant. See this FAQ on the IRS site for more
information:
http://www.irs.gov/Charities--Non-Profits/Charitable-Organizations/Frequently-Asked-Questions-About-the-Ban-on-Political-Campaign-Intervention-by-501%28c%29%283%29-Organizations:-Constitutional-Considerations.

Also, I should make it clear that this is not legal advice. You should
consult with a lawyer about your personal obligations if you are
uncertain. As you can probably see, there's a lot of information
available on the IRS site too if you'd like to educate yourself (I don't
think I'll have time for more back and forth on this issue).

While I am not running for another board term and have limited time, I
still intend to be available as pro bono counsel to GNOME when the new
board takes office. I also am happy to continue to help coordinate other
pro bono counsel, as I have done for the last number of years.

karen
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Re: Questions for candidates

2015-05-29 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2015-05-29 13:54, Richard Stallman wrote:

Does this not limit the ability of the FSF to campaign against US laws
 which attack software freedom somewhat?

In practice, the requirement is no difficulty at all.
We could legally spend up to 10% of our budget on lobbying.
Even if we did lobbying, we would never do that much of it.

However, what we actually do about these issues is not lobbying.
Rather, it is outreach to the public.  That 10% limit does not apply
to outreach to the public.

  Also, we are not allowed to work for or against specific candidates
  for office.

 I think you are correct about this. Am I right in assuming that only
 applies to political parties in the USA, then?

I don't know -- for that you should check with a lawyer.


As I recall the regs are silent as to whether the restriction on 
endorsing or opposing political candidates is limited to the US. I once 
found some IRS guidance that said that that it is applicable 
internationally too. I would definitely consult a lawyer before any 
United States c3 charity takes on any political activity.


karen
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Re: GNOME Foundation 501(c)3 status

2015-05-27 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2015-05-27 13:33, j...@joshtriplett.org wrote:

On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 05:32:27PM +0100, Magdalen Berns wrote:
With that said, at the moment we are technically “delinquent so we 
have

lost our tax exempt status for not submitting required 990 forms.[4,5]
Assuming that has been a mistake and that we do actually want to 
benefit
from 501(c)(3) status, then I think we would be obliged to sort all 
that
out and just stick to the original mission of the GNOME Foundation 
which

essentially allows us to continue to do things like produce useful free
software and educate people all about it.



I've seen this mentioned previously on this list as well, and I'm
curious how that happened.

I would also suggest that this should be the top priority issue for the
GNOME Foundation to fix.  Is the current Board already working to fix
this?


A quick search shows GNOME is still listed on the IRS website as being 
in good standing:


http://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/pub78Search.do?ein1=names=GNOMEcity=state=All...country=USdeductibility=alldispatchMethod=searchCharitiessubmitName=Search

(actually I think you'll need to redo your own search)

and in CA I see we are listed as active

http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/

We were delinquent  with CA a few years ago when I started as ED I 
believe but we straightened that out.


Rosanna should check on our current filing status but often our 
accountants file extensions on the 990s.


karen

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Re: Call for OPW project ideas

2014-11-10 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-11-10 04:38, Magdalen Berns wrote:
I highly doubt being an OPW mentor will increase the likelihood of my 
ending up in court.


I think that is not in question here. The point is that if a big
organisation who can afford to get sued is not willing to take a risk,
why should an individual volunteer be EXPLICITLY asked to do that when
there is seemingly no similar such demand made of the mentor
organisation for which they are volunteering their free time?


I'm sorry... I've been traveling a lot and am not caught up on emailing. 
I hope to find time to address more of these concerns on list but I'm 
completely swamped now.


I do want to say that many of our participating orgs are not really 
orgs at all. Some have absolutely no corporate form. Getting them to 
sign is not possible. Also, of the orgs that do have corporate forms, 
some of those aren't big and can't afford to be sued either. We have 
evaluated getting the mentor orgs to sign but after discussing at length 
with our pro bono counsel when we had the legal infrastructure written 
up we decided it made a lot more sense to set it up as we have, as the 
mentors have the most control over their participation in the program, 
ie their ability not to behave with gross negligence, recklessness or 
intentional wrongdoing. We do meet with the mentor org admins before 
allowing an org to join the program discussing the expectations for 
participation. Mentorship and expectations around it are a big part of 
the discussion.


karen
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Re: Agenda for board meeting on September 26th

2014-10-02 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-10-01 08:53, Richard Stallman wrote:


GNOME is part of the GNU Project, whose goal is freedom for users.
Not only that, but GNOME in particular was started to protect users
from a specific threat to their freedom (nonfree Qt).

So freedom is at the heart of GNOME and should never be forgotten.


Agreed! Freedom should always be front and center with GNOME and it's 
important to stay focused on that (and to raise the point when it needs 
to be raised).


I think it would help if next time you please checked third party sites 
when you are raising objections like these (or maybe have someone at the 
FSF do the legwork?).  If there's a real problem with something the 
GNOME Foundation is doing, the board wants to know. You can also email 
the board privately at any time if you have thoughts that aren't 
substantiated.


karen
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Re: Call for OPW project ideas

2014-09-29 Thread Karen Sandler

On 2014-09-29 13:13, Germán Poo-Caamaño wrote:

[only foundation-list]

On Sat, 2014-09-27 at 13:13 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
- Original Message -
From: Germán Poo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org
On Sat, 2014-09-27 at 11:45 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
- Original Message -
From: Germán Poo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org
To: Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com
Cc: GNOME Foundation foundation-list@gnome.org, desktop-devel-list
desktop-devel-l...@gnome.org
Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2014 11:23:34 AM
Subject: Re: Call for OPW project ideas

On Fri, 2014-09-26 at 23:48 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
Dear Foundation,

The application process for the new round of Outreach Program for
Women internships has recently started, and we are looking for people
willing to mentor GNOME projects in this round. Because we only
usually have a few participants in OPW, this round we would only like
to offer projects that are most strategic for GNOME. These include,
but are not limited to, projects in the area of privacy [1], developer
experience, GTK+ [2], core experience, core applications [3], and web
infrastructure. We would also like people to think ahead of time how
they will be able to provide excellent mentorship to the interns
before, during, and after the internship, and whether there is a
larger project team the intern will be able to receive support from.
Matthias Clasen, Allan Day, and Sriram Ramkrishna have kindly agreed
to be a part of a cross-team triage committee for proposed project
ideas. Please add ideas you are willing to mentor to the wiki page for
the round [4] by early next week.

Hi Marina,

Will the mentors still be required to sign a document that makes them
legally liable?

Hi Germán,

Yes. The legal liability is only for gross negligence, recklessness or
intentional wrongdoing. This is covered on
https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen#Contracts

This is not unique to OPW. GSoC has similar terms mentors have to
agree to, which are much more broad -

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2014/org_admin_agreement
.

The difference is that the GSoC agreement is between the organization
and Google, no mentor becomes legally liable (though, IANAL).

By having agreements directly with mentors, we recognize that free
software organizations that participate might only have a limited
control over the mentors who participate.

Is there other venues to address a possible issue? For example,
requiring the organization to look for an alternate mentor in case of
problem.

That is a mechanism we certainly would use, but it doesn't protect the
Foundation in the extreme cases that the agreement is written for.

Making legally liable a volunteer who is giving time and work for free
is asymmetrical, where the volunteer has nothing to win, but a lot to
lose.

On the other hand, mentors have a tremendous amount of control over the
internship. What situations are you worried about? When I read gross
negligence, recklessness or intentional wrongdoing I think of
situations like:

* a mentor stalks and harasses an intern
* an intern tells a mentor that she feels like she is in danger of
imminent harm due to behavior by other contributors and the mentor
doesn't tell anyone or do anything.

* a mentor physically attacks an intern at a conference

Also I should note that we originally thought to put the legal
infrastructure in place because a donor asked for it as part of their
diligence related to reviewing the program.

karen
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Re: Agenda for board meeting on July 18th

2014-07-18 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-07-18 09:26, Michael Catanzaro wrote:

On Fri, 2014-07-18 at 14:12 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:
I would like to remind you that if you would like the board to discuss
any issues at a meeting, you are welcome to request additions to the
agenda for the following meeting at any time.

Could you please discuss how the new board will be publishing meeting
minutes; in particular, the timeliness of publication.


I actually just added the election of officers to the agenda - we'll add 
this to the discussion of the Secretary position


karen

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Re: Supporting the free software movement

2014-06-03 Thread Karen Sandler

On 2014-06-03 17:33, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:

- Original Message -
From: Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org
To: foundation-list@gnome.org
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2014 6:22:38 AM
Subject: Supporting the free software movement

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Would candidates please answer the question,

How will you direct the GNOME Foundation to promote the general idea
of free software: that software should be free/libre?

I mean, beyond just making GNOME a good and useful free program.

Hi Richard,

I'd like us to continue promoting free software applications and
services that compliment GNOME's core offerings to the user and
inter-operate with them well. We should also work on strong privacy
and security features.

I'd like to see a larger presence from GNOME at LibrePlanet, and will
encourage people next year to submit talks about GNOME.

I include the explanation of the four freedoms, license types, and
distinction between Free Software and Open Source in the GNOME
Newcomers Workshop.

I agree with everything Marina said.

The newcomer's tutorial at the GNU 30th was a great example of the ways 
FSF and GNOME community can work well together.

I'd also love to continue to help the marketing team figure out ways to 
articulate and promote software freedom to nontechnical people as well 
as to our core userbase. How we talk about and explain what we do can be 
as important as what we do.

karen

Thanks,
Marina

--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

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Re: Question for candidates: OEMs

2014-05-22 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-22 15:10, Michael Catanzaro wrote:

On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 14:35 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote:
- Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story

Dell is currently shipping Ubuntu computers running Unity. Wouldn't it
be desirable to see a major OEM shipping GNOME as well? If so, what
steps do you believe GNOME, and the board in particular, should take to
achieve this goal?


As Executive Director,I had a few calls/emails with Dell, trying to get 
a foothold in the company (or get a donation since they're using GNOME 
technologies) without too much luck. I think the Foundation needs to 
promote GNOME as much as possible and find partners, but we need 
successes to point to as well to get the message across. There are a few 
companies that have been working on products with GNOME in the last 
couple of years but already at least one of those efforts have fizzled. 
My fingers are crossed for the products still under development (I'm 
looking at you, Endless Mobile, for one) which will create more of an 
opportunity to approach new partners. With Android having met so much 
success we need a compelling story - I think we have that, but it's hard 
to communicate when it's more theoretical.  In Dell's case they believe 
they need to contract with a company who will stand behind the 
technology, and Canonical serves that function. This is not an easy 
problem for the GNOME Foundation itself to solve.


karen


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Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer

2014-05-21 Thread Karen Sandler

I'm not going to quote the emails about company control and Red Hat's 
contributions in particular as I think it's gotten fairly heated and my 
thoughts are more easily generally expressed.


I think we need both to be successful - companies that are invested in 
GNOME technologies who are users and contributors and who care about it 
because it is useful to their business and individual contributors who 
are here because they are jazzed about our awesome mission.


We need to work on both now to try to figure out how to get wider 
adoption of GNOME and how to show that we're an important project that 
is worth a hobbyist's time and is fun to be a part of.


As Emily and Sri have mentioned, we really need to put a premium on 
encouraging people when they first show an interest, something I think 
we've gotten better at but still need a lot of improvement on.  We need 
to go out of our way to take an interest and to be advocates for GNOME 
to new individuals and new companies. I've been scratching my head over 
this for a while. Speaking at conferences and being present where people 
meet and talk about important technologies have been the approaches I've 
pursued but I think there's a lot more that can be done. A lot of it 
involves promoting culture that is welcoming, which I think we were 
leaders of once upon a time and have gotten much better with more 
recently. We definitely want to make the companies already invested in 
our space feel good about their contributions while making sure the 
infrastructure is in place for no corporate control.


I'd love it if we could do something like put together a team of 
volunteers who are ready to help companies adopt GNOME, whether it's to 
go and talk to decision makers or to go and give an occasional demo or 
training session. I recognize that this is a lot of work and nontrivial 
to organize (we have to make sure the right people are representing us) 
but it's part of what I think GNOME has been missing. With the right 
enthusiasm from the membership this is something that can be done.


I also will say that the boards and foundation memberships that I've 
worked with have been more productive when everyone has a positive 
attitude. Being critical of the way things are and what other people say 
is necessary for insightful discussion and change but finding the core 
of what someone is saying and helping to find positive ideas for that 
change is essential. In general positive communicators are more 
persuasive and create a better collaborative environment. I've been a 
bit dismayed about the negative tone of a lot of the emails regarding 
candidacy, not just this thread. I want to be on a board that has 
differing views but can communicate in a way that inspires cooperation.


karen


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Re: Question for candidates

2014-05-21 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-21 13:04, Jeff Fortin wrote:

Le dimanche 18 mai 2014 à 12:58 -0400, Dave Neary a écrit :

So my question to all of you is: what are the main characteristics you
will be looking for in the next executive director?

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


I think that expecting an ED candidate to have all of those
qualities/skills nailed down simultaneously would be a difficult
proposition to entertain. It's basically asking for a
20-years-experienced C*O to lift mountains at non-profit compensation
rates and very high risk.

Let's be honest: whoever that person might be, there's a heck of a
challenge in terms of fundraising; we're far from the situation we were
in back in 2009 or so. Karen et al have my respect for weathering the
very harsh times GNOME has gone through in recent years.

The board, too, requires diversity in the skillset of its members. It's
a team effort. I hope my skills and interest in 
biz/mkt/mngt/design/etc.

will be good complements to those of other board members.


So in my eyes, in our current circumstances, I would say these are what
are valuable traits: business acumen/experience growing a commercial
ecosystem; communication skill (I consider that to be a side-effect of
the previous item), admin/org experience.

Maybe cost in theory, but in practice, what I just described is kind of
a biz dev/salesperson... good luck finding an experimented person to
fill that role in a cost-constrained scenario!


I agree that it's hard to find the right person on our budget but I 
think there are a lot of different ways that it can play out, as others 
suggest. To me, understanding the GNOME community (and thus being able 
to work with all of us to accomplish GNOME's goals) and being passionate 
about free software (to understand and be able to advocate for adoption 
and funding) are at a premium. I think we should not be too rigid about 
our expectations and see who responds to a call for applicants - there 
are a lot of different ways to do the job right. We need someone to keep 
convincing our current donors to give (when I joined as ED we'd already 
lost adboard members and some of our current ones were threatening to 
leave), to build the connections with our allies to get to the donation 
level and to help steer GNOME in a direction that individuals and others 
will want to give. I personally wished many times that I was more 
technical in my role so I could dive in and help on things that were in 
the public interest or of concern to one of our partners, rather than 
agitate for those fixes to be made by others (I haven't really coded in 
a decade). One thing- it would be great to have someone who is a good 
public speaker, in order to advocate for GNOME, but also to get invited 
to the places where people and companies are meeting. With the exception 
of GNOME's events, the vast majority of my travel was funded by the 
conferences and having keynotes meant that I could reach more people. 
Then again as someone else said, traveling takes away time from other 
things. It is indeed a balancing act :)


karen


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Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer

2014-05-20 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-20 09:30, Emily Gonyer wrote:

In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel
that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is
probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at
least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly
run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we
all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors
are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is
directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the
thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But
because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and
rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us
who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the
wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying
for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they?
As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community
alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so
fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now
have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing
for the same handful of users.

I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't.
But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not
completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly
by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very
composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to
work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a
conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied
to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first,
and not the needs of any individual corporation?


When people serve on the board of directors they have a duty of care and 
a duty of loyalty to the organization. We have asked that board members 
use their personal email addresses for communication, for example. Still 
conflicts do come up and in those cases the board members recuse 
themselves from any decision making for the organization. I think the 
board has been nicely conservative about this, at least in the time I 
was Executive Director (even in one case having a board member not 
present for any of the conversation about an issue their company had an 
interest in). Also, not every board member who is employed at an 
advisory board member is paid to work on GNOME. You're right that the 
needs of the project must come first for board members when they are 
acting in that capacity, which is why we have disclosure of affiliation 
and treat conflicts carefully (and can't in any case have more than two 
people from any particular employer). I do think it would be unfair if 
we excluded candidates who happen to be employed at our adboard members. 
That all said, it is nice that we have such a diverse set of candidates 
this time!


karen



On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote:
On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Emily,

On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote:
Name: Emily Gonyer
Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com
Affiliation: None

Dear Foundation,

I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first
time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led
direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a
corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of
now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large
corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our
users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost
a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free
software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will
actively work against this tide and towards the more open,
community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again.

I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in
the project direction.

Based on the available financial information, the corporate
sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and
an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the
administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation
membership and the current board is already facing the challenges
resulting from having only one employee at this time.

How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies
that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative
work and offer financial support to our membership?

GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid
contributors. It seems that you wish to change the

Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Oliver Propst

2014-05-20 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-20 09:48, Oliver Propst wrote:

On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 13:19 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:
Hi Oliver,

On 15 May 2014 20:51, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote:
 Name: Oliver Propst
 Email: oliver.pro...@gmail.com
 Affiliation: None

 Dear foundation members I want to announce my candidacy for the GNOME
 Board of Directors.

 I have been contributing as part of the Engagement Team since 2010,
 recently I have been involved with the GUADEC 2015 Gothenburg bid and
 the Annual Report.

 I think that free software never have more important then now and if
 we as a community can get together and do the necessary work the
 greatest future of GNOME lay ahead of us.

 I have two years of experience of being on the non-for profit FSCONS
 board (FSCONS, the free software conference in Gothenburg that Karen
 keynoted last year). More info about me (including occupation) can be
 found here [1].

 In the upcoming year I like to continue explore growth/collaborations
 opportunities for the foundation and investigate the benefits of a
 possible WC3 membership [2].

In early 2013, the board briefly investigated W3C membership,
Interesting, any notes about this?

The cost of a W3C membership is 7,900 USD and there is
extensive information available on their website at
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership .


Actually, I was able to get most of the way towards the discounted fee 
for the fist years of WC3 membership when I was Executive Director, but 
we just didn't have the bandwidth to participate in it. If the new board 
thinks it's valuable, I can help pick up that conversation (whether I am 
on the board or not of course).


karen


What benefits do you feel
that joining the W3C will bring to GNOME and how would you approach
sustainable raising the funding for the membership fees?

While I have not done any extensive investigation about benefits, I 
have some

thoughts about this.

If more free software entities where to join WC3, proponents of a open
unrestricted and Web would have a stronger voice thus be able to making
a lager impact and ultimately shaping the future of the Web in a free
software friendly direction (for those who wants to have more info 
about

WC3 and its work I recommend this video [1]).

Right now to my knowledge Mozilla are only the free software foundation
that are a W3C member[2], as the events of the past week have showed
fighting for a Open Web in that environment is hard [3], They have
to carry a very heavy load.

Its also brings up a point that we as a free software project are
used to tell a story from a outside perspective when there is value of
to join others and collaborate across organizational boundaries
(something are very used to do within the project and on the technical
side ).

Also as you (and others) may know GNOME are maintaining its own WebKit
implementation and browser [4] [5], I'm sure contributors to those
efforts could provide valuable inputs to WC3 and learn much from other
members.

I understand of course a that a membership fee should never threaten 
the

financial situation of the foundation. With that said I hope that the
Foundation will have larger revenue in the future, thus be able to pay
the membership fee or find other founding opportunities.




1 http://www.w3.org/2011/11/w3c_video.html
2 http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
3https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/
4 http://webkitgtk.org/
5 https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web







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Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer

2014-05-20 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-20 09:49, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:

On 20 May 2014 14:30, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote:
In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel
that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is
probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at
least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly
run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we
all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors
are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is
directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the
thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But
because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and
rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us
who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the
wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying
for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they?
As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community
alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so
fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now
have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing
for the same handful of users.

I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't.
But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not
completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly
by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very
composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to
work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a
conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied
to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first,
and not the needs of any individual corporation?

Thank you for your reply.

I would like to point out that there has been outreach to the projects
which were forked from GNOME, but with poor results. I encourage you
to address the issues that you see regardless of whether you join the
board or not.


I agree with what Kat says here and it's true for all candidates and 
everyone asking questions and reading this too: you don't need to be a 
board member to effectuate change in GNOME!


In my last email I should have pointed out that that we did reach out to 
those projects. While there were some poor results for some things as 
Kat says, I think the cross desktop events and efforts that have been 
going on have been really positive.


karen



There are also precautions in place to ensure that no single corporate
entity employs a majority (over 40%) of board members. At the moment,
this means that a maximum of 2 out of 7 board members can share an
employer.

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote:
On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Emily,

On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote:
Name: Emily Gonyer
Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com
Affiliation: None

Dear Foundation,

I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first
time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led
direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a
corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of
now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large
corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our
users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost
a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free
software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will
actively work against this tide and towards the more open,
community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again.

I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in
the project direction.

Based on the available financial information, the corporate
sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and
an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the
administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation
membership and the current board is already facing the challenges
resulting from having only one employee at this time.

How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies
that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative
work and offer financial support to our membership?

GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid
contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of
GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve
this?

I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money
on and evaluate

Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler

2014-05-20 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-20 09:17, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:

Hi Karen,

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Oliver Propst 
oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote:

On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:
Affiliation: Software Freedom Conservancy. I'm also pro bono General 
Counsel
of QuestionCopyright.Org, and an advisor of The Ada Initiative and 
sometimes

help other orgs (like the FSF) on legal and other free software related
matters.

As promised when I left the position of Executive Director, I'd like to
throw my hat in the ring for the Board of Directors. I think I can help
bring continuity to the board (Stormy was incredibly helpful on the 
board
when I started as ED). Also, as a lawyer I sometimes have an 
additionally
useful perspective. I'm still doing volunteer work for GNOME both as 
pro
bono counsel and as a volunteer on nonlegal matters for GNOME. I've 
been
helping with fundraising, collecting on outstanding invoices and 
generally

wherever I can.
You are a very busy person with many responsibilities, if you get
elected to the Board do you feel confident that you can spend the
necessary time on Board work?

While I think you do a lot for Free Software and your passion and work
inspires many, I'm afraid I do share Oliver's concern here.


I am extremely busy. I was just reading through all of the emails to 
board candidates this morning, as the time I've had in the last few days 
for GNOME I've spent volunteering on time sensitive things that I think 
must be done. This includes following up on outstanding invoices and 
also tracking a GNOME trademark matter. I also reviewed and commented on 
the contract for the GUADEC local organization (there may have been 
other things that I'm forgetting).  And this is all in the last week, 
and not counting recording the voice over for the cool documentation 
video that Bastian is putting together :)


I have to say: being on the GNOME board takes a lot of time. It's not a 
small commitment that the candidates are offering to make! Most boards 
meet quarterly at most, so meeting every other week is really a lot. 
However, I think it's worth the time expenditure. I just recorded an 
oggcast on this topic (what it means to serve on a board of directors 
and whether you should want to do it), which unfortunately won't come 
out until next week.


If elected, I'll probably use my time for GNOME by participating in the 
meetings and working on things like I've been doing as a volunteer 
mentioned above and am less likely than some other candidates to engage 
in lengthy discussions on mailing lists, but I think that's ok provided 
that some of the other board members focus on that important role (I 
will chime in on discussion, it just might not be right away or in great 
detail).


karen


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Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler

2014-05-20 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-20 11:30, David King wrote:

Hi Marina

On 2014-05-20 11:17, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote:
In my view, having immediate feedback and ideas from someone with lots 
of experience during the
board meetings is very valuable, and can't be substituted with 
occasional consulting. The board
and the Foundation benefit from a diversity of skills and experiences 
of the board members. As
both Karen and I mentioned, she has been dedicating her time 
volunteering on critical matters.
Being on the board provides the best view into what these matters are, 
which she is able to help
us with. I think the composition of the board and the skills and time 
commitments people can

offer need to be considered together to create the best balance.

Indeed, and there is no reason that the immediate feedback cannot be
gained from Karen as an adviser if she is invited to board meetings. I
do not think that a board composed of some members who are able to
devote time to taking on many action items and some who are not able
to take on many is a good balance, and certainly not the best balance.

Karen, how much time would you have available to dedicate to board
matters above and beyond your existing volunteering commitments? You
mentioned elsewhere that you have been spending 5 hours per week on
your volunteering efforts for GNOME. Would you be able to dedicate
time above that to board duties, or would your board duties negatively
impact your existing efforts?


I'm not sure Dave, it's a tough question. To be honest, if I'm not a 
board member I probably won't regularly join the board meetings. For 
reference, I was not invited to board meetings when I was just pro bono 
counsel to GNOME (from my SFLC days) and I'm unaware of any pro bono 
counsel being regularly invited to the meetings. While it's possible to 
join it's not really part of that role.


I try to give the maximum amount of time I have free to GNOME (much to 
the annoyance of my family, it's actually some weeks been much more than 
5 hours since I left as ED but I wanted to give a more conservative view 
of my time commitments).


The volunteer work that I've been doing is in part driven by the 
momentum I've had as ED and being a part of the board meetings in the 
past. I would expect that to diminish if I'm not on the board. On 
helping to collect invoices and asking for sponsorship (I've done both 
for GNOME even in the last 2 weeks), it will be much easier if I am a 
board member, as I'd have the authority to represent the org.


As I said in an earlier email, being on the board is a lot of work - I 
want to make myself available to serve, but am happy to leave it to 
others if the membership so chooses. I think I'd be an asset to the 
Foundation in this position which is why I've chosen to run.  It's also 
hard for everyone to make promises about availability going forward.  
I've seen a lot of people promise to do a lot during the elections 
period and then fail to step up over the course of the term. I've 
avoided other boards in the past (I've been asked to serve on a lot of 
them) but I am making an exception this time as GNOME is special :)


The current board has been really great, and very active. I've been glad 
to work with them. If elected, I will indeed have to readjust my 
priorities and overall commitments. And it might mean that I miss a 
marketing meeting in favor of a board meeting if I am very busy that 
week. I think that's probably true for every board member though.


karen

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Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler

2014-05-20 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-05-20 11:42, meg ford wrote:

Hi Karen,

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:

I am extremely busy. I was just reading through all of the emails to 
board candidates this morning, as the time I've had in the last few 
days for GNOME I've spent volunteering on time sensitive things that I 
think must be done. This includes following up on outstanding invoices 
and also tracking a GNOME trademark matter. I also reviewed and 
commented on the contract for the GUADEC local organization (there may 
have been other things that I'm forgetting).  And this is all in the 
last week, and not counting recording the voice over for the cool 
documentation video that Bastian is putting together :)


I have to say: being on the GNOME board takes a lot of time. It's not a 
small commitment that the candidates are offering to make! Most boards 
meet quarterly at most, so meeting every other week is really a lot. 
However, I think it's worth the time expenditure. I just recorded an 
oggcast on this topic (what it means to serve on a board of directors 
and whether you should want to do it), which unfortunately won't come 
out until next week.


If elected, I'll probably use my time for GNOME by participating in the 
meetings and working on things like I've been doing as a volunteer 
mentioned above and am less likely than some other candidates to engage 
in lengthy discussions on mailing lists, but I think that's ok provided 
that some of the other board members focus on that important role (I 
will chime in on discussion, it just might not be right away or in 
great detail).


It seems, from the other responses, that the other candidates plan to
spend  5 - 10 hours per week on board-related duties. How many hours
per week do you plan to spend?


I just wrote about this in greater detail but didn't want to leave a 
direct email to me unanswered.


The short answer is 5 or more, possibly more like 2 (hopefully) when 
traveling or very busy :)


karen
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Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler

2014-05-13 Thread Karen Sandler

Affiliation: Software Freedom Conservancy. I'm also pro bono General 
Counsel of QuestionCopyright.Org, and an advisor of The Ada Initiative 
and sometimes help other orgs (like the FSF) on legal and other free 
software related matters.


As promised when I left the position of Executive Director, I'd like to 
throw my hat in the ring for the Board of Directors. I think I can help 
bring continuity to the board (Stormy was incredibly helpful on the 
board when I started as ED). Also, as a lawyer I sometimes have an 
additionally useful perspective. I'm still doing volunteer work for 
GNOME both as pro bono counsel and as a volunteer on nonlegal matters 
for GNOME. I've been helping with fundraising, collecting on outstanding 
invoices and generally wherever I can.


Additionally, as you all know by now, I'm a huge advocate for software 
freedom. I'd love to help GNOME continue to partner with its nonprofit 
and corporate allies as well as ensuring that the foundation is solidly 
focused on promoting freedom.


karen



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Re: Current state of Foundation finances

2014-04-12 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-04-12 14:45, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:


No, it wasn't know. If it had been known, spending would have been
frozen by then and a budget for the hackfest would not have been
approved.


For perspective, people actually call this a success crisis.

Thank you so much to the board and Rosanna for getting on top of this 
situation and being transparent about it.


karen
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Re: Current state of Foundation finances

2014-04-12 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-04-13 01:43, Stormy Peters wrote:

Don't we have reserves though? We should have 6 months of operating
expenses as reserves.


I should leave maybe this to Kat and other board members but I'm 
recently enough gone that I can answer - the Foundation has adequate 
reserves for GNOME's ordinary operations but not for OPW, and the 
program has ramped up really quickly while the Foundation is still very 
small.


For a rough overview, the 30 participants in the round that just ended 
required around $170k in expenditures, and that's the smaller of the two 
rounds per year. The two most recent rounds together should have 
approached $400k. So OPW only accepts interns with confirmed funding for 
each intern but if there are delays in getting that funding it adds up 
to a big burden for the org to bear. As the FAQ states, the board is 
evaluating various solutions, including raising the admin fee already 
charged and putting measures in place to assure earlier payments. I 
think the program should also try to raise its own reserves, though this 
is very difficult on a short term basis.


GNOME would never have been able to support the program to date without 
the reserves it already had in place.


karen


On Apr 12, 2014 5:26 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:

On 2014-04-12 14:45, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:

No, it wasn't know. If it had been known, spending would have been
frozen by then and a budget for the hackfest would not have been
approved.

For perspective, people actually call this a success crisis.

Thank you so much to the board and Rosanna for getting on top of this 
situation and being transparent about it.


karen
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Re: Agenda for board meeting April 8th

2014-04-08 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-04-08 04:57, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote:

Hi Luis,

On 8 April 2014 09:07, Luis Villa l...@tieguy.org wrote:
Perhaps a naive question, but I would have expected discussion of 
hiring a

new ED - is that being handled in a separate hiring committee?

The board has discussed it for the last 6 (weekly) meetings, although
it was decided that those minutes should be kept private due to the
timing of Karen's announcement. While it is unprecedented, I think
that most of those minutes should now be made public.


I realize that I didn't make it very clear when I let everyone know, but 
I purposefully waited until after the 3.12 release before announcing. 
It's such an awesome release we didn't want my news to distract at all 
(this decision was made in consultation with our core engagement team).



I have also suggested that we consider delegating to a committee as
the board is not generally in the business of hiring employees, as has
been done before, but it has not been decided how we will proceed.


I think the board could form a committee and it would be a fine way to 
go. The board does have the ultimate responsibility for choosing a hire 
and while they should seek all of the expertise they need in making the 
decision, the people who are elected by the GNOME community are 
ultimately the ones to choose. :) It may make sense depending on the 
candidates who step forward to handle the decision differently.


karen


Today's agenda will touch on accessing whether we should hire an
executive director from a financial point of view and what the best
timing would be.

Luis


On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 12:44 PM, Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se 
wrote:


Hello Foundation members!
Next board meeting is April 8th at 16:00 UTC

This is the agenda:
* Travel sponsorship for 2 attendees to go to 15th FISL (867 USD)
* Travel sponsorship for LGM for two attendees.
* Outstanding reimbursements
* Budget
* We still lack a budget for this fiscal year.
* OPW project has grown a lot. This is great! However, we are taking a
greater financial risk handling the money between the organizations and 
the
attendees. It also makes it a bigger work burden and we need to discuss 
how

to handle this.
* Upcoming events
* GUADEC 2014
* GNOME.Asia
* License grant (trademark) to use the GNOME Foot for worldofgnome.org
* We were asked to license the use of a modified GNOME Foot logo for
worldofgnome.org, let's vote on it

- Andreas
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Re: Is there GNU/Linux distribution which includes always latest gnome 3

2014-04-03 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-04-03 04:28, Ali/amjjawad wrote:



Arch is a variant of the GNU/Linux system, so please let's not call it
Arch Linux.  Calling the whole system Linux is, in effect, giving
Torvalds credit for our work, so we get no credit for it.

See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html [1] and
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html [2], plus the history in
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html [3].

Since Arch is a version of GNU/Linux, the right term is Arch GNU/Linux.


As many people on this list know, I too prefer the term GNU/Linux, and 
it's been GNOME's official policy to use the term. FWIW, I try to avoid 
this problem by referring to the project as just Arch.


karen
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Re: New challenge

2014-04-01 Thread Karen Sandler

Thanks everyone for your warm wishes, I'm so glad that leaving the paid 
role doesn't mean an end to the great work we're doing together. :)


karen
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New challenge

2014-03-31 Thread Karen Sandler


Hi Foundation members,

I've posted some news on my blog.

Working as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director has been an 
incredible experience for me and GNOME has made some impressive progress 
in my time at the Foundation. I'm proud of where the GNOME community is 
and think it's time for me to hand the reins over to someone new.


Today I am announcing my new position as the Software Freedom 
Conservancy Executive Director. As many of you know, I have been 
volunteering with Conservancy for some time, having co-founded it when I 
was at SFLC.  It is an important organization where I think I can make a 
difference, and GNOME is in good hands. The current board of directors 
continues to impress me with their commitment and varied skillset and I 
know they will continue to lead the organization well.


There's a more detailed discussion of this change on my blog at 
gnomg.org but of course, I have no intention of leaving GNOME.  I plan 
to announce my candidacy for the board when the call comes out, I'll 
stay on as pro bono counsel, and of course I'll continue volunteering in 
other ways. The Conservancy has also agreed to partner with GNOME, so 
that I can help to run the Outreach Program for Women with Marina.


I'm excited for my new role and am glad I can continue to work with you 
in so many ways.


karen



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Re: Minutes for the Board meeting of February 4th, 2014

2014-03-05 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2014-03-05 10:15, Sindhu S wrote:

Hi!

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 3:44 PM, Emmanuele Bassi eba...@gmail.com 
wrote:


   * Karen met with the Debian packages for GNOME and asked the
current state of Debian
   * The Debian packagers feel demotivated by the current situation
   * They agreed to blog more on the issue
   * The Debian packagers asked for a technical position from the
GNOME project for the use of systemd

I am not able to understand this, why are the packagers feeling
demotivated? what is the
current situation? Is there any way I can help?

I am interested because I am preparing for Debian MiniConf 2014 by
presenting remotely.


I'm sorry that was a clumsy summary of the situation (and probably 
should have been marked private, and the Debian packagers didn't 
actually ask for a position, I suggested it could be useful to maybe do 
a joint statement with other desktops and it turned out from the public 
discussion that followed to be unnecessary). I do think that it's been 
tough though the systemd/upstart discussion and with the default status 
of GNOME being questioned. In any case, I think we as a community could 
be more supportive of our Debian packagers who are doing a fantastic 
job! Thank you!


karen
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GNOME.Asia Summit is calling for speaker submissions

2014-02-20 Thread Karen Sandler


hi all!

The GNOME.Asia team has opened their call for papers:

http://www.gnome.org/news/2014/02/gnome-asia-2014-is-now-calling-for-papers/

There's a list of suggested topics, and they're specifically looking for 
newcomers and experienced speakers alike. The conference will take place 
May 24-25 in Beijing, and there usually is some funding to help speakers 
in need with travel. The deadline for submissions is March 3.


It's a fantastic conference - I went last year and had a great time :)

karen
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Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013

2013-11-29 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2013-11-29 03:20, Vincent Untz wrote:

Hi Karen,

Le mardi 26 novembre 2013, à 00:47 -0500, Karen Sandler a écrit :
As a lawyer I want to point out that the main thing about our trademark 
is
to make sure that users (under the law: consumers) aren't confused 
about
what comes from GNOME and what doesn't. This is extremely helpful when 
you

have real jerks who try to distribute software that isn't GNOME or free
software but use our name and logo to fool people into downloading it.I
have seen some really bizarre uses of our logo and to my knowledge we 
have
only enforced when we think the use is confusing. As was also pointed 
out
by someone else, we've had many friendly discussions that have resulted 
in

better uses of the marks for all.

Do you have some concrete examples of confusing/misleading uses of our
logo where we had to enforce our trademark?


Sure! There was an android app that was using our logo as their icon. 
They had nothing to do with GNOME. They just changed their logo/icon 
when we asked them to in a friendly way (after a little bit of follow 
up).  There was a software consultant that was using our logo on his 
webpage (and he was not working on GNOME). There are others (and a 
couple I have outstanding to follow up on) but those are the ones that 
occur to me now as obviously confusing use of our trademark in software.



It's been obviously quite some time, but from my years in the board, I
only remember misuses that were actually not in the software field, and
I wonder if things are the same or if it got worse.


There are still a lot of uses that are not in the software field, but 
often in these cases when the logo has been modified, because it's not 
related to software that often is ok as no one would be confused. Like 
the time that someone used our logo for a fish pedicure business, 
turning the base of the foot into a fish :) (I loved that, as its the 
perfect example of how it's beneficial to license the copyright of a 
logo freely even as you exert trademark restrictions over it, something 
that's hard for trademark lawyers to grasp).


Also, how do we define the right balance? In the Ubuntu GNOME example, 
I

would consider the project to be both part of the Ubuntu and GNOME
communities, so imho, it should be entitled to use our trademark.


I think they should definitely be able to use the mark. I still think 
the right thing to do is to talk to them to find the best use of it for 
both projects. We did the same thing in a friendly way with Debian, 
even, as well as with events related to GNOME. Obviously we feel great 
about the activities and the use of the mark in principal. I don't think 
that this is a big problem. Because Ubuntu is not the GNOME Foundation, 
if the use is outside our 3rd party trademark guidelines (which again, I 
think can be improved), we either need to grant them special permission 
or ask them to change it to be consistent with our guidelines and 
continue to establish a legal record of regular defense. I would expect 
them to want to talk to us about what works as well (for example,it was 
awesome that they consulted us about what name they should use). This 
shouldn't be an adversarial thing at all.


karen
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Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of October 29th, 2013

2013-11-25 Thread Karen Sandler

Apologies, I'm just going to jump in and respond here as there really was
a lot of discussion I missed and I can't respond to everything. I'm also
on the road even though I'm back from vacation (speaking at a conference
in Ecuador), so I haven't been able to read everything.

Firstly, I think it's really awesome that so many people care about
GNOME's trademarks and are invested in us getting this right. I definitely
think this is more of an opportunity to include people in our community
rather than alienate them.

As a lawyer I want to point out that the main thing about our trademark is
to make sure that users (under the law: consumers) aren't confused about
what comes from GNOME and what doesn't. This is extremely helpful when you
have real jerks who try to distribute software that isn't GNOME or free
software but use our name and logo to fool people into downloading it.I
have seen some really bizarre uses of our logo and to my knowledge we have
only enforced when we think the use is confusing. As was also pointed out
by someone else, we've had many friendly discussions that have resulted in
better uses of the marks for all.

On Mon, November 25, 2013 5:41 am, Dave Neary wrote:
 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.

For the record I (and others) have been reaching out and I agree with you
in principal. I even invited some of those developers to meet at GUADEC :)

However, we do need to make sure that we have a clear policy on our
trademark use without permission (so that we can still stop those real
jerks when they surface, in addition to making sure that we're clear about
what GNOME is distributing). We can grant permission for usage outside of
the policy and that is what we were discussing in the Ubuntu situation
(some of the examples listed in earlier emails were of uses that were
explicitly permitted).

I think having a very friendly discussion about what the right solution is
and then making sure that it is implemented makes sense. I think it's
perfectly reasonable to work with people who are using our logo to
encourage a less confusing, nicer looking solution. I think everyone wants
to encourage this use of GNOME!

I also think that Allan is right that we can improve our trademark
guidelines (and think it's great he's started to do it). Perhaps we should
set up a working group for this? I've been somewhat afraid to touch this,
as I understood the policies we had were a product of a lot of work and
discussion but on the other hand it's always been confusing, even to me.

karen





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GUADEC 2015 bid deadline extended

2013-09-30 Thread Karen Sandler


Hello bidders,

As I've talked about with each of you, I'm pleased to let you know that 
the bid process is extended another month, until October 31. Given that 
the event is not until 2015, it makes sense to give you a little more 
time to get organized.


Thanks so much for submitting your intent and for working hard to put 
together the formal bid - it takes an incredible amount of work to just 
do take on this step!


karen
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Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror

2013-09-13 Thread Karen Sandler

On Thu, August 15, 2013 5:03 am, Alberto Ruiz wrote:

 I've been working with the GitHub guys and Andrea Veri on setting up a
mirror for all GNOME repos in GitHub.

As you can see in the minutes published today, the board discussed the
thread about GitHub and the various concerns on this issue.

Firstly, the board would like to thank Alberto and Andrea for their hard
work to increase participation in GNOME by making this mirror happen. We
all think it's important to improve our outreach to newcomers and welcome
work like this to make contributions easier to a greater group of people. 
Alberto, please also pass on our thanks to the folks at GitHub who took
the time and helped make this happen!

However, the majority of the board requested that the word official be
removed as we think it could be confusing as to whether GNOME is
recommending GitHub. Alberto has already complied with this request. (You
can read more detail about this in the minutes.)

The board would like to explore making this effort with other services
(like Gitorious). If there is someone who would like to put in the work to
create the appropriate hooks in the repository, please contact us.

karen

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Re: GUADEC videos are available only with nonfree codecs

2013-08-15 Thread Karen Sandler

On Thu, August 15, 2013 6:39 am, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
 On 08/15/2013 12:02 PM, Christian Persch wrote:
 Yesterday I discovered that the GUADEC videos on
 http://www.superlectures.com/guadec2013/ are available only in
 proprietary formats, H.264 for the video and MP3 for the audio-only
 option.

 Why aren't they available at least *also* in formats using Free codecs
 (webm / theora / ogg) ? Preferably they should even be available *only*
 using Free codecs!

 The most important part of the above message is that GUADEC videos are
 actually available!
 I was really uncertain if this would happen or not, based on experience
 of so many previous GUADEC's where we did recordings but failed to
 publish them. I was really 50/50 on it and didn't want to make any
 promises to people who asked about it.

 A big thank you for everyone who made this happen!

Yes! The recordings were done in previous years but the breakdown was with
the video processing. The fact that these were done so quickly is so
exciting.

I would add that making the videos available in a free format was one of
our initial requirements.

karen




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GNOME Annual General Meeting August 2

2013-07-31 Thread Karen Sandler

Hi everyone,

I wanted to write a little about the Annual General Meeting that we have
scheduled for Friday.

As we've done in the past, we have lined up short 5 minute presentations
from the various team members so that the membership can find out what is
going on across GNOME.

I contacted individuals who I thought were good people to coordinate this
but I apologize for not writing to the team email lists. These are the
reports we have lined up:

Release team
Bugsquad
Design
Localization
Accessibility
Documentation
Web
Marketing
Membership
Outreach
Financial
Sysadmin
GNOME.Asia
Foundation

Is there any team or subject area I missed?

In response to last year's feedback (and since this is a long list), we've
decided to move the QA with the board to the keynote slot on the
following morning. This way we'll have plenty of time for a short break in
the middle of the AGM as well as adequate opportunity for the board
members to talk to you and answer your questions. We also think the board
should be responsive to the community at large, and not just the
membership. While the AGM is for the members of the organization we
encourage everyone to attend!

Can't wait to see all of you in Brno!

karen





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Re: Supporting GTK+

2013-07-04 Thread Karen Sandler


On Thu, July 4, 2013 4:06 pm, Martyn Russell wrote:
 On 07/01/2013 05:56 AM, Hu Zheng wrote:
 Can your tell me your paypal account? I want to donate some money to gtk
 project!

 As far as I am aware there is no PayPal account for the project
 specifically. AFAICS, your options are to either donate to the GNOME
 project or to the GIMP project - which is where GTK+ kind of started.

 And, why not just list the paypal account at
 http://www.gtk.org/development.php

 We would if we had one ;)

 Thank you very much!

 Thank you for wanting to donate!

 If anyone else in the community has ideas around this, it would be
 interesting to hear.

The GNOME Foundation does fund travel and other expenses to support GTK+,
like for the GTK+ hackfest. So donating to GNOME would help with that :)

You can read about the last hackfest here:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/GTK2013, which also links to blogposts
about the event  - thanks again to OLPC for providing the venue!

karen



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Re: GNOME Foundation Board Elections Spring 2013 - Preliminary Results

2013-06-10 Thread Karen Sandler

On Mon, June 10, 2013 8:13 pm, Max wrote:
 Congratulations to all the preliminary candidates !
 ^__^


Thank you for running, Max, and congratulations to you on another
successful GNOME.Asia Summit! (which surely distracted you from being able
to write long responses to the questions on this list) I hope we can find
more ways for GNOME to be active in Asia and look forward to more great
suggestions from you :)

Thank you for all of your hard work!
karen


 On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org wrote:
 Dear Foundation Members,

 the GNOME Foundation Membership  Elections Committee is pleased to
 announce
 the preliminary results for the Board of Directors.

 We strongly encourage everyone to look at the detailed results to verify
 their ballot. (see below)

 These results can be challenged by sending an e-mail to
 electi...@gnome.org.
 The challenges have to be sent before Tuesday, 2013-06-18, 23:59 UTC.
 Please
 note these results should not be considered final until any challenge
 have
 been resolved.

 The results can be found at:
 http://vote.gnome.org/vote/results.php?election_id=21

 A list of all votes can be found at:
 http://vote.gnome.org/vote/votes.php?election_id=21

 If the results are not challenged, the new Board will be composed by:

 Tobias Mueller
 Joanmarie Diggs
 Emmanuele Bassi
 Andreas Nilsson
 Sriram Ramkrishna
 Ekaterina Gerasimova
 Marina Zhurakhinskaya.

 Some figures about the votes: there were 361 registered voters. 192
 voters
 sent valid ballots.

 Cheers,
   Andrea Veri
   on behalf of the GNOME Foundation Membership  Elections Committee

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Re: Extending the call for candidates (was Re: Withdrawal of board of idrectors candidacy)

2013-05-25 Thread Karen Sandler

On Thu, May 23, 2013 4:57 pm, Richard Stallman wrote:
 It is not a good thing when there are so few candidates
 that nearly all have to be elected.  With just 8 candidates
 and a 7-member board, we are only voting about which single
 one of these candidate not to put on the board.  That is getting
 pretty close to no choice at all.  What would we do if there were
 only 7 candidates?  If there were only 6?

I think in the instance that there are not enough candidates to elect, the
empty spots would be treated as vacancies under the bylaws. I'd need to
check, but I think then the directors in office can fill the remaining
spots.

That said, I don't think that we are near that position at this point that
we really need to worry about it. My point about the candidates this time
being really strong is that I think there were a few people who were
thinking of running but who decided not to run against the people who had
already put themselves forward.


 I propose changing the election rules for future elections so that if
 the number of candidates is less than 7/4 the size of the board, there
 will be another request for candidates, giving 5 days for people to
 step forward.

I don't object to this change, but I worry about the wait and see attitude
it could encourage for people who might be more timid about running. I
don't like the idea of two waves of nominations if we could avoid it, and
if only 7 people throw their hats in the ring, if they are solid
candidates I don't think there's a problem with that. As I was saying
above, I think there's been some self selection this time.

karen

 If that squeezes the subsequent step, then expand it
 by moving all the previous dates 5 days earlier.


 --
 Dr Richard Stallman
 President, Free Software Foundation
 51 Franklin St
 Boston MA 02110
 USA
 www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
 Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
   Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call

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Re: Proposal: DNS change irc.gnome.org becomes A record and irc.gimpnet.org starts getting phased out.

2013-05-10 Thread Karen Sandler

On Fri, May 10, 2013 10:55 am, Bastien Nocera wrote:
 On Wed, 2013-05-08 at 10:02 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
 To many, 'gimp' is an offensive term an given our dedication to a11y
 it seems counter-intuitive to have this name in our infrastructure.

 I've never heard the word gimp used as a slur against handicapped
 people (which I guess is what you're getting at[1]). What made you think
 that there was a connection between those 2 uses of the word?

To chime in here as another US-based native english speaker, I've come
across the negative reaction more than once in the past when telling
people to join us on GIMPNet and also when talking to newcomers about
what other awesome free software is available for them to use. It's a
connection that I think people naturally make, as the word is a well known
slur. Since for GNOME it's out of context to anyone who doesn't know about
the GIMP and the historical relationship with GNOME, I think it can make
people unnecessarily uncomfortable.

karen



 Cheers

 [1]: Rather than people who might need a11y technologies, which is
 pretty much everyone (keyboard on touchscreen, text sizes, inverse
 colours, etc.)

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Re: Proposal: DNS change irc.gnome.org becomes A record and irc.gimpnet.org starts getting phased out.

2013-05-09 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, May 8, 2013 3:53 pm, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

 Yet another PCPOS in GNOME. When will this stop? Is there an end? Any?

I refer you to GNOME's Code of Conduct:
https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/

Be respectful and considerate, patient and generous. Please take this into
consideration in future posts.

karen

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Re: Boston Summit 2013?

2013-04-30 Thread Karen Sandler

On Fri, April 26, 2013 4:51 am, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
 I'd love to visit Portland!

 However we might want to take into account that doing it in the west
 coast will have an impact on the travel budget since a lot of people
 live in Europe and the east coast.

I know Sri is working hard to look into organizing this in Portland, but I
think there are a number of obstacles. If Portland isn't the right choice
for this year, are there folks who want to organize in Montreal?

karen

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Re: ANNOUNCE: The GUADEC 2013 Call for Presentations is now open!

2013-04-02 Thread Karen Sandler

On Tue, April 2, 2013 7:10 pm, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
 On 2013-04-02 19:47, Gil Forcada wrote:
 El dt 02 de 04 de 2013 a les 18:09 +0100, en/na Emmanuele Bassi va
 escriure:
 Hi everyone!

 The call for presentations for GUADEC 2013 in Brno is finally open.
 You can register here:

 cut

 Sorry for asking here, but will be, at last, get a permanent version of
 the website or is this wordpress instance expected to last only for this
 GUADEC? It's already time to offload/invest (depending on how you look
 at it) setting up a website/CfP/review process of each GUADEC team
 organizers and just have (and improve) one over the years...

 /me asking that since 2007...
 Excellent question!
 I want to fix this for future events [1], or ideally, have a intern
 tackle it [2], because setting this up every time is too much stress.

Does anyone here have experience using CiviCRM to handle events? I think
what it offers is quite basic, but we have the latest version up and
running and it might be handy to integrate with it.

karen

 1. https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/EventsSite
 2. https://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram/2013/JuneSeptember

 - Andreas
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Reminder: Call for a11y bids deadline in one week

2013-03-08 Thread Karen Sandler

Hi everyone,

Just a friendly reminder that the deadline to submit a proposal to do a11y
work with our Friends of GNOME money and Mozilla sponsorship is coming up
a week from today.

Details are here:

http://www.gnome.org/news/2013/02/call-for-bids-for-gnome-accessibility-work/

Extra tip for those of you working on proposals: one item that isn't on
the list but would surely be good to see is a discussion of your future
commitment to contributing to GNOME and accessibility once the money runs
out.

I look forward to reading your bid!
karen




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Re: Want to review a book about GNOME 3?

2013-03-07 Thread Karen Sandler

On Thu, March 7, 2013 4:35 pm, alex diavatis wrote:
 Hello all and hello Stallman,

 On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org wrote:

 If it is going to be sold via Amazon, GNOME might want to look into
 the Amazon non-profit affiliates program.

 Please don't encourage anyone to buy from Amazon.  See
 stallman.org/amazon.html for the many bad things that Amazon does --
 to independent book stores, publishers, authors, its workers,
 and its customers.

FWIW, in my first email back to Packt I requested that they consider
releasing this under a free license. Based on the response, I'm a little
unclear about what the license terms are but I suppose it will be cleared
up when we get the sample copies.

karen

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Want to review a book about GNOME 3?

2013-03-06 Thread Karen Sandler

Hi everyone,

Packt Publishing has recently put out a book on GNOME 3, which was written
by Mohammad Anwari. It would be great to have a review of the book on
gnome.org. As with all of their books about free software projects, Packt
will give us a small percentage of the royalties as a donation, and
slightly more if we promote it on our website (which would include
publishing a review). Either way, they'll send us a couple of promotional
copies to conduct the review and it would be great to have our view on it
out there (positive or negative).

If you're interested in reading the book and writing a review, let me know.

thanks!
karen


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Re: Want to review a book about GNOME 3?

2013-03-06 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, March 6, 2013 3:01 pm, Chris Leonard wrote:
 On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:
 Hi everyone,

 Packt Publishing has recently put out a book on GNOME 3, which was
 written
 by Mohammad Anwari. It would be great to have a review of the book on
 gnome.org. As with all of their books about free software projects,
 Packt
 will give us a small percentage of the royalties as a donation, and
 slightly more if we promote it on our website (which would include
 publishing a review). Either way, they'll send us a couple of
 promotional
 copies to conduct the review and it would be great to have our view on
 it
 out there (positive or negative).

 Karen,

 If it is going to be sold via Amazon, GNOME might want to look into
 the Amazon non-profit affiliates program.  I believe Brad Kuhn / Tony
 Sebro of SFC recently went through registering SFC (and member
 projects) that wanted to earn click-through donations from purchases
 of project-related books, they could probably tell you more about it.

Thanks, I'll look into it! I did help Bradley and Tony with some of the
legal analysis around taking the revenues from those donations but I
didn't think about the fact that it could make sense for this- thanks! :)

karen

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Re: Want to review a book about GNOME 3?

2013-03-06 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, March 6, 2013 2:47 pm, tong hui wrote:
 On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 3:19 AM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:

 Mohammad Anwari


 I searched his name, so here is the book URL
 http://www.packtpub.com/gnome-3-application-development-beginners-guide/book

 Through the brief instruction of the book, and some item I am very
 interesting for reading the book and writing some reviews.

  may I ask a more cheaper ebook editon?

Thanks! I've already gotten a few responses about this, so I'll ask about
e-book copies, but I think we're probably set on reviewers now!

karen

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Andrea Veri - GNOME's new part-time sysadmin hire!

2013-01-24 Thread Karen Sandler

In the spirit of the below email from last week, I'm extremely pleased to
announce that the Foundation is hiring Andrea to work as our new sysadmin
contractor. We've been without someone in this position since Christer
stepped down last year, and Andrea has really been sensational as a
volunteer and done a great deal of the work in the meantime.

I'm confident that Andrea will continue to do a great job for GNOME! And
we've got a lot of work to do.

Thanks to the rest of the sysadmin team, the GNOME board and those of you
who emailed me suggesting that we do this very thing.

karen

On Wed, January 16, 2013 3:58 am, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
 Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org a Ã©crit:

 I've finally managed to migrate all the services to a new machine. You
 should be able to apply/renew your membership and request changes to
 your
 accounts again.

 \o/.  This was fast!

 Thanks for your patience

 No.  Thank *you* for the awesome work and extreme dedication.



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Re: Andrea Veri - GNOME's new part-time sysadmin hire!

2013-01-24 Thread Karen Sandler

On Fri, January 25, 2013 12:08 am, Luis Villa wrote:
 Terrific news!

 And thanks also to all the supporters of the Foundation over the year
 who have made this sort of hire possible - this investment in
 infrastructure and support is extremely important to GNOME's long-term
 health.

Great point, Luis! I should note that this is made possible by both our
individual Friends of GNOME sponsors and our corporate supporters. There's
tons of work to be done, which I hope will help us in the coming years!

karen


 On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:
 In the spirit of the below email from last week, I'm extremely pleased
 to
 announce that the Foundation is hiring Andrea to work as our new
 sysadmin
 contractor. We've been without someone in this position since Christer
 stepped down last year, and Andrea has really been sensational as a
 volunteer and done a great deal of the work in the meantime.

 I'm confident that Andrea will continue to do a great job for GNOME! And
 we've got a lot of work to do.

 Thanks to the rest of the sysadmin team, the GNOME board and those of
 you
 who emailed me suggesting that we do this very thing.

 karen

 On Wed, January 16, 2013 3:58 am, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
 Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org a Ã©crit:

 I've finally managed to migrate all the services to a new machine. You
 should be able to apply/renew your membership and request changes to
 your
 accounts again.

 \o/.  This was fast!

 Thanks for your patience

 No.  Thank *you* for the awesome work and extreme dedication.



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Re: Setting moderation bit for members who consistently hijack topics

2013-01-09 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, January 9, 2013 5:28 pm, Tobias Mueller wrote:
 Heya,

 On 09.01.2013 23:15, Andrew Cowie wrote:
 Would it be possible to set the moderation bit for Richard Stallman's
 posts to GNOME lists?
 sure it would be. The list is managed by mailman and it has that feature.

 As Stormy pointed out, every time there's a conversation about anything
 he jumps in and swerves off thread.
 I see neither the every time nor the swerving off part. Even if I
 did, I hope that it takes some more effort like providing references
 before being able to block someone from posting to GNOME mailing lists.
 Proof:
 https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2013-January/msg0.html

I agree. I should also note that Richard brings up a really solid point in
his post, and while he should have started a different thread and perhaps
worded it a little differently, his post could be relevant to GNOME
Foundation members to read.

Moreover, it's probably more polite to make requests about changes to
moderation policy off-list to the admins,

karen

 but constantly hijacking other people's threads is getting
 frustrating.
 You can probably tell your client easily to not display mails in these
 instances then.
 I don't think that your personal frustration should be the reason for
 everyone not to receive some type of email.

 Cheers,
   Tobi

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Re: Reaching out to Amazon for credit?

2013-01-06 Thread Karen Sandler

On Sun, January 6, 2013 9:20 pm, Richard Stallman wrote:

 There are some things that we must not tolerate on any pretext.
 Spyware is one of them.

I agree with this sentiment, and am glad you are raising the issue. I
liked the post you wrote, which I discuss with Bradley on our oggcast.

To raise it here in this thread is definitely off topic, as others have
said. I do think it's important to point out flaws in GNU/Linux
distributions and the FSF serves its role well in that capacity.

GNOME like all projects that are part of GNU is free software and can be
used by anybody for any purpose. A lot of these communities have all sorts
of participants, from hacker hobbyists to companies that sell various
products around them, many of which involve proprietary software, spyware
and all kinds of bad stuff. Our communities are stronger for having
diverse participation, and the body of free software keeps growing because
of this. Take GCC, for example. And the LGPL.

What's important on the GNOME Foundations list is that you help us stay
focused on GNOME and keeping it free. I hope Canonical does the right
thing with Ubuntu going forward. It's right to call them out on it, but
the GNOME foundations list isn't the venue for it unless for some reason
GNOME starts including spyware too (which we won't!!). I also really hope
that Canonical keeps contributing to help make GNOME better.

karen










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Re: GNOME Quarterly Reports

2013-01-02 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, January 2, 2013 7:49 pm, Andrew Cowie wrote:
 On Wed, 2013-01-02 at 23:53 +, Juanjo MarÃn wrote:

 I personally think that the major drawback is that there is a mismatch
 between the quarterly reports and our release scheme.

 Rather than being a PR exercise, the quarterly report could be recast
 as, alternately, a formal progress report ~2 months before release
 (highlighting areas of urgent concern), and then a review ~1 month after
 (observing what worked and what didn't in well enough time to make
 adjustments next cycle).

 We have a lot of structure in our release process, but defined occasions
 to discuss progress might be a good addition.

I love the idea of tying the reports to our release cycle. Some areas,
like events, don't fall on this cycle, but so long as there is a concrete
cycle to compile this information I think it doesn't really matter.
Quarterly reports as we've had them have often been confusing timing-wise
anyway since the Foundation's fiscal year is not the same as the calendar
year.

I've found the quarterly reports very useful in my work for pulling
together information quickly to provide to others across the different
parts of GNOME, so I'd really love to see them continue. If bringing them
closer to the release schedule makes more sense and has the potential to
make them more useful, then we should do it!

karen

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Re: Questions about the new GNOME Forums

2012-11-21 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, November 21, 2012 1:14 pm, Bastien Nocera wrote:
 Heya,

 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 :)

karen

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Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!

2012-11-15 Thread Karen Sandler

On Thu, November 15, 2012 2:39 pm, William Jon McCann wrote:
 Hi Karen,

 I think these are good suggestions. But I think it would be a mistake to
 leave this critical responsibility to a committee of volunteers. One of
 the
 many challenges we face is that our voice and message have been too
 inconsistent - too infrequently heard. Heard too late. Lacking authority.
 In want of good taste. And dealing with this is taking a huge toll on our
 ability to attract and retain contributors. Something needs to be done.

 I propose that we hire or appoint a full time director of marketing.

This is a great idea! And I agree that this is a major area of need for
us. Given the GNOME Foundation finances, it probably is also worth
considering someone part-time (especially if there is a team of volunteers
that can be trained and directed by such a person) or thinking creatively
about fundraising for the position.

The other challenge will be to find the right person for the position. In
the past, organizations I worked with who hired for these kinds of
positions had a really tough time finding someone with the right skillset
already and who also understood free software and was affordable. But we
can tackle that and set up a hiring process if we decide this is what we
want to do and can raise the funds.

We'll take it to the board! In the meantime, as I return from maternity
leave (I'm not fully back for a few weeks), I can help push forward some
of these tasks - some of them have gone in and out of my queue over the
last year depending on my other commitments - though many of them require
someone more trained than me to do well. We've been talking about various
ideas on the marketing list, including a weekly podcast/oggcast about
GNOME.

If we can get that together, mind being on the first one, Jon? :D

karen


 With the following responsibilities:

  * Organize and work with a team of advocates
  * Grok and channel the voice of the project rather than impose a separate
 agenda
  * Consult with the design, development, testing, and documentation teams
  * Help us clearly and effectively communicate our goals and objectives
  * Organize the creation of press releases / release notes
  * Blog regularly about ongoing initiatives and progress
  * Be a beacon of light to counter the darkness
  * Help us communicate proactively instead of reactively
  * Educate misinformed journalists
  * Be a point of contact for external parties that want information
  * Reduce the burden on volunteers
  * Delegate the above responsibilities

 If nothing else, it is clear that we are failing to perform these critical
 duties. We are paying a dear price for it. I think we need to admit we
 need
 professional help - a point I'm sure even our harshest critics will agree
 with.

 Jon



 On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 12:47 AM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:

 On Wed, November 14, 2012 8:40 am, Bastien Nocera wrote:

  - And discontent. Well, I think that I have reasonable doubts to
 think
  that those community managers wouldn't be able to carry the message of
  developers truthfully if said developers aren't being talked to.

 I think it's a fair point to raise issues of quality control for this
 committee. One of the things I think we should start with for this
 initiative is the creation of GNOME talking points/FAQ type of document.
 The new team could do this by working with the release team, the board
 and
 others in the community who would like to contribute. I think some of
 the
 conversation we're having in other threads on this list are a good start
 for that too. By going through that process, we'd be able to train the
 volunteers and provide material to work from for the individuals to use
 in
 formulating their own responses (so not a cut and paste document, but a
 formulation of key goals, ideas and decisions). We could also create
 infrastructure to help them out, like an IRC channel and private mailing
 list where posts can be vetted.

 We'd also need to set up mechanisms for communication so that developers
 can be consulted. In the end, I think this could wind up being a lot
 easier for our core developers, who seem to be often put on the spot to
 defend their work. Having a team that these developers can talk to and
 count on to repeatedly respond on behalf of the project seems to me like
 a
 great way to preserve those people's time. Are there other ways we could
 improve this side of the conversation?

 karen





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Re: Looking for community managers or enthusiasts!

2012-11-14 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, November 14, 2012 2:28 pm, meg ford wrote:
 Hi,

 On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 1:08 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna
 s...@ramkrishna.mewrote:

 The wrong idea of course is that people think we're just removing
 features
 for no apparent reason even though for instance fallback mode was never
 guarantee.  We need to correct those misconceptions.

 Having a good relationship with the general public is more important now
 than it was in the past thanks to social media.  For example, with
 Ubuntu
 (who holds the largest share of users right now), GNOME is no longer the
 default and so it takes a conscious effort to change to GNOME.  If they
 do
 the research, I don't want them to see a pile of ridiculous blog
 postings
 that aren't challenged by calm and simple rhetoric.

 Regarding, Emily's post.  You need to look at the overall message there.
 Not everyone is on the same page, and the fact that we are having this
 discussion with other people who clearly have the same concerns is
 indicative that we do have a problem.  If you think there is no problem,
 we
 an drop this whole thing.

 Community enthusiasts won't go out there using the 'royal we' without
 some
 training.  This stuff isn't easy, and it is important that our
 volunteers
 understand how to engage in both the GNOME community and the community
 at
 large.  They will need training on GNOME's vision and purpose.  That
 means,
 release team, designers, and relevant parties will need to help these
 volunteers in understanding it before going out there and speaking in
 our
 name.  I'm having Karen be in charge of us.


 I'd like to request that Karen also provide the members of the board with
 the information she shares with the volunteers. It's demoralizing to see
 members of the board arguing about GNOME's vision and purpose. If we are
 going to present a positive image of ourselves to the public, I think we
 need to at least have the board members agreeing on the basic message. I
 hope this doesn't offend anyone; I'm just saying this because, as a member
 of the foundation, I would really appreciate it if the board members could
 present a united front.

Great point, Meg. I think the board should definitely be involved in this
process, as they are our elected representatives. I of course commit to
doing everything I can to help make that happen.

In any event, I agree with you that a coordinated basic message (with
flexibility for individual perspectives) should be of the utmost
importance.

I'm glad we're undertaking this effort - I hope it will help drive us to
be more coordinated all around.

karen

 Meg Ford


 The end goal is to reduce the signal to noise ratio and get real
 feedback
 without hyperbole and let developers and designers be able to produce
 awesome stuff without feeling buried in undue negativity.  The only
 thing I
 ask in return is that you consider the feedback that is being provided
 to
 you.  If the feedback is negative, help us engage with the community
 with
 the right approach.  If the feedback is positive, then I hope you will
 take
 that as encourage and motivation to keep doing it.

 sri



 On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 2:38 AM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net
 wrote:

 Hey Sri,

 On Tue, 2012-11-13 at 16:07 -0800, 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.

 Which is?

  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...



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Re: Google Code-In 2012?

2012-10-15 Thread Karen Sandler

On Sun, October 14, 2012 10:49 am, Andre Klapper wrote:
Google will run Google Code-In (GCI) again this year
(see [1] below if you don't know what that is).

Is the GNOME community interested in participating?

Would you (developer, translator, doc writer, designer) be a mentor and
provide tasks?

(Asking as I faced reluctance in the past, because time spent mentoring
students took often longer than if GNOMErs did the task themselves, plus
students often didn't stick with the mentoring org afterwards.)

In case there is enough interest:
Is anybody else in to help organizing this for GNOME?
Asking as I won't have much time this year.

I can, of course! I can also come up with a few marketing tasks at least...

While there's no translation this year, I note that to get started, we
only need 5 tasks for each of the 5 categories by the November 26 start
this time (there were 8 categories last time).

They also changed the prize structure to motivate students to concentrate
their work with one or two projects, and are asking for tasks to be more
bite-sized (able to be completed by an experienced person in 2 hours) I
think both of these changes make the program better for mentors to
participate.

karen

Comments?

andre

[1]
Code-In is for 13-17 year old students. Tasks take 3 to 5 days.
Nov 05th is the deadline for orgs to apply. The contest runs from Nov
26th to Jan 16th. Tasks can be about Code, Documentation,
Outreach/Research/Marketing/Community Management, QA and UX.
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/09/google-code-in-contest-for-high-school.html
--
mailto:ak...@gmx.net
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper

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Re: Google Code-In 2012?

2012-10-15 Thread Karen Sandler

On Mon, October 15, 2012 6:01 am, Simos Xenitellis wrote:

 The announcement indeed does not mention translations.
 Are we positive that the organizers specifically do not want to have
 translation tasks this year? Citation?

There's a page called Information for Mentors and Org Admins for GCI 2012
that says:

 We have removed translation tasks entirely from this year's contest
 per feedback from mentors and students. Do not combine translation
 tasks into documentation tasks - we specifically are not having
 translation tasks be any part of this year's contest.

http://code.google.com/p/google-code-in/wiki/GCIMentorInformation2012

karen

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Re: GNOME foundation exposure in BSD Mag?

2012-08-07 Thread Karen Sandler

Hi Antoine,

On Tue, August 7, 2012 9:45 am, Antoine Jacoutot wrote:
 Hi.

 As a regular contributor to the BSD Magazine I was proposed to put a
 half-page of advertisement free of charge in one of my articles
 (the ad does not need to be commercial).
 I was wondering if there was any interested from the Foundation to use
 this half-page to have some exposure... and if so who should I contact?

 Also let me know if this is not the right place to ask :-)
 Thanks!

Thanks for thinking of us! You can contact me and the GNOME board of
directors at board-l...@gnome.org. I'd love to hear more about what you're
thinking for this...

karen

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Re: Suggestions for format of AGM next year

2012-08-03 Thread Karen Sandler

On Fri, August 3, 2012 5:29 am, Allan Day wrote:
 Hi,

 Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote:
 ...
 I thought a bit about the AGM we had a few days ago, and I'd like to
 suggest we find a different format for next year.

Thanks for putting this down, Vincent!


 Here's a list of issues with the current format, from what I saw this
 year:

  - it was a bit too long. A small break might have helped.

  - the discussion about changing the release team had to be cut, because
it would have used too much time needed for the other reports.
However, I think this is a discussion a lot of people cared about and
that could have been used more time. Especially since we had everyone
in a room, which helps communication. Hopefully, the GNOME OS BoF was
useful for this (I missed it, so don't know).

I agree - The release team decided to do this last minute, so I was aware
they wanted a few minutes for QA but didn't realize they were opening up
the floor to a whole discussion. Once it was started, I also felt it was
an important discussion to have and didn't want to cut it off. Because
this took at least 20 minutes more than we'd budgeted for, timing got very
tight. Additionally, our outreach section took a lot longer than expected
with handing out the certificates, which was also not budgeted for
time-wise. Perhaps this should have been appended to the lightning talk
session for the outreach participants, which actually ended 15 minutes
early this time.


  - I didn't feel there was a lot said about the Foundation itself. Sure,
there were a few slides at the end, but that was not that much
detailed, and because of the short remaining time, it went really
fast.

Sorry about that, I agree!

  - obviously, we should have had time for questions. Questions from the
members, but also from the board to members (to bootstrap discussion
on some topics).

Last year, with the identical agenda we had tons of time for the QA, and
some great conversation that came out of that so I wasn't as worried about
timing this time. In addition to the Outreach and Release team
presentations taking longer, this time we also had the last minute
proposal for the planet gnome discussion. The AGM should include agenda
items formally proposed by members, so we also had that unexpected
addition as well.

  - it might be a good idea to have some kind of document sent before the
AGM to foundation-list or the members, so we have more details about
what's going to be discussed. This could be just the slides, or
something different. Having some time to ponder about the content is
useful, and that could lead to more questions or some improved
discussion.

Good point. Last year and this year, at least, the agenda consisted of the
reports, a few announcements and QA. While there were no identified
discussion areas in advance, next year we can definitely do that,
circulating topic ideas here a week or two in advance.

 Another approach would be to split the team reports and the AGM in two
 different slots. Easy to do and not that much impact. Probably something
 we could try next year?

We may want to do something like this. What about extending the AGM to 3
hours, which we may not need all of, and scheduling the reports first but
taking a break after them? I think it's good to have the reports and
discussion back to back as I think the reports set the context of where
things are and what has happened over the last year.

 I agree that the AGM was a bit constrained this year, and these all
 seem like good suggestions. Perhaps it would be good to split the
 GUADEC closing out into a separate session too (so we have 1. team
 reports 2. AGM and 3. GUADEC closing)?

This time we did have a separate GUADEC closing on Sunday (the AGM was
Saturday). I started with a GUADEC feedback session - was that useful?

 An open call for questions or discussion topics can often be
 inhibiting; I'm sure that we would have a livelier debate if we had a
 set of potential discussion topics prepared in advance. The Board
 could organise this depending on current hot topics. We could also
 pull recent discussion subjects from the Foundation list.

Allan, I think you may be right. We can perhaps circulate an Expected
Discussion Topics list, which allows people to think about what else
they'd like to discuss.

I'm glad we're thinking about the format of the meeting, and hope we can
improve for next year!

karen

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Call for GUADEC 2013 proposals

2012-06-29 Thread Karen Sandler

We announced this earlier this week on gnome.org - I hope you consider
submitting a proposal!
http://www.gnome.org/news/2012/06/call-for-guadec-2013-proposals/

Call for GUADEC 2013 Proposals

The GNOME Foundation invites proposals to host GUADEC 2013. GUADEC is the
biggest gathering of GNOME users and developers and includes a three-day
conference, the annual general meeting of the members of the GNOME
Foundation, and a week of coding, meeting, and discussion. Those who would
like to host the next GUADEC are hereby invited to write a formal proposal
to the board of the GNOME Foundation at board-l...@gnome.org. Deadline for
the proposals is July 20, 2012 and bidders are invited to present in
person to the board of directors at this year's GUADEC on July 24 or on
another day during the conference.

Do you think your city would be a great place for GUADEC? Key criteria for
a large GNOME event like GUADEC are:

* Cost and ease of travel from major European cities and airline hubs
* Local GNOME community with strong leadership and support for hosting the
conference
* Venue, cheap housing and nice hotels, and the distance between them
* The budget for infrastructure and facilities required to hold the
conference
* The availability of restaurants or the organization of catering on-site,
cost of food and drinks
* Spaces for hallway tracks and social activities
* Local industry and government support

The conference will require availability of facilities for one week,
including a weekend, during summer. Dates should avoid other key free
software conferences. See the GUADEC check list and How To for an overview
of the kinds of things you should include in the proposal, and check out
the bids from previous GUADECs for more information.

Organizing a conference of this size is a lot of hard work, but there are
people in the community with experience who can help you. Feel free to
contact board-l...@gnome.org for more information or guidance.

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Re: Questions for the board election candidates

2012-05-27 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2012-05-27 00:44, Stormy Peters wrote:

I try to avoid these conversations because I think there are lots of
over generalizations, stereotypes and emotions. I just want to say
that I generally use the term open source *and* I believe in many 
of

the values attributed to free software. I don't believe that using
different terminology makes us as different as some portray.


I agree with this, in that I also think that folks in practice use the 
terms interchangeably, sometimes even when talking wholly about the 
ideals of freedom. I hate for us to get distracted too much arguing 
about terminology (as Joannie says), but I do think there is an 
important discussion about the importance of freedom to GNOME and the 
role of the GNOME Foundation in promulgating freedom. As a charitable 
nonprofit, I believe our existence must be based in the ideals of 
software freedom and our mission and public good are totally related to 
those ideals. (For example, we're not a trade association.) I think that 
in order to be true to our nonprofit mission, GNOME itself must be 
committed to freedom.


karen


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board/ED contact (was Re: A question for the candidates)

2012-05-25 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2012-05-25 12:54, gnomeu...@gmail.com wrote:

2012/5/25 Allan Day allanp...@gmail.com:

Hi all,

Thanks to all the candidates for stepping forward. It's fantastic 
that

you are interested in doing this important work.


Thank you.


A question for you:

Sometimes it can feel like the Board of Directors is a bit divorced
from the rest of the GNOME project. Is this a problem, in your view?
If it is, what do you think can be done about it?


I think the Board could be more visible, currently being on the
outside I recently spent 3 weeks with non-communications with my 
board

contact (Karen) during the late stages of planning a hackfest. Not
knowing what to do or what the protocol was proved fairly distressing
and I suspect not helpful to GNOME overall if such situations proves
widespread.


Since you mention this on Foundation list I'd also like to apologize 
for this here - your requests came at a time I was dealing with health 
issues and I should have been more communicative about that. I believe 
everything was resolved with adequate time but I'm sorry that you found 
it at all distressing. (On the specific issues at hand, I thought I'd 
wrapped up the outstanding portion directly with Udesh, but we can 
definitely talk more about it privately if you'd like.)


I know you also say that you haven't heard any reports of widespread 
problems, but this is a good opportunity to say here to everyone that if 
there is some request you are waiting on, please do not hesitate to ping 
me on IRC (I'm karenesq) or to reach out to others if you feel like 
there's something that's getting dropped. The board's email (with me and 
Rosanna) is board-l...@gnome.org and you can always cc that, which will 
get to everyone! For me personally, I prefer more contact - you won't 
irritate me  and I feel terrible when things slip through the cracks :)


karen



There are some minor things I would like to see, if you contact the
board list, getting an acknowledge that your question was received 
and

notification of when the next meeting where there will be time to
debate it, if needed, is scheduled would help a lot.

Likewise I don't think I have seen breakdowns of how Board members
have voted on issues anywhere which I would personally consider
valuable in terms of selecting a candidate to vote for (or to hold
someone accountable).

That being said, I think I would like to observe the Board more
closely to see where it can do better in feeling as a more organic
part of GNOME before making any big promises or suggestions. I only
have some limited personal experience and haven't heard any reports 
of
widespread problems. Perhaps it is an area where we need more input 
to

identify our problems, so I would like to encourage people to step
forward and tells us where it hurts.

David
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Re: Brian Cameron - Stepping down from the board

2012-05-23 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2012-05-23 15:52, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 20:15 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote:

After serving 4 terms on The GNOME Foundation board of directors, I 
will

be stepping down at the end of this term.


Thanks for all the work you put into your position, Brian :)


Yes, thank you, Brian - it's been a pleasure working with you :)

And thanks to Germán (who's served multiple terms and as treasurer 
previously too), Stormy and Ryan who have also decided to step down 
after this term. We really appreciate your hard work!!


karen

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Re: Boston Summit?

2012-05-22 Thread Karen Sandler


On 2012-04-27 17:17, Michael Hill wrote:

Hi Karen,

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 4:25 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org 
wrote:



Are there teams (or individuals, since this is a less formal event)
in Toronto, Boston and/or Montreal that are willing to take on the
burden of trying to organize this?


I don't want to speak for Ryan, but I'm available to be part of any
Toronto team. I know of a couple of developers, a couple of docs
people and a GSoC intern. (Okay, the developers are Behdad and Ryan.)

Lucas Rocha posted a photo of the Mozilla space on G+ today. (Ignore
his comment about snow, it's sunny now. Please also disregard what
Shaun says about snowstorms and flights, that was unseasonable. Snow
on Thanksgiving weekend is unheard of, or at least fairly rare.)

I'd like to get to Boston sometime, so if it's in Toronto this year,
and I invite everyone to my folks' place for Thanksgiving dinner, I'm
pretty sure I'll be able to go next year.


I don't see any further discussion from this on the 
Boston/Montreal/Toronto Summit! Should we set up a (somewhat informal) 
bid process? I'm reminded of this, as I just got the confirmation on the 
space in Boston for Columbus Day weekend (we don't have to pay any fees, 
thanks to MIT and to Walter Bender). If there's a push to have this 
elsewhere, we should at least free up the space so others can use it.


karen
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Re: Boston Summit?

2012-04-27 Thread Karen Sandler

On Fri, April 27, 2012 2:47 pm, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
 On 04/27/2012 02:18 PM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
 On 04/27/2012 12:25 PM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

 I was thinking, size permitting, we may even be able to do at Mozilla
 offices?

 What were you thinking about the date? Is Columbus Day weekend ideal,
 inconvenient, or irrelevant?

 Eventually that's the board's call.  Personally, I can help for any time
 before mid October, but late October is Unicode Conference time for me.

Columbus Day weekend has always been a convenient time in the past because
it's a long weekend, and typically schools don't have a lot going on so
it's easier to get space. As we discovered last year, though, when we
moved locations, traditions can be broken for good reason.

To avoid what happened last year, I went ahead and got a hold on space at
MIT for that weekend (with amazing help from Walter Bender!!), so we have
that space if we want it on Columbus Day weekend. Ryan tells me that
there's also a possible push to have the event in Montreal again.

I think we should probably have it wherever there is a solid push to
organize the event, but if we've got 3 different places that are
interested in hosting, I think we should probably do at least a quick bid
process as we do for other events. Do we have folks motivated in these
three places to warrant this? Are there teams (or individuals, since this
is a less formal event) in Toronto, Boston and/or Montreal that are
willing to take on the burden of trying to organize this? Boston does have
a small advantage so far in that there's already reserved space for no
charge :)

I'm excited that there's enthusiasm for a North American summit!
karen

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Re: GNOME Deutchland e.V. [Was: Re: European bank account for donations]

2012-03-09 Thread Karen Sandler

On Fri, March 9, 2012 7:30 am, Chris Kühl wrote:
 On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:27 PM, Dave Neary dne...@free.fr wrote:
 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?

I've looked into this in other contexts and always came up against the
unknown tax consequences blocker - anyone know a tax lawyer in these
countries who would maybe do some pro bono work for us? (All the lawyers I
know in the free software world are copyright lawyers and such, and I've
never gotten a great lead on an affordable or pro bono tax lawyer.)



 Looking at the GNOME Deutschland e.V. website[1], I wouldn't consider
 it a likely candidate for such a relationship and the writing on that
 page doesn't seem likes it's always in GNOME's best interest. It
 states that the site is run by an individual and has no connection
 with GNOME e.V. Does the GNOME e.V. even exist any longer? There's
 probably a backstory to this I'm not aware of.

A very interesting question - I'd love to know more about this.

karen


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Re: Questionnaire on motivation analysis of open source and open content

2012-02-23 Thread Karen Sandler

On Thu, February 23, 2012 1:44 pm, Richard Stallman wrote:
 Google Docs operates using nonfree Javascript code.  Is it possible
 for people to fill out your questionaire without running that nonfree
 program?  I don't know, but I guess not.

George,

You might want to consider looking into LimeSurvey if you're interested in
approaching this again with the comments you've received so far. As
Richard indicates, many of us in the free software community will avoid
using nonfree solutions, so using them could bias your results too.

good luck!
Karen


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Re: IDLELO 5: March 19 - 23 2012

2012-02-20 Thread Karen Sandler

On Mon, February 20, 2012 4:12 pm, Tobias Mueller wrote:
 Heya,

 On 26.01.2012 16:30, Karen Sandler wrote:
 I think it's really
 important for GNOME to have a presence there.
 Is anybody going now?

Not that I know of sadly. Perhaps we should start thinking about our
participation next year now, since I think this takes more time to
organize properly. I know it's a long way down the road, but is anyone
interested in participating next year?

karen

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Re: IDLELO 5: March 19 - 23 2012

2012-01-26 Thread Karen Sandler

On Tue, January 24, 2012 19:56, Ben Konrath wrote:

For those interested, IDLELO 5 is taking place between March 19 - 23
2012 in Abuja, Nigeria.

People requiring a visa must meet the requirements to get a visa
application letter by February 20, 2012. Details can be found on this
page:

http://www.idlelo.net/node/21

Ben

Hi Ben,

Thanks for letting everyone know about IDLELO - I think it's really
important for GNOME to have a presence there. I'm cc'ing foundation-list
to remind folks that the GNOME Foundation could probably fund travel for
any GNOME member who wanted to go to IDLELO, experience Nigeria and
promote GNOME!

Thanks for keeping us focused on this - we can definitely use more
volunteers thinking about the developing world.

karen

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Boston Summit logistics (was Re: Desktop Summit Planning)

2011-12-15 Thread Karen Sandler


On Thu, December 15, 2011 5:28 pm, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:
 On Thu, 2011-12-15 at 16:41 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
 What did the previous MIT contact do?  Maybe I can get it done.

 We used to get free rooms (~4) at MIT on Columbus day long weekend.

 It would be great if you can get done it.


Thanks so much for offering to look into this, Richard! I hear that the
Stata Center was a better location in the past than the Economics Building
if we have the choice...

karen



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AGM Agenda for today! (4pm)

2011-08-09 Thread Karen Sandler

The AGM will be from 4pm-6pm in AGM,
Fritz-Reuter-Saal at Dorotheenstraße 24

We will have short update presentations in the following areas:

* Release Team
* Design Team
* Bug Squad
* Accessibility Team
* Marketing Team
* Mobile
* Website
* Localization
* Documentation Team
* Events
* Membership
* Finance
* Travel Committee
* Board Report
* Women's Outreach

The presentations will be followed by a period of QA with the new board!

see you there!
karen


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Re: GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-June 2011)

2011-08-03 Thread Karen Sandler

On Wed, August 3, 2011 2:50 am, Frederic Muller wrote:

 Why is it difficult to just give a rough number at end of our financial
 period ('09 or '10) and be done with it for now?

 The GNOME Foundation obviously hasn't complied to state laws for years
 (by not making the required form available to the public) and you seem
 to enjoy not answering foundation members as well. What about the
 statement on our financial page:
 For comments or questions on the data, please contact the GNOME
 Foundation Board of Directors. 


I'm sorry that you weren't responded to more quickly and were frustrated,
and I hope you understand that, as Germán says, he is only a volunteer
treasurer.

I'm obviously not on the board (and also new here) but I wanted to respond
because you mentioned being out of compliance with state laws. I believe
the form need only be made available on request in order to meet the state
requirements. While you definitely requested an important piece of
information, you didn't specifically ask to see the last 990 or the form
1023, both of which would overall have less relevant financial information
than what was circulated by Germán (even if the 990 had an ending
balance).Many nonprofits choose not to put their 990s up on their websites
and are not in violation of state laws to my knowledge. California does
make form 990s available directly on their website without registration,
but those forms are often not the best way to see the financial position
of a nonprofit anyway because of the reporting format. So long as a
nonprofit provides the forms when asked (they don't have to do it
instantly and can also charge a reasonable fee for doing so), they are in
compliance with the rules.  I think GNOME seeks to do better than that,
which is why the more detailed information was circulated to members.

I'm glad that you found the information you wanted ultimately and thanks
for the suggestion to publish the 990s and to improve the budget report.

karen

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my OSCON keynote

2011-08-02 Thread Karen Sandler

In case you are interested, O'Reilly has posted the video from my OSCON
keynote, in which I connect my medical devices work to the importance of
the desktop. Not sure how it translates to video, but it got a great
response live - it was awesome to get people excited about freedom
generally and GNOME 3 specifically. A report of the conference is at my
blog: gnomg.org or you can go directly to the video on YouTube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFZGpES-St8

See you all at the Desktop Summit!
karen


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Re: proposal to change GNOME's trademark guidelines

2011-07-29 Thread Karen Sandler


 This section is quite broad, and is only modified by the somewhat vague
 Fair Use section. Unfortunately, if taken literally, it would prevent

On Thu, July 28, 2011 4:24 pm, Alan Cox wrote:

 The Fair Use section has another problem btw when someone is looking at
 this. Fair Use has no meaning in most legal systems outside the USA.

I wasn't going to get into this level of detail here, but actually Fair
Use doesn't really have any meaning in trademark law the way it does in
copyright law in the United States. There is a concept of nominative use,
which basically gets to what this section is talking about. The policy
does go on to describe what is meant in this context so i don't think it's
too problematic as a term here.

To be honest, I would probably rewrite a bunch of the policy if we were
starting from scratch but I'm trying to make a narrow fix to address a
real problem that has become an obstacle. We may want to rewrite the whole
policy at some point, but I think that's a lot more work.


 I'm proposing this additional language (which is based on text in other
 free software trademark policies) to be added in the same section, after
 that paragraph:

 And that should be reviewed by someone experienced in trademark
 law. I'm sure some of the corporate members can help. I know how much fun
 Red Hat had trying to get the Fedora mark right.

I'm not the world's foremost expert in trademark law but I am a lawyer and
have worked in this area in my tenure at the Software Freedom Law Center.
The language that I proposed was reviewed in other contexts by other
lawyers at SFLC as well as lawyers at various companies that were involved
in the projects that adopted policies with this language in it. (That
said, I'd be happy to get other lawyers involved if it's not overkill.)

  This requirement is waived in all contexts where such marks are not
  normally included, such as email, online discussion, package names,
  non-graphical advertisements (when permitted), and academic papers.
  We encourage the use of the symbol whenever possible, but recognize
  that many non-commercial and informal uses will omit it.

 This for example allows the use of gnome for packages which are not
 gnome packages or to advertise products that are nothing to do with
 Gnome using google adwords (eg buying the Gnome word and pointing it at
 xfce.org 8)). snip

Actually, you'd have to cross reference this against the very first  item
in the Prohibited Use section:

 Do not make reference to GNOME or GNOME Trademarks in a manner
 that is false or misleading.

The proposed addition is just a waiver from a requirement to add notices.
It relies on the prohibitions elsewhere to make sure that the behavior you
describe can't happen. If it weren't for the prohibition against false or
misleading use, then even without adding the new text, your scenario would
be permitted -- others could use the GNOME name to point to non-GNOME
software-- provided they include the notices. The policy must be taken as
a whole.

However I don't want us to add any confusion so would it make an easier
read to add Subject to the provisions contained elsewhere in these
guidelines, including those contained in the Prohibited Use section...?

 We want to make sure that people can use GNOME software and talk about
 it
 freely without unreasonable restrictions. The aim is to adopt this
 amendment to the policy in two weeks if there are no objections. Public
 discussion here about it would be great, and folks can contact me
 privately too if they want to.

 This seems the wrong tack to me. Giving clear examples of fair use, and
 clear, tight ones so you don't make the package mistake would sort this
 out. Trademark requirements are quite specific and defining some examples
 would provide clarity and assurance surely ?

 It's really essential such changes go through lawyers. Sad the world
 works that way but in the case of trademark that's how it happens to be.

I think you're asking for a major change in the GNOME trademark policy,
which I'm not against, but sounds like a lot of work. I'm really focused
right now on fixing a problem quickly that folks are complaining about. I
agree that the policy as a whole could be improved so we can definitely
start an initiative to review and improve it if you want.

karen

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Re: proposal to change GNOME's trademark guidelines

2011-07-28 Thread Karen Sandler

On Thu, July 28, 2011 4:12 am, Vincent Untz wrote:
 Le mercredi 27 juillet 2011, à 20:13 -0400, Karen Sandler a écrit :
  This requirement is waived in all contexts where such marks are not
  normally included, such as email, online discussion, package names,
  non-graphical advertisements (when permitted), and academic papers.
  We encourage the use of the symbol whenever possible, but recognize
  that many non-commercial and informal uses will omit it.

 We want to make sure that people can use GNOME software and talk about
 it
 freely without unreasonable restrictions. The aim is to adopt this
 amendment to the policy in two weeks if there are no objections. Public
 discussion here about it would be great, and folks can contact me
 privately too if they want to.

 +1 for this change.

 But I wonder if we shouldn't go further: I find it really ugly that we
 have to put the TM next to the GNOME logo on our t-shirts, for
 instance... If this is covered by the many non-commercial and informal
 uses that will omit the symbol, then I actually wonder: when should it
 not be omitted?

I think that the use of the logo on a t-shirt isn't an informal use
(and maybe not a non-commercial one either, sorry for the double
negatives). Of course, these guidelines only apply to third parties, not
to the holder of the mark so if the GNOME Foundation itself wanted to make
shirts without the notices it could. Using the notices is a good idea
because it lets people know that there is a mark and that it's being used
in certain ways. The law looks to whether the mark was well known as such
and notice is a part of this. (And we'd want to make sure we protect the
mark enough to stop others from abusing it.) As with most aspects of
trademark law, it's really about whether people would be confused about
the mark and notices help with that. Notices can also be really small :)

You definitely make an interesting point, and sometimes trademark policies
require only the use of the notices either the first time it's used or in
some prominent place. I think adding this new provision generally makes it
much easier to do what we are already doing. There are also other parts of
the guidelines that could also be revisited and improved, but it's
probably worth fixing the problem that we have in front of us now and
that's easy to fix. I don't think we should allow third parties to use our
logo on shirts without including our notice. The Foundation could also
grant exceptions on a case by case basis if that makes sense (the policy
does invite people to email and ask for more permissions).

I'm at OSCON so sorry if I'm slow to respond!

karen

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proposal to change GNOME's trademark guidelines

2011-07-27 Thread Karen Sandler

Various people have pointed out that a part of the GNOME Foundation
Trademark Usage Guidelines for Third Parties could be improved.

The Guidelines are at: http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/

The section entitled Use Proper Notice of Trademark reads:

 Identify GNOME Trademarks appropriately as a registered trademark
 (using the circled-R symbol  ®), or as an unregistered trademark
 (using the TM symbol  ) or an unregistered service mark (using
 the SM symbol  #8480;). Check the list of GNOME Trademarks found
 at http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/ to verify the correct
 symbol to use for each name.

This section is quite broad, and is only modified by the somewhat vague
Fair Use section. Unfortunately, if taken literally, it would prevent
the use of the name GNOME in emails and package names without using the
appropriate notice characters, as well as in other places where it would
probably be a hassle to include. We don't want this, right?

I'm proposing this additional language (which is based on text in other
free software trademark policies) to be added in the same section, after
that paragraph:

 This requirement is waived in all contexts where such marks are not
 normally included, such as email, online discussion, package names,
 non-graphical advertisements (when permitted), and academic papers.
 We encourage the use of the symbol whenever possible, but recognize
 that many non-commercial and informal uses will omit it.

We want to make sure that people can use GNOME software and talk about it
freely without unreasonable restrictions. The aim is to adopt this
amendment to the policy in two weeks if there are no objections. Public
discussion here about it would be great, and folks can contact me
privately too if they want to.

thanks!
karen




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my new GNOME blog

2011-07-24 Thread Karen Sandler

Hi!

I've launched a blog where I plan to talk about my work for the GNOME
Foundation as executive director:

http://blogs.gnome.org/gnomg/

I've just published the following post, the first, I hope, of many!
Hopefully the blog will also be on the planet soon.

-Karen


 So were just over 3 weeks into my full time stint at GNOME. I feel a
 little bad about the fact that its taken me so long to get a blog
 going, but it took some time to settle on a name and make a
 hackergotchi that looked at least ok! (I wont list these as
 accomplishments)

 I think for the next couple of weeks I may just post a few things now
 and again as I remember them so you can get an idea of what Im
 working on as I get oriented. Im still very new, and even though
 Ive been involved with GNOME as a lawyer for a couple of years, Im
 really still learning about the Foundation, the community and the
 software (though I should note that I have been a user and fan for
 over five years).

 So, in no particular order, a few of the things Ive done:

 * I set up quite a lot of calls with people in the GNOME community 
 some contributors and some advisory board member representatives.
 There will be many more of these to come I think. (I hope! So far
 its very helpful to hear from people what theyre thinking about
 GNOME)

 * I contacted someone using the GNOME name in a domain name and
 reminded them of our trademark guidelines. After some initial fuss,
 they agreed to transfer the domain name. Ive got a few more of these
 to do. They take some research to be confident that youve got your
 facts right before writing. And hopefully these people will channel
 those efforts to contributing to GNOME.

 * I got the foundation unsuspended in the state of California (this
 is where being a lawyer helps!) Due to I think a very old situation
 of missed filings, this needed to be corrected. Thanks to James
 Vasile and Marc Miller at SFLC and Rosanna Yuen at GNOME

 * I read up on git. Yes, Ive been an svn user primarily in the past,
 so it was time. That and I need to update GNOMEs website.

 * I did some prep work for the panel Im moderating at the Desktop
 Summit on Copyright Assignment, a very hot topic these days.

 * I talked to Marina about the great work she and Stormy and a lot of
 others have done with the GNOME Womens Outreach Program. I was
 totally inspired by the program and its success so far. We talked
 about what we can do at the Desktop Summit, and we contacted Claudia,
 Lydia and Celeste at KDE, about setting up a joint Womens Networking
 BoF. Im really looking forward to it.

 * Attended my first board meeting and my first advisory board meeting
 (the advisory board meeting was on my first day). I also got to my
 new role just in time to welcome the new board to *their* new
 positions. The old board deserves a lot of thanks for their hard
 work, and I hope to learn from both the outgoing and incoming board
 members.

 * I set up some interviews and other speaking engagements. Ill post
 about those here as they happen! for now you can read the interview I
 did with Joe Zonker Brockmeier.

 Ive of course been up to more than that in these three and a half
 weeks  these are just a few of the things that come to mind. Now
 that Ive got a space to talk about them, Ill try to write about
 things more as they happen.

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