Re: Running for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors.
On Wed, 2022-06-01 at 14:05 -0700, Jeremy Allison via foundation- announce wrote: > > I would respectfully like to submit my candidacy for the GNOME > Foundation Board of Directors. I wholeheartedly endorse this candidacy. Jeremy is a great person to work with! Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Open Letter to the IT community, the GNOME Foundation, and Niel McGovern
To the Foundation membership: please don't dignify this rant with a response. The poster is not even a Foundation member. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: New GNOME online code of conduct
On Wed, 2019-09-25 at 10:59 +0100, Robert McQueen wrote: > > The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors is pleased to announce our > new code of conduct for online behavior. Thanks for the announcement, Rob! For the record, the link in this announcement goes to my personal web page's scratch space. The new CoC is not uploaded to wiki.gnome.org yet - I'm putting it up now. In the scratch space you'll see broken links and not the final formatting. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Pants of Thanks nominations are open
Dear everyone, The Foundation Board invites you to nominate people for the Pants of Thanks that is traditionally awarded during GUADEC. We give this award to someone who has done outstanding work for the community. Please mail bo...@gnome.org with your nominations! Thanks, Federico on behalf of the Board ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as > a whole? All the previous replies have good ideas. We should definitely enable remote hackfests. Is this "just" about gnome.org hosting a WebRTC service which we can already use through practically any web browser? I don't know! In terms of engagement, we need conferences on the scale of GUADEC or Gnome Asia, but in the Americas, and outside the United States, where travel+visas are problematic. But in terms of environmental impact, I am not sure whether this would enable fewer people to fly across the ocean for their yearly "big GNOME conference", or if it would encourage *more* people to fly cross-continent to the new conference. I wonder if it is possible to get reports on power consumption from things like our CI runners. Maybe even power profiles for individual runs? Or does the way things run in datacenters, where *our* CI runs are not the only thing running on a server, make this not entirely trivial to do? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Events Code of Conduct: CoC Working Group status
On Mon, 2018-07-30 at 13:52 +0200, Benjamin Berg wrote: > Could the Board please clarify what the status of the working group > is? Hi, Benjamin, The work of the Code of Conduct Working Group is finished now; all matters around the Code of Conduct are delegated to the Committee now. We have no further expectation or requirement from the Working Group. The board thanks the Code of Conduct Working Group, and confirms that future work on the Code of Conduct will be performed by the Code of Conduct Committee and approved by the Board. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Events Code of Conduct and New Committee Ratification
On Fri, 2018-07-06 at 16:58 +0200, Benjamin Berg wrote: > > I have a number of questions about the events Code of Conduct. Is > there > another way to submit questions rather than only during the AGM? You can ask here or to code-of-conduct-commit...@gnome.org :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: User Data Manifesto
On Mon, 2015-08-17 at 11:31 +0100, Allan Day wrote: Our friends at ownCloud have been in touch to see if we want to endorse the next version of the User Data Manifesto [1]. This is due to be launched at the ownCloud contributor conference at the end of August. A number of other prominent FOSS projects are lined up to also endorse it. Any thoughts? Let's do it! Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: preparing for the use of the Privacy campaign funds
On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 14:00 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote: Therefore, to anyone reading this, in light of the formation of the Safety Team and the safety/privacy BoF session that occurred at GUADEC, it would help tremendously if you (as individuals and as a team) would start coming up with a specific action plan and make a proposal to the board. You are probably better positioned than us to focus on this particular task. Thanks for bringing this up. We don't have a concrete plan yet, unfortunately. There is some movement in individual bugs as per the wiki [1], but there is no concerted effort yet to achieve anything in particular. Part of the problem is that we have many scattered ideas (sandboxing! TLS! UI research! Tor! Service APIs!), but nothing to connect them yet. Also I think we need to get familiar with how other platforms attack these problems (iOS, Android, Ubuntu phone). As such, we don't have any particular ideas for how to use the funds from the privacy campaign. Bounties are one possibility, but we would need to find very self-contained items that can be solved cheaply. The allocated funds are not substantial enough for a big development project. I'm not sure if it would be better to dilute the funds into bounties, or to bring several people together into some sort of hackfest - even bringing in people outside of GNOME, but who are more familiar with how privacy/sandboxing/etc. are implemented in other platforms. I'll ask people from the safety/privacy meeting to post what they've been doing. I know Elad has been chasing the SSL/TLS bug around the apps we ship. I've been playing with cgroups and namespaces and getting nowhere :) [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/SafetyTeam Sorry not to have a concrete answer for now - this is how we stand. Federico -- GPG fingerprint - RSA 4096: 263F 590F 7E0F E1CB 3EA2 74B0 1676 37EB 6FB8 DCCE ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror
On Thu, 2013-08-15 at 11:03 +0200, 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. This is great news! It should make it easier for people to keep independent/experimental branches of Gnome modules and have a place to collaborate. There's no intention to support pull requests or to depend in any way in this service, this is just a nice-to-have to serve the GitHub's community and user base. There is an API to probe pull requests, and it is described at http://developer.github.com/v3/pulls/ I don't know if there's an RSS feed or something for pull requests. But either with that or with the API, someone could do a weekend hack to notify module maintainers of pull requests, maybe. In any case, having the mirror is great news. Thanks for all the work to make it happen :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Announcing GNOME's official GitHub mirror
On Fri, 2013-08-16 at 19:09 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: Hosting services in general are not SaaSS. Maybe some specific thing about GitHub is SaaSS; if so, can you explain the details? Please take discussions of GitHub off-list. The Foundation Board will discuss the GNOME mirror during its next meeting, and this thread is just feeding noise into the mailing list. Thanks, Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: ask.gnome.org for developers
On Thu, 2013-06-20 at 17:46 -0007, Jim Nelson wrote: I'd like to toss in my two cents in support of a Stack Exchange-style GNOME developer site. I think Stack Exchange is a proven winner for developers helping each other with technical problems. Ask Ubuntu has gone over very well, and it strikes me that an Ask GNOME would be popular and useful. Check this out if you haven't seen it before: https://help.openstreetmap.org/ It looks and feels like Stack Exchange, and it works extremely well (... as far as I've used it to ask questions about editing OpenStreetMap). The software that runs it is http://www.osqa.net/ Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Services is now MeetBot capable
On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 12:01 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote: from today the Services bot will be able to manage / log meetings by using the MeetBot plugin. This is pretty awesome. Thanks for setting up nice services like these! Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Bugzilla upgrade work
On Fri, 2012-12-14 at 13:42 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote: If anyone wants to join, I'll work on Bugzilla during Dec 22 - Dec 30 together with Andrea. Thanks for doing this really valuable work :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few observations about GIMPNET
On Mon, 2012-10-15 at 08:03 -0400, Joanmarie Diggs wrote: * determine who owns this network * verify if it is really unmaintained * if it really is unmaintained, offer to become a maintainer * improve it with the specified features Gimpnet is very old. It predates Freenode! As far as I remember, Manish Singh (yosh on IRC) and Zach Beane (xach) used to admin the network. I don't know if they still do that, and I don't know their current emails. Anders Carlsson may know something - wasn't Gimpnet basically a server in Berkeley's XCF facility and another one in Sweden? Apologies if some or all of the above is incorrect - this is really, really old infrastructure (think 1995, pre-GIMP 1.0). Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Brian Cameron - Stepping down from the board
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 :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - January 7, 2010
On Tue, 2010-01-19 at 13:09 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote: * Co-locating in 2011. Vincent talked to Cornelius Schumacher, and the KDE community is very interested in co-locating. The GNOME board would like to first discuss with the advisory board before making any decisions, so this is a topic for the next advisory board meeting. Co-location would be awesome. Dave Neary and I had a brief chat during GCDS about how we could co-locate better. Behold our observations on the spacetime implications of co-located conferences: The schedules for the KDE and the GNOME tracks need to coincide. During GCDS, the schedules of Akademy and GUADEC didn't coincide, that is, the talks were not scheduled at the same times and they did not have the same duration. So, one almost never had a chance to see people from the other project - when you were in a break they were in the talks, and vice-versa. There needs to be a physical central common area where people can mingle, get some networking, and communicate. The GCDS auditorium, a postmodern fantasy where structure does *not* follow social spaces [1], had no default central meeting area. People scattered around to find a place to sit in small groups and converse. Coupled with the lack of synchronized schedules, this made it really hard to see people from the other project. If the chosen venue doesn't have a physical common area, we sould delimit a place so that psychologically you *want* to be there when you are not attending a talk. Were the lightning talks combined, or were they separated between GNOME/KDE? I can't remember. They need to be combined so that both projects get to see each other's cool stuff :) [1] http://vasarhelyi.eu/books/A_pattern_language_book/apl205/apl205.htm [2] Hot damn, the entire A pattern language online! http://vasarhelyi.eu/books/A_pattern_language_book/apl.htm Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Sat, 2007-12-15 at 15:06 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Federico Mena Quintero Who's on the potential maintainership team for PGO, so that we may inquire them about the progress? Sorry, but I'm not going to get caught up in pointless crap like this. Some folks may think it's okay to treat me differently as a result of attempted character assassination, but you should know better Federico. For the record, I'm *not* taking part in said coup. I'm just going through my to-do list, and in there is something to figure out the state of Planet. I've already said -- before your emails and after them -- that I'm writing down the guidelines and will have a maintainership team in order to resolve the minor maintenance issues with Planet GNOME. The potential co-maintainers have already had experience doing so, and were asked months ago. I just find it funny that this has been going on since September. That's three months to write a few guidelines and give the OK to some co-maintainers. So either the list of guidelines is horribly long, or the co-maintainers are not doing their job. I'd like to know who they are, if you please, so that I can help :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 08:24 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: The module's maintainership isn't sucking in general, but there have been a number of periods in which it hasn't been great. Please don't make this out to be worse than it is, that kind of approach doesn't help resolve anything. What I want to resolve is this: * There are regular complaints about lack of responsiveness in the maintainership of Planet Gnome. * The process is not transparent. When someone mails you, add my blog, or update my hackergotchi, no one but that person will know if he got a reply, or what the reasons were for his request getting rejected. * There's no way to know what makes a hackergotchi that will be accepted, or a whole blog for that matter. Planet Gnome has trascended a personal project into being a community resource; congrats on that! PGO is the only thing I read *outside* my normal aggregator because it is *so nice* to look at. Your maintainership on that front has clearly been very good; now what I want to do is to make it all smoother for everyone. I've spoken to potential maintainership team members who already have direct experience with pgo maintenance, and have been working on sucking guidelines out of my head and into publishable form. What you're asking for is already on the way. Ah, that's good to know. Who's on the team, so that we may inquire them about the progress? Sucking guidelines out of my head --- that's exactly the kind of problem we need to solve. If this is not documented, every rejection seems arbitrary. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Sat, 2007-12-15 at 09:51 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Federico Mena Quintero What I want to resolve is this: So do I, as already noted. Sucking guidelines out of my head --- that's exactly the kind of problem we need to solve. That's why I mentioned it. But please don't ignore the question I asked: Who's on the potential maintainership team for PGO, so that we may inquire them about the progress? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 10:30 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: planet-web already exists, but making it a free-for-all isn't a useful solution. I re-read http://perkypants.org/blog/2005/06/10/1118362980/ and it mentions the possibility of making the SVN module essentially a free-for-all. .. And I quite like that possibility :) We can certainly have some guidelines as to what a suitable blog is (though if we want to keep all the current feeds, simply is vaguely a contributor to GNOME and tends to post in English is about appropriate). For p.g.o I think it has worked really well to *not* have strictly GNOME content; I'm sure many people appreciate ocassional cool pictures from a music festival or sexy recipes. If you are feeling super-paranoid, we can have a Planet module on bugzilla, and we can point people to a page with instructions: 1. Get a bugzilla account. 2. File a bug under the Planet module. 3. A number of Trusted People(tm) get automatically CCed on the bug; this can be yourself and other old fogeys. 4. We debate to death on the bug itself, so that the requester can be aware of why his blog is / is not appropriate. 5. The blog gets added to the SVN module. Though I prefer the first option: simply have some guidelines, and let people figure things out by common sense / meritocracy / whatever. [I have a git-svn mirror of the planet-web module now, and my trigger finger is getting twitchy ;) ] Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 14:05 -0400, Claudio Saavedra wrote: Put another way, I would find it uncomfortable to say someone sorry, you don't belong here, so these situations should be avoided. I think that adding a requirement for the applicant to have someone from the community to sponsor her/his request (similar to the approach used in the Foundation membership) would contribute to avoid these situations most of the times. Sure. So we say, Create a bug under the Planet module. CC your sponsor, and in the initial comment write, sponsorname, I want to be added to planet. Can you please vouch for me? The sponsor then goes and adds a comment, this human has been working on $cool_project and has been blogging about it (or other GNOME-related activities); his blog should definitely be syndicated on Planet. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 17:19 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Some editorial control for planet is essential - there are already so many feeds that the planet's become less useful - we're up to 50 or 60 posts a day. The question is how to marry reactivity to requests and accountability with that editorial control. We have no editorial control. Get over it :) There are people who seldom post about GNOME-related things, and their feeds nevertheless remain in Planet. I only know of once instance when someone was removed (voluntarily?) in the past. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Fri, 2007-09-07 at 21:56 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: I know Planet GNOME maintenance has been patchy -- I've been thinking about ways to alleviate that while keeping strong editorship in place. The Board has prompted me about this too, so I have plenty of incentive to resolve it without any of the poop flinging we've seen in this thread. Does this need to be any more complicated than having a planet-gnome module on SVN, and a README that says to add someone to the feed, put him in people.xml? Then anyone who has a SVN account can add someone else to Planet. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?)
On Sat, 2007-09-08 at 10:17 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote: Hi, Olav, You are ignoring the central place. You need somewhere all GNOME devs are able to commit. This is what is so wrong about www.gnome.org/~foo/git/. The interesting question is, why are people doing ~foo/git/blah in the first place? Because it is no longer possible to create new SVN modules easily, as it was when we used CVS. By easily I mean that it you want to create a module, you don't need to ask anyone to do it for you. Think of a gnome.org developer who has just written a new and exciting program, and wants to make it available. You are in that beautiful moment when the program works well enough that you want to show it around, and you are pumped up! The only thing that goes through your mind is publish, publish, publish! So you start writing an exciting blog post full of nice screenshots and plans, and you write you can get MyProg at svn.gnome.org/svn/... Oh, shit. Giant brick wall. You cannot create the module by yourself. You google for gnome creating new svn modules and you get pointed to http://developer.gnome.org/tools/svn.html - which leads you to http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/import.html if you want to import your code, but THAT WON'T WORK because it still talks about cvs import. Okay... so you know that the developer's site is pretty bad and outdated, so you go to check the wiki. Go to live.gnome.org and type svn in the search box. Great, the first search hit is http://live.gnome.org/NewSVNRepos - which tells you mail an admin with this list of requirements. Download page? Project homepage? Come on, this is my first it barely works release - I don't have all that set up yet! So you are stuck. Ask an admin to create a new module? That will take days. Your energy and happiness go to hell. It is very sad that even if you already have an SVN account, you cannot create a module by yourself. Back when we used CVS, anyone with an account could do cvs import, just as described in the developer's site. People botched it up and imported generated files, etc., but that could be easily fixed. People are using ~foo/git/bar because *it works* without having to ask someone else to import your code for you. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 16:21 -0400, Claudio Saavedra wrote: That's the way things are handled ATM. With the exception that only Jeff is supposed to commit to the appropriate file (there's a README or HACKING somewhere there). Well, we can certainly stea^H^H^H^Hfree Jeff from the drudgery of having to do that :) What's the module on SVN? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Special GNOME event in California next week
El sáb, 14-04-2007 a las 04:12 +1000, Jeff Waugh escribió: I am particularly sensitive to the issues you've raised here, and they've been at the top of my mind working on this over the last 9 or so months. I am satisfied that it has been consultative (with a particular subset of the community), in line with GNOME's mission, acceptable to the Board (I am 100% responsible to the Board for doing this right), and not a subversion of the desired natural order of GNOME decision making [2]. What if there had been no continuity in the membership of the Board from the previous year to this one? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of SoC meeting
El mié, 28-02-2007 a las 19:46 +0100, Vincent Untz escribió: SoC/WSOP mentors from previous years: Behdad Esfahbod, Shaun McCance, Danilo Segan, Joe Shaw, Vincent Untz Bleh. Sorry that I couldn't attend, but Oralia and I were jet-setting around Belgium ;) + performance analysis projects are interesting but might not produce concrete results in the end Interesting. How did you come to this conclusion? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2007/jan/04
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2007/Jan/04 - Board transition meeting Attendance: Anne Østergaard Behdad Esfahbod Dave Neary Federico Mena Jeff Waugh Quim Gil Rosanna Yuen Vincent Untz No attendance: Glynn Foster (regrets) MINUTES === * Overview: - We are still in the process of hiring a director of business development for the Foundation (executive director): - Someone who will make a revenue model for the Foundation. - Work with companies around GNOME to figure out GNOME and the Foudation can grow in terms of revenue and partnerships. In general, things that are not fulfilled by the community. - We interviewed people, including Quim himself; didn't hire anyone. Lots of discussion on the board-only mailing list. - Board's wiki: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate - Mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - General list for the Board, not visible to the public. http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/private/board-list/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Really only the Board, not employees of the Fundation (i.e. Zana as our administrator). We used this list to discuss the hiring process for the bizdev director, since Quim was interested in the position - Quim was removed from the board-only list for that time. http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/private/board-only/ - Dave sent a draft of a GNOME Annual Report for 2006 to board-list. It will be printed in glossy paper (~300 copies), and will be sent to Advisory Board members and donors who have given over USD 50 to the Foundation. * Financial situation: - http://www.gnome.org/~zana/GNOMETransactionReport.pdf (September to September) - Last year we got USD 109,773 in corporate sponsorship (Advisory Board fees, etc.). - We got USD 13,973 from paypal + cheques. - How much money are we guaranteed to have this year? We invoiced people for USD 110,000 this year. Doesn't include PayPal, and what else? Total money in this year: USD 241,223 - includes SIGGRAPH, GIMP About USD 200,000 solely for GNOME. This didn't include about $60,000 which came into GUADEC but went straight to GNOME Hispano. - How much is GUADEC going to cost? European sponsorship for GUADEC: 50-60,000 euros for GUADEC. GUADEC cost around EUR 120,000, but that's closely related to the amount of sponsorship we get. - How much outgoing money can we expect? - We are paying USD 50 for each wire transfer (!). - We pay Zana USD 22,500 a year (part-time job). - There's a one-time cost for having employees, about USD 500 per month. - WSOP cost USD 20,000. - GNOME Event Box cost ??? - We used about USD 6,000 to sponsor travel. - We have a bit more than USD 80,000 in the bank (we are also holding the GIMP's funds). - We'll have about USD 100,000 guaranteed income from the Advisory Board this year. - We can probably raise about USD 200,000 up-front for GUADEC. - We need to change banks soon, but need to ask the lawyers first. We need to know if we need a US citizen/resident on the board who signs cheques and authorises transfers. - Miguel resigned from being president of the Foundation. this was never written down by the lawyers --- the by-laws say that the Foundation needs a president. - Summary of the financial situation: The budget discussion was mostly brainstorming. Zana gave an overview of our financial situation: we have about $80,000 in the bank, and we're aiming for a budget of $300,000 this year, including GUADEC. * Boston Summit: - People said that it was not as well organized as in the previous years. - Jeff says it was very productive anyway. - Jeff says we shouldn't do a talk-fest, but rather a hack-fest. - Need better facilities; the Media center was a bit too spread out, in contrast with the Stata center previously. - Dave: This year, do what we do for GUADEC. Find 2-3 volunteers in Boston who are willing to do
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2007/jan/04
Oops, I forgot this bit: * OSGeo: We agreed an administration fee of 6% with OSGeo. We authorised a payment of $18,800 to them, based on their grant request. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Free call board meetings (was Re: Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO)
El sáb, 06-01-2007 a las 07:06 +0100, Quim Gil escribió: We had our first 2007 meeting last Thursday. Every board member was able to call to a free phone number in her country and the conference happened somewhere in telecom space. This will be the system for the rest of meetings this year. Thanks Glynn Sun for the service. Also thanks to RedHat for the conferencing infrastructure provided in previous years. Yes, indeed! This is a very nice gift from Sun. [See, Glynn? You *are* a rock star.] Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Oct/25
Clearing out the drawer of old minutes... GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/Oct/25 === Attendance: Quim Federico Zana Vincent Jonathan Anne Dave No attendance: Jeff Waugh (regrets) MINUTES === * Intel server: Powered like a server machine. Big upright form factor. Cannot put it in the Red Hat colo because it takes up too much space even with the rackmount adapter. Tried to send it back to Intel when it arrived, to exchange it for a different form factor, but this failed. We need to ask OSL to see if they can host it in their colo. It's not a very good desktop machine; it's really loud. What to use it for? We were using it for backups, but we have a better solution now. We don't really know what to use it for right now. GNOME Hispano was promised a server (or access to one) at GUADEC. Sun has not been able to provide one. DECISION: ship the machine to Portland until we figure out what to do with it. [update 2006/dec - the machine is in Portland now; thanks to Red Hat!] Shipping costs: to be figured out. Maybe Red Hat can pay for shipping. ACTION: JRB to figure out how to send the machine. ACTION: Dave to contact Portland to see who should receive the machine. * Killermundi is now public and in marketing-list. * Code of conduct: * Need to be able to just point people to the CoC eventually. * Do we think that the Board should come out to the membership and say that the CoC is a good idea? * We need someone to write a sample mail to board-list on how we would present the CoC to the Foundation's membership. * ACTION: Anne to write the sample mail on the Code of Conduct. * To announce in foundation-list: Izabel Cerqueira Valverde (Brazil) and Clytie Siddall (Australia) has joined the membership committee. * Latinoware: 1500 dollars for marketing material is too much. DECISION: We'll give them USD 750, and Dave will fly down there. The Foundation will pay for his travel. ACTION: Dave to mail OSU OSL about Sun machine ACTION: Dave to ask about racking a 5U Intel machine at OSU OSL ACTION: Dave to put JRB in contact with Corey Shields for delivery of T2000 ACTION: Dave to get drunk on caipirinhas ACTION: Budget 2007 - Dave to do a first draft * We need to let the incoming Board know how much money we expect to get next year, and what the expected expenses are. We have such and such funding requests outstanding, etc. ACTION: Jonathan to prepare financial information for the next Board. * Quim: we should announce to foundation-list that we are starting to prepare the budget for next year. Also, we should query the membership: what should we spend our money on? Which events, etc.? * Elections: * Vincent asked the elections committe, but no news yet. * Outstanding question: how many people on next year's Board? DECISION: Seven people for the next Board, just as it is currently. * Process for replacement of members of the Board? * It's too late this year to propose that people run for specific roles in the Board (chairman, secretary, treasurer, etc.). * It would be interesting to know how many new Foundation members we got this year. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidacy :: Glynn Foster
On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 11:26 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote: I don't want to be a rock star, I just want to help. If more suitable candidates are running, I'm happy to cheer them from the sidelines. Too late, Glynn, you *are* already a rock star :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO
On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 00:19 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: This sounds as a strong argument. I wonder if we could get a general agreement on the fact that board members could request refund of these calls. I don't see why not. The Foundation can definitely do this; it's peanuts compared to what we spend on meerkat slippers for board members. PS: The solution might be as simple as calling the board member(s) needing funded calls. Joking aside, this may be harder. It depends on who's hosting the conference calls; some companies don't allow outgoing calls. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO
On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 13:29 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO I will not be running as a candidate for this election, by the way :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO
Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO Federico Mena-Quintero November 2006 Background == In pretty much all the elections for the Board of Directors of the GNOME Foundation, it has been inevitable that the rock stars who nominate themselves are eventually elected. The rock stars are the most prominent hackers who contribute to GNOME. They know that their contributions are valuable, and they wish to give even more of their valuable time to further GNOME's goals: this is why they nominate themselves for the Foundation's Board of Directors. And since everyone in the Foundation knows who they are, they get elected. I have been a Board member of the GNOME Foundation for three or four non-consecutive years. I am also a pretty visible member of the GNOME project, and a busy hacker at Novell. My personal experience in being a Board member is that I never have time to do all the little administrative things that are part of being a Board member, and I end up feeling terrible about myself. This is not a problem only for myself. Other Board members, if they happen to be busy hackers, also suffer from this problem. They never have time to do all the little things that one must do for the Board, and the Board is seen as a nebulous entity that accomplishes nothing. Would you be a good member of the Board? * If you are a rock star hacker (or a busy non-rock star hacker at work), you will not be a good Board member. Don't think that you can squeeze in a couple hours each week; you won't be able to. In the Board you have to do little tasks like answer mails, take minutes, send minutes to the public, be in contact with the companies in the Advisory Board, make plans, etc. If you wouldn't normally have time to participate in a volunteer organization where you do paperwork, the Board is not fit for you. * If you are a hacker, your GUADEC experience will be destroyed. GUADEC is about meeting fellow contributors and talking to them in person. It is about having lunch with them, discussing the technology or your favorite brand of beer. If you are a Board member, during GUADEC you will be in meetings literally all day and you will not be able to talk to fellow hackers. Forget about the parties; you will be too tired to go to them if the meetings are even over by then. * You need 1 hour every two weeks for the regular meetings. You need about 1-2 hours each week to deal with minutiae: your assigned actions, writing mails to people, figuring things out. But this is not 1-2 hours of well-defined work. It's a big context switch from your regular activities, and if you don't like interruptions for paperwork, you'll dread having to do it. If you are the kind of person that forgets what you talked about two weeks ago, you won't be a good Board member. * The Foundation will not reimburse you for the conference calls. The calls are invariable hosted in the USA, so you may have to do long-distance calls every two weeks. We haven't done any work to make the calls through VOIP or anything. So who would be a good member of the Board? === * People who have had experience in running other volunteer organizations. * People who have had experience in administering other people's money. I.e. you could be the Treasurer for the Foundation. * People whose daily jobs don't extend beyond normal work hours: hackers tend to keep working on the stuff from their job even after they go home. * People who are good at paperwork, following up in communications, and who don't mind frequent meetings. But don't let me discourage you === I am not trying to discourage all hackers from nominating themselves for the Board elections. I am just pointing out why being a Board member is not the best idea for everyone. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME nominated for the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration
Dear Foundation members, I'm pleased to inform you that the Board has nominated GNOME for the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration: http://rit.mellon.org/awards The submission looks as follows: The GNOME Foundation would like to nominate the GNOME Project for participation in the 2006 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration. GNOME is a project to create a desktop environment for personal computers based entirely on free software. All of the software produced by the GNOME Project is released under free software licenses. GNOME was the first such project to make a concerted effort in the areas of usability, accessibility, and internationalization. Usability means that we keep people in mind when designing our software. Accessibility means that physically disabled people can use our software. Internationalization means that people of different languages, cultures, and writing systems can use our software. The GNOME Project's software is widely used in the public and private sectors in many countries, including schools and universities. Spain uses GNOME in the regions of Andalucía and Extremadura, where an estimated 400,000 students and teachers are able to use GNOME every day. The South Tyrol region in Italy uses GNOME for 16,000 students. Macedonia uses GNOME in almost 500 computer labs in primary and secondary schools. India uses GNOME in about 2,800 schools, thus serving 500,000 students. GNOME's focus on usability has been a deciding factor for these deployments: GNOME understands that people should not need to be computer experts in order to use computers. Also, GNOME was the first major free software project to support most of the world's written languages, including those like Thai and Arabic which require sophisticated text-handling functions. Along with usability, GNOME has a commitment to accessibility, so that physically disabled people can use their computers adequately. GNOME has built-in support for accessibility technologies such as Braille readers and eye trackers. No other software platform provides this level of support for disabled people. More recently, GNOME was chosen as the building platform for the One Laptop Per Child project, which intends to bring low-cost laptops to primary students across the world. GNOME is especially proud to be part of OLPC. In summary, we can say that the GNOME software is widely appreciated as being useful for education, and it is actually used by hundreds of thousands of students and teachers across the world! Now, everyone keep their fingers crossed :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Aug/02
Hot minutes straight out of the oven! GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/Aug/02 === Attendance: Anne Dave (chairing) Federico (minutes) Jeff Zana No attendance: Jonathan (regrets) Quim (regrets) Vincent (regrets) AGENDA == * Trademark application * Canonical coming into the Advisory Board * Budget * Election reform * Other business OLD ACTIONS === * Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. NOT DONE * JRB to send an update on what hardware has been bought for the event box. DONE - we are missing a small-form-factor machine. * Vincent to work with the membership committee on problems and governance. DONE - the membership committee had a meeting, and they are moving forward. * Vincent to change the template for the notifications that happen upon getting a CVS account: By the way, now that you have CVS account you may want to become a Foundation member!. DONE * Jeff to write a press release for the GTK+ / Foundation announcement. IN PROGRESS * Quim to finish the financials from GUADEC (should be ready by the end of July or August). IN PROGRESS * Quim to finish his GUADEC-HOWTO (ETA: end of August). NOT DONE * Federico to send question to foundation-list: who should get the two Ultra 20 machines? DONE * Dave to contact Miguel Ángel López and Izabel Cerqueira about the Latin American conferences. NOT DONE * Anne to send the trademark licensing agreement to Software Freedom Law Center for approval. NOT DONE. We have the old agreement lying around; we need to update the new one to send it. New action: Anne to contact our pro-bono law firm instead of SFLC. * Quim to talk with Killermundi about the GNOME Store. IN PROGRESS, Quim is in contact with them and they are defining the details. * Dave to mail Zana about rewording the sample contract. DONE - contract is finished and signed by Jonathan. * JRB to mail the draft criteria for an interview for the executive director to board-list. NOT DONE * Federico to ask JP Rosevear about Novell's people going to demo GNOME at SIGGRAPH (Aug 1-3, Boston). DONE - Dave Reveman and other people will go. * Federico to contact Dave Richards about going to GOSCON - ASAP, because we need an abstract to be submitted. DONE - Dave got contacted; is talking to our own Dave Neary about this. * Federico to send GNOME's nomination for the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration. DONE * Zana to mail Federico with her ISV integration guide (articles in Red Hat Magazine), so that Federico can integrate it with the current GNOME Integration Guide. DONE - sent to Federico; not integrated yet. * Dave to ask O'Reilly about comissioning a GNOME book for ISVs under a free documentation license. NOT DONE MINUTES === * Trademark application: - Costs about USD 1,000 to 2,000 to register the foot trademark. - Anne thinks we need to have the mark (foot logo) registered, not just the GNOME name. - Anne will get in contact with Luis and our lawyer. - Luis is in close contact with our lawyers and knows the issues well. - We should keep using Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati, our pro-bono lawyers, for legal matters not related to free software. The Software Freedom Law Center is appropriate for free software concerns. - DECISION: we will register the foot logo. - ACTION: Luis and Anne to talk to our lawyers to restart the trademark process. * Canonical coming into the Advisory Board: - This is great news! - Starting on 2007 with the fee for big companies (USD 10,000) - We need a press release. ACTION: Jeff to draft a press release about Canonical joining the Advisory Board. - Dave suggests that we have another Advisory Board meeting at the beginning of September. ACITON: Federico to announce the meeting to the advisory-board mailing list on Wednesday September 6th. * Budget: - We'll make the final numbers public once the GUADEC budget is done at the end of August. - We are rather poor in the bank right now, but we have many upcoming fees to collect. * Election reform: - Dave contacted the election committee after GUADEC to let them know that we are thinking of changing the format of the Board elections. They said they had no problem updating their software to support the new scheme. - We want a model where people run specifically for certain roles in the Board (president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer): - They would know the responsibilities, so that they won't apply for things they can't perform. - Foundation members may get a better idea of whom to
Re: Ask for schedule board's meetings
On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 13:51 -0400, Germán Poó Caamaño wrote: As a member is our obligation to ask for information, for instance, ask for the minutes of the board's meetings. But, how to ask if we don't know when the meetings happen. We only know it happen every two week, but not exactly or if they didn't take place. So, I ask to the board to publish the schedule of the meetings for this year. I think it is a easy task for the board that can help us to control and ask for information and try to give to them a hand in any task they need. The meetings are scheduled roughly every two weeks, on Wednesdays. If we don't have much to discuss, we may cancel a meeting. We have had trouble with the conference number or the password not working, and thus we had to have the meeting on IRC --- fortunately this only happened about two times. If the minutes don't go out on time, it is entirely my fault. I almost always send the draft minutes to board-list for revision on the same day as the meeting, and almost always I forget to send the minutes a few days later to the public foundation-list. If you don't see the minutes on foundation-list by the Friday of the week on which a meeting is scheduled, feel free to kick my ass via mail :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Apr/05
Dusting out the drawer of old minutes... GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/04/05 == Attendance: Dave (Chairing, minutes) Vincent Luis Jonathan Rosanna Jeff (0:10) Regrets: Anne Missing: Federico Actions: Luis to mail boston-social@gnome.org to look for volunteers to represent us at Boston Usenix and Boston LWE - DONE! Dave to be our liaison with marketing-list to set up the basic structure of the new www.gnome.org - ongoing Dave to request a contract from Quim for GUADEC - ongoing. We expect something by Easter. Federico to mail advisory-board-list about what members would like to obtain from the Foundation. - We'll pick it up at the meeting. Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. - ongoing. Jeff describes Ghosts of past Conferences. Something we should do for GUADEC. Luis to send mail RE LWE/Usenix: done GUADEC meetings - Deciding dates times for advisory board and board meetings Board meeting before and Advisory after is a good idea. -Dave: We should split up the all-day board meeting so we don't wear out. -Advisory board is on Thursday, June 29th Advisory board - Preparing the meeting - Need an agenda - luis: Should we keep it to a single agenda? - bolsh: Want to turn it into something where they go to them frequently - jeff: turn it into a long term agenda Action: Get Advisory board rep for RH -Done: Gerry Riveros is representing Advisory Board fees - -We're going to go to a January billing period. Prorate people. No one has been billed yet. Axis Informática wanting to sell products with the GNOME logo (see Rodrigo's mail) -Reuse the german contract for this group (initially) -Turn it into a generic TM agreemark that people can use -Action: Contact lawyers to make sure our generic contract can work. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Questions for deployments of GNOME
Are you a deployment of GNOME? Are you like the City of Largo, Florida, or like the districts of Extremadura and Andalucía in Spain, who have big installations of machines running GNOME? At the GNOME Foundation we are conducting a little, informal study of how we can make your lives easier. If you are in charge of the technical part of a GNOME deployment, we would greatly appreciate it if you could answer the questions here: http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2006-06.html#questions-for-deployments Please mail your replies to [EMAIL PROTECTED] A summary of the replies will be published during GUADEC this year. Thank you! Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Required: Administrator for the Foundation
Hi, The GNOME Foundation is in need of a part-time administrator based in the USA. Our administrator will: 1. Collect, sort and summarise mail for the Board. 2. Handle bills in a timely manner. 3. Prepare checks for the Board to sign. 4. Track donations and fees. 5. Maintain a list of Board contacts. 6. Send out Friends of GNOME gifts to donors. 7. Keep the boards files in order, and sending expenses (when appropriate) to the accountant. 8. Handle the purchase and preparation of materials for tradeshows. 9. Attend board meetings bi-weekly as appropriate, and prepare status updates. 10. Be computer literate. Preferably Linux literate. 11. There is no number 11. Proximity to Boston, MA is very desirable, though not mandatory. Please send your CV/resume in plain text to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Event Box for North America
On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 16:44 -0400, Fernando San Martín Woerner wrote: Could be this be able for Latin America too? I'd *strongly* advise against sending machines from the USA to Latin America. At least not to Mexico. It is a truly tremendous pain in the ass to get hardware out of customs. It took me 8 months of constant phone-calling, chasing a customs agent around, and letter-writing to get two *new* machines out of customs. If you send *used* hardware around, you'll never get it out of customs (the law, for incredibly stupid reasons, makes it practically impossible to import used computers). So, go with caution. Customs laws and corruption within customs offices can really, really kill a nice project like the event box. I'd suggest constraining an event box to reside within an area where it is guaranteed that it will get to its destination in a few days. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Mar/01
Late minutes, sorry. GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/03/01 == Attendance: Anne Dave (+30 mins) Federico (minutes) Jeff Luis Vincent No attendance: Jonathan (regrets) PREVIOUS ACTIONS * Jeff to organize and contact people in various countries and regions to act as local press contacts. (ongoing; he contacted various people and is following up) * JRB to finish job description for administrative needs. (ongoing, sort of done) * Anne to start process for GUADEC 2007 selection (DONE) * Federico to organize next call at Novell (NOT DONE; to be done for the next call) * Luis to mail boston-social@gnome.org to look for volunteers to represent us at Boston Usenix and Boston LWE (ongoing) * Anne to send her draft program to foundation-list and put it up in the web page (need to try again because of moderation issues) * Dave to be our liaison with marketing-list to set up the basic structure of the new www.gnome.org (ongoing as Dave was not in the call) * Federico to ask Rodrigo what we got Killermundi to sign (DONE) * Luis to help marketing-list prepare a press release for the GNOME/W3C SVG anouncement (NOT DONE) * Dave to formally invite the Software Freedom Law Center to be a member of the Advisory Board (DONE) * JRB to send out mugs and mouse pads to outstanding donors, and thank-you notes as well (ongoing, as JRB was not in the call) * Luis to find business card template and send it to board-list (DONE) NEW ACTIONS === * Dave to request a contract from Quim. * Quim to write a formal letter of invitation for the people who need to get visas. Quim to find someone in Spain to contact the ministry of foreign affairs. * Jeff to start writing an agenda for the Advisory Board meeting (DEADLINE: March 08). * Federico to write his paper for the Advisory Board (DEADLINE: March 08) * Federico to mail advisory-board-list about what members would like to get out of the Foundation. (DEADLINE: March 08) * Jeff to ask the Advisory Board about funding GNOME through OSDL, or funding it directly. * Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. * Dave to resurrect German contract from last year so that we can use it for Axis Informática. AGENDA == Hiring an administrator: - JRB was not in the call, so we'll postpone this. GUADEC: - Travel budget: 20K euro is set aside for sending people to the conference. - Credit card / handling cash advances: postponed until we have Quim on a call, or on the mailing list. - Sponsorship: we have Nokia on board as cornerstone sponsor; further progress to be confirmed with Quim. - Visa requests: we need someone from Spain to contact the ministry of foreign affairs. We need a formal letter of invitation. - Travel requests: need update from Quim. - In general, we request that Quim send a status report one day before each Board meeting. Advisory board call: - We don't have a date yet. - We don't have an agenda. - Federico to get off his lazy ass and finish writing up the requirements. - Jeff to start writing an agenda for the Advisory Board meeting. - Federico to mail advisory-board-list about what members would like to get out of the Foundation. - Idea is to have the adv. board call in two or four weeks from now; we obviously need the agenda first. OSDL participation: - Companies are starting to perceive funding GNOME vs. funding OSDL as an either/or proposition, but OSDL could act as a pipeline to fund projects or conferences related to free desktops. - We need to ask the OSDL steering committee for funding. - This should be raised with the advisory board. - Jeff to ask the Advisory Board about funding GNOME through OSDL, or funding it directly. Technical project meeting idea: - Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. Exhibition materials: - Anne is working on printing out materials for Linux Forum in Copenhagen. Anne needs links to extra materials. Dave suggests http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/MarketingMaterial Axis Informática wanting to sell products with the GNOME logo: - Dave to resurrect German contract from last year so that we can use it for Axis Informática. Trade shows: - Dave contacted Aaron Seigo about participating in Open Source Development Workshops; he's okay with that. - We should ask the Advisory Board for funding so that we can send the right people. - Novell is interesting because we can position GNOME + Mono as a good platform. Getting back in touch with our legal representation: -
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Mar/15
More late minutes. GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/03/15 == Attendance: Anne Dave Federico Jonathan Quim (guest starring) Vincent No attendance: Jeff Luis (regrets) PREVIOUS ACTIONS * Jeff to organize and contact people in various countries and regions to act as local press contacts. (ongoing; he contacted various people and is following up) * JRB to finish job description for administrative needs. (ongoing, sort of done) * Federico to organize next call at Novell (NOT DONE; to be done for the next call) * Luis to mail boston-social@gnome.org to look for volunteers to represent us at Boston Usenix and Boston LWE (ongoing) * Anne to send her draft program to foundation-list and put it up in the web page (need to try again because of moderation issues) * Dave to be our liaison with marketing-list to set up the basic structure of the new www.gnome.org (ongoing as Dave was not in the call) * Luis to help marketing-list prepare a press release for the GNOME/W3C SVG anouncement (NOT DONE) * JRB to send out mugs and mouse pads to outstanding donors, and thank-you notes as well (ongoing, as JRB was not in the call) * Dave to request Quim for a copy of a contract with the Generalidat describing what they are paying for this GUADEC. * Quim to write a formal letter of invitation for the people who need to get visas. Quim to find someone in Spain to contact the ministry of foreign affairs. * Jeff to start writing an agenda for the Advisory Board meeting (DEADLINE: March 08). DONE * Federico to write his paper for the Advisory Board (DEADLINE: March 08) * Federico to mail advisory-board-list about what members would like to get out of the Foundation. (DEADLINE: March 08) * Jeff to ask the Advisory Board about funding GNOME through OSDL, or funding it directly. * Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. * Dave to resurrect German contract from last year so that we can use it for Axis Informática. DONE NEW ACTIONS === * Federico to remind people to submit abstracts, and announce the confirmation date. * Vincent to update www.gnome.org to mention the call for papers deadline. * Jonathan to ask Quim about invoicing, and to finish the budget ASAP. * Federico to mail Dave today (Mar. 15) with the agenda for the Advisory Board meeting. * Anne to take care of GNOME joining ODF-Alliance: http://www.odfalliance.org/about.html All present board members in agreement. AGENDA == * We have hired Rosanna Yuen for a period of one month. * We are still looking for an administrator! Zana is working for us as a stopgap measure. Tentative date for hiring a full-time administrator: end of April. Needs to be USA-based for administrative and legal reasons. * GUADEC report by Quim: Budget: No figures yet, but Quim feels safe given that we are not paying for the venue, and we already have good sponsortship. Infrastructure: Bungalow-based camping in Villanova; there is public transportation between camp site and conference site. The bungalows are actually nicer than the youth hostel; the price is about the same. At 5 people per bungalow (with air conditioning and microwave oven for kittens), it's around EUR 17 per night. Quim is putting all his effort right now into the web site. Suggested fees: student - EUR 30, normal - EUR 50, professional - EUR 150. Suggested that we have discounts for Advisory Board members, Foundation members, and Sponsors. Sponsorship: Reimburse people or pay for their tickets? By default people pay for their own travel, and then we give them cash or a check when they are in Villanova. Call for papers: Only about 10 submissions so far. Need to announce call-for-papers in the main www.gnome.org page. Need to make it clear that we don't require full papers right now; just abstracts are fine. Suggest Apr. 20 as the date in which we tell people whether we accept their submissions. ACTION: Federico to remind people to submit abstracts, and announce the confirmation date. ACTION: Vincent to update www.gnome.org to mention the call for papers deadline. Organization: Suggest that we have a speed-talks session at the end of GUADEC, so that people can show what they did during the conference. Keynotes: We'll pay for the expenses of keynote speakers.
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Mar/22
More late minutes. GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/03/22 == Attendance: Anne Federico (+10 mins, minutes) Jonathan Luis Rosanna (new admin) No attendance: Dave (regrets) Vincent (regrets) PREVIOUS ACTIONS Jeff: ongoing JRB to finish job description: Sort of done. Need to announce that we are hiring. Federico to organize next call: ongoing. Luis to mail boston-social to look for representation at boston usenix: done. Luis to help marketing-list to prepare a press release about the W3C SVG announcement: ongoing. JRB to send mouse pads and mugs to outstanding donors: delegated to Zana; ongoing. Dave to request Quim for a copy of a contract with the Generalidat describing what they are paying for this GUADEC. Quim to write a formal letter of invitation for the people who need visas: DONE. Federico to write agenda for Advisory Board meeting: ongoing. Federico to write a paper for the Advisory Board: DONE. Federico to mail advisory-board-list about what members would like to get from the Foundation: not done. Jeff to ask Advisory Board about funding of GNOME versus funding OSDL: ongoing. Jeff to ask about technical project lead: ongoing. Dave to resurrect German contract from last year so that we can use it for Axis Informática: DONE. Federico to remind people to send submissions for GUADEC papers: not done. Vincent to update gnome.org to mention call-for-papers deadline: DONE. JRB to ask Quim about invoicing and finish the GUADEC budget: not done. High priority. Federico to mail Dave with the agenda for the AB meeting: not done. Zana's status report Zana sent a status report to board-list with what she has done. GUADEC == Need to look for more keynote speakers. High priority = Announce Mar. 29 meeting of the Advisory Board. Jeff's embedded working group = Pleased about the positive response. We want to announce this during GUADEC, and hold a press conference. The meeting of the embedded participants will happen during GUADEC. Need a mailing list to get people talking before the announcement, so that we can have something technical and concrete to show by then. Expanding the board === We have a problem of lack of resources --- board members don't have time to do their tasks. Decided to wait until GUADEC to request volunteers for helping out. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting 2006/Feb/08
Since I suck, I didn't send these minutes until today. Apologies for the tardiness. GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/02/08 == Attendance: Quim (guest starring) Anne Dave (chairing; see below) Federico (minutes) Jeff Jonathan Vincent No attendance: Luis (regrets) Quim's status report on GUADEC == Slower than we thought, but going the right way. Change of location was a good decision; people very helpful. Infrastructure is on its way. We need sponsorship. Quim is confident that he can get sponsorship in Spain. Needs help from the Foundation to get sponsorship from companies. Call for papers is open and announced. Dave asks - is there a way for people to make submissions without first registering in the web page? Answer: page says they can email Quim. Logo contest is ongoing. The sponsorship money would be for travel and accomodation, printed materials. Venue and basic costs are already covered. Quim is concerned about how we will manage the money, accounting, etc. Idea from Anne: could the University pay for some of the printing in exchange for having their logo on that material? Positions with the Board Federico doesn't have time to chair the Board all the time. Dave will chair; he has been keeping track of a lot of stuff anyway. Anne will vice-chair; that's the position for when the chairman is not available. Federico will be secretary. Federico will be the point of contact / technical liaison for the members of the Advisory Board. JRB, as treasurer, will keep track of Advisory Board fees from the various members. Jeff will be our press spokeperson. Anne can talk to the Scandinavian press; in general we try to find the closest person that can respond to each press inquiry. For reference: Chairman: - Prepares an agenda and sends it 2 days before the board meeting - Makes sure that meeting details are available (phone number, asterisk server, etc.) - Leads the meeting, following the agenda, makes sure we don't get tied in knots. Secretary: - Takes minutes of board and advisory board meetings - Sends them out in final version within a week of the meeting [*cough cough gasp*] - Takes note of actions since the preceeding meeting, which weren't on any agenda, and includes them in the following minutes Treasurer: - Monthly report on financial situation (cash, receivables, outstanding bills, expenditures, income) - Interact with accountant Advisory Board == We will recommend that member companies have two people representing them: a technical contact and a decision-making contact. Logo guidelines === Dom says he's interested in taking over this. Foundation hire === Administrative person. JRB to finish the job description. GUADEC 2007 === Anne agreed to polish the call we sent out last year; sent it to board-list. This is a list of technical requirements for the conference. Let's lose the requirement for a hall for 1000 people; that's what kept many universities from applying. Last proposal from Spain which can be used as a sample: http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/files/guadec06_at_barcelona-1.sxw Boston Usenix June 2006 === Miniconf or just a stand? Decided to take this on the mailing list. Anne's draft program People to read it; send comments. This is about information which newcomers to GNOME need to know about us. Foundations meeting at FOSDEM = To be discussed in the mailing list. ACTIONS === - Jeff to organize and contact people in various countries and regions to act as local press contacts. - JRB to finish the job description for our administrative person by Wednesday Feb. 15. Federico to poke him to see that it is done. Next meeting Next week, to pick up the things for which we didn't have time this week. THANKS == Thanks to Red Hat and Novell for hosting the Board's conference calls for several years. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting 2006/Feb/15
GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/02/15 == Attendance: Anne Dave Federico Jonathan Luis (+15 min) No attendance: Jeff Vincent (regrets) ACTIONS === * Jeff to organize and contact people in various countries and regions to act as local press contacts. (ongoing) * JRB to finish job description for administrative needs. (ongoing) * Anne to start process for GUADEC 2007 selection (ongoing) NEW ACTIONS === * Federico to organize next call at Novell. * JRB to finish the job description for our admin person by the next board meeting (March 01) * Luis to mail boston-social@gnome.org to look for volunteers to represent us at Boston Usenix and Boston LWE. * Anne to send her draft program to foundation-list and put it up in the web page. * Dave to be our liaison with marketing-list to set up the basic structure of the new www.gnome.org. * Federico to ask Rodrigo what we got Killermundi to sign. * Luis to help marketing-list prepare a press release for the GNOME/W3C SVG anouncement. * Dave to formally invite the Software Freedom Law Center to be a member of the Advisory Board. * JRB to send out mugs and mouse pads to outstanding donors, and thank-you notes as well. * Luis to find business card template and send it to board-list. AGENDA == Advisory Board: * welcome to new members. * Inform about the new board members: names and functions * advice in connection to the 2.14 release. * return on investment for advisory board members Hire of staff: * Status of job decription * Hire or outsource? Boston USENIX in June 2006 - GNOME representation Exhibition materials incl. info about GUADEC for FOSDEM in Brux. and Linux Forum in CPH. Anne's draft for a program. Appoint a team for the website update? * VincentUntz: see the Request to the board (proposal) thread on gnome-web-list (archives are offline right now) Axis Informática wanting to sell products with the GNOME logo Gnome The W3 SVG Working Group: PR to be prepared soon Whither the technical project meeting idea? * Jeff Waugh would like to propose a strategy/delegation for making this happen Outstanding issues: * Tradeshows - in particular LinuxWorld, FOSE, Open Source Business Conference, LinuxWorld Mexico, WebTech * Getting back in touch with our legal representation or switching to elsewhere * Write a mail explaining the paypal mess in the past two/three months (Done by Vincent) Advisory Board == * Sun: John Rice is their technical representative; we'll try to get Simon Phipps as a rep. as well. * IBM: Greg Kelleher is a potential candidate. * Novell: Robert Love will be the technical rep; also JP Rosevear as our decision-making rep. * We'll invite the Software Freedom Law Center to the Avisory Board. Hire of staff = * Job description: not done (JRB) * Outsourcing: need to find out candidates and fees. * JRB to finish job description by next meeting. Boston Usenix representation this year == * We are content with sending a few people. Luis to boston-social@gnome.org to look for volunteers (also volunteers for Boston LWE). * Materials: Anne to look for materials; we have some in the wiki and Anne's draft for a foundation program = * We are fine with her draft; she'll send it to foundation-list and put it up in the Foundation web site. Web site * Dave to contact marketing-list to set up the basic structure of www.gnome.org. * Once we get the new machines in the colo in a few weeks, we'll set up the tech infrastructure. Axis Informática * We are fine with giving them permission to sell products with the GNOME Logo. * Need to find the contract that we got Killermundi to sign, so that we can use the same contract for Axis Informática. * Let's give the cut to GNOME Hispano; this is a good way to fund local groups. W3C SVG Working Group = * Luis to help marketing-list prepare a press release for the GNOME/W3C SVG anouncement. Technical project meeting idea == Postponed since Jeff was not in the call. Outstanding issues == * Getting back in touch with our legal/accounting representatives - JRB to contact them. Next meeting March 01 2006 Same bat-time Same bat-channel ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Off Topic] Words to Avoid Vendor [was Re: Questions to answer]
On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 17:34 -0500, Richard M. Stallman wrote: Nearly - though any new acronym can obfuscate. For that reason, I'd suggest going with ISD, because of its similarity to the familiar ISV, at least the reader may clue in by association and context. ISD would solve the problem equally well. I like ISD. Thanks for the suggestion :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Additional questions for the board candidates
On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 18:56 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should GNOME do with fd.org? Destkop standards are interesting when they let external developers make assumptions. Can I drop a file in a well-known location, and be assured that a launcher for my app will appear in the panel/kicker/whatever? Can I, using $foo_toolkit, cut an image to the clipboard and be assured that $bar_toolkit will be able to paste it in an application? Desktop standards would be *REALLY* interesting if each platform (GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc.) provided a conformance test suite. Any of the GUI test suites based on the accessibility interfaces would be *great* for this. Write an LDTP/Dogtail script to cut an image in the GIMP, paste it in OpenOffice, and ensure that it works. Desktop standards are not interesting if they are not really implemented by the major players, or if they are implemented with too many idiosyncrasies or platform-specific extensions. The MIME spec is a very sad example of this. Thankfully, freedesktop.org is not about de-jure standards. What we need is more people, in any of the platforms, to identify the issues that would benefit from standardization, *and to go ahead and write and implement the standards*. GNOME should take the responsibility of figuring out what would benefit from standardization. It should do this by establishing close contact with other big projects and finding common factors. And it should help the implementation wherever possible. See my rant on superheroes here: http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-06.html#20 http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2005-07.html#06 In particular, the second link has a tidbit from Microsoft's infamous Halloween Memos, which I'll quote again: Integrative work across modules is the biggest cost encountered by OSS teams. This is still true, and it is why standardizing things is so hard - no one wants to change their code to make use of a standard library. Someone has to go and do it for them. This is why Fontconfig worked. Second question: What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? We enhance cooperation by participating in the standards process. And there's cross-pollination among conferences already, isn't there? I cannot disregard them because my employer has a policy of supporting both desktops. And D-BUS is moving forward rapidly. This will introduce a lot new such standards. Even D-BUS itself is such a standard of which it hasn't been said that it's the IPC for a typical modern GNOME application. Or is it ORBit-2? D-COP? I guess nobody knows. D-bus will succeed or fail, just as ORBit/Bonobo did, depending on whether people write actually interesting public interfaces that any interested application can use. Neither D-bus not ORBit are interesting by themselves. They become interesting when I can know that I can search my addressbook with them, or when I can tell applications that the network went offline. D-bus seems to be well accepted across more than the GNOME platform. We need to publicize the useful interfaces which applications expose through D-bus, and see if they would benefit from standardization. I can imagine companies that would like to target the GNOME desktop, while developing solutions for their customers, would like this type of leadership to happen. Yet I can imagine a lot Free Software GNOME developers dislike any form of leadership. It's not a simple problem to solve. Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? You mentioned Linus as being the leader for the Linux kernel. Having a leader works for Linux because it is constrained in function: in oversimplified terms, and from the viewpoint of applications, Linux only has to provide a Unixish API that works. Linus can then oversee whether proposed modifications to the kernel are in line with this goal. Would GNOME benefit from a central leader? GNOME has become too big a platform for anyone to grasp the whole thing in his head. It has no bounding technical goal. We need to keep GNOME from growing simply by accretion. The way to grow a large system is to ensure that the different pieces are in line with some basic principles. That
Re: Distribution branding of GNOME
On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 08:52 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: Of course, we have no way to make it mandatory, but GNOME as a brand has suffered greatly by the whitewashing practiced by distributions, most notably the Java Desktop Environment (I mean, honestly, what the hell is that?), but Red Hat's desktop is also a major offender. Perhaps if we asked nicely. What would we ask? Please genericise your desktop so it is unrecognisable? I don't think that would get us very far. Now, the powered by logos idea has come up numerous times, but thus far, no one's done it. One of the things we discussed during the Summit last year is whether we actually want to promote the Gnome brand: http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fTargetMarkets_2fLinuxDistros There are at least two strategies: 1. Be aggressive in promoting the brand. This implies that the Board get its act together and solve the trademark issue. This would get us to ask distros to keep foot logos, or generally say Powered by Gnome in some conspicuous fashion. 2. Make Gnome so compelling by itself that no one would think of using anything else, even if they re-brand it. The suggestion in the wiki page above is to make branding as easy as possible, hopefully with a gnome-brand-o-matic program into which you can drag icons and images, click a button, and out comes a tarball/package/schema file that will brand GNOME as you specified. This would be a killer feature for regional distros: unlike large distributors, these have few resouces to re-invent the branding wheel themselves. While it would be very pretty to see Powered by [Gnome foot] in every boxed distribution (oh god, does anyone sell boxed software anymore?), or in login splash screens, do we really want to see [Powered by the Linux kernel] [Powered by GNU] [Powered by the X Window System] [Powered by Gnome] [Powered by Mozilla] [Powered by OpenOffice] [Powered by your mother's knickers] everywhere? In either of the cases above, we have to make Gnome so good, so compelling, that people wouldn't want to use anything else. In the first case they would say, not powered by Gnome? I'm not using it, then. In the second case they would say, doesn't feel like Gnome? I'm not using it, then. We are not at that point yet. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
