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 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: 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: 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 Tue, 2007-12-18 at 18:33 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > 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 :) OK, I won't bother you with this any more. Andreas Nilsson pointed me to this new page: http://live.gnome.org/HackerGotchGuidelines Which is a great start. Sorry for pestering so much; I understand if recent happenings have made you touchy :) 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: > > > 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 Sat, 2007-12-15 at 09:51 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: > > > > 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 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 Thu, 2007-09-13 at 11:20 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: > > > > The current "editorial control" is simply more or less "if you ever > did > > something peripherally related to GNOME, you can be on Planet, > regardless > > of what you post". > > It's somewhat more intricate than that -- I'm writing it up atm, so > people > can understand the decision making process (guidelines). That's the > first > step. :-) Ping. Any progress on this, so the editorial policy can be linked from Planet? Also, Dave's idea about having a co-maintainer for Planet didn't get any replies: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2007-September/msg00103.html When a code module's maintainership is sucking, what we do is let someone else take over. The planet-web module shouldn't be an exception. [Yes, I'm volunteering for the co-maintainer position of Planet.] Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 09:13 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: > > > > We have no editorial control. Get over it :) > > We absolutely *do* have editorial control at the moment. The challenge I > have at the moment is to continue that, while improving what people see to > be the drawbacks of the current process (which can almost entirely be > summarised as slow response particularly when I'm travelling). I don't want to turn this into "we do", "we don't" ping-pong. What I mean is that once you are syndicated in Planet, you can post whatever you want. That's why we have people posting all sorts of things that are not related to GNOME: music festivals, science fiction books, recipes, vacation photos, political editorials, the roof of my house, "dear lazyweb", etc. And that's a *good* thing. I'm as annoyed as anyone by certain kinds of posts, but I can simply ignore them (or make my tools ignore them - wish this were documented). Controlling the topic-ness of posts would be fascist. The current "editorial control" is simply more or less "if you ever did something peripherally related to GNOME, you can be on Planet, regardless of what you post". 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 06:26 -0700, Sanford Armstrong wrote: > I know their are a few random blog posts floating around, but I'd like > to see something on l.g.o that documents the suggested workflow for > git-svn/bzr-svn/hg-svn/etc. Is it really a passable solution to all > this? Does it help regular contributors without SVN accounts in a > concrete way? Glad you asked :) http://live.gnome.org/GitForGnomeDevelopers 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 15:56 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: > That's exactly like how NewAccounts [1] work. So, just use that process > for planet. Pros: NewAccounts is our current process, which means endless delays and a lot of screaming. Right now I don't care about the reasons why it is so; I've heard very lengthy explanations. It is a process which is just not working as we want. So this is not an option. Bugzilla and planet-on-svn is still a better plan. 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 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, ", 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 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: Creating new modules (was Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?))
On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 16:42 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote: > Anyway. I'm not sure the old cvs-commits-list type approach really > scales to GNOME's current size, but I think something *was* lost. Yes, something definitely was lost. It was quite pleasant to see commit messages go by; people cared enough that you'd see jokes and funny stuff deliberately written for the commit messages. Then it became a firehose as the project grew larger. I do miss reading commit logs and wouldn't mind doing it for a few sub-projects, but definitely not for all of GNOME. 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: 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 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: 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 mar, 06-03-2007 a las 23:01 +0100, Vincent Untz escribió: > > > + performance analysis projects are interesting but might not produce > > >concrete results in the end > > > > Interesting. How did you come to this conclusion? > > Hrm, I don't have the logs of the meeting, so maybe someone will be able > to jump in and help with the reply. > > But, IIRC, what was told is that performance analysis is something hard, > and that it might require a lot of effort to get (code-wise) a small > result. The result can still have a big impact on user experience, but > it's hard to know this before the performance analysis is done (ie, > before the end of the project). I don't know why the Nautilus project didn't succeed, but it sounds like it was due to lack of guidance. At the time very specific problems were known to happen in Nautilus; they just needed to be tracked down. Instead, the result was some rather general profiling of parts of the program that had already been fixed, or that were not relevant to the known problems. Writing code is easier than reading it. I think SoC is a great opportunity to focus a lot of energy into teaching people how to use tools and their brains to understand foreign code. Performance optimizations are just a good vehicle to do that :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org 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
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
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 d
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/Nov/15
GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/Nov/15 === Attendance: Anne Dave (+30 min) Federico (+15 min) (rest of the minutes) Jeff Jonathan Vincent (initial minutes) No attendance: Quim (regrets) MINUTES === * Extra: Thanks to Vincent for taking the initial minutes. * Last Advisory Board meeting before we leave? Do one with the new Board in December. * Finances: We have a new accountant, who will charge some money (the previous one was pro-bono), but it's a reasonable fee. We were not satisfied with the previous accountant. Jonathan is trying to extract our tax information from the public information website in California. * Trademark application: Anne doesn't want two law firms in charge of the same thing. Anne is in contact with Eben Moglen and the SFLC. We need to contact Luis to see if Wilson/Sonsini will still be handling the trademark application. Jeff is happy to facilitate access on the sysadmin side to set up a group to handle this. ___ 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
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Nov/10
More old minutes with an edible crust. GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/Nov/10 === Attendance: Dave Neary Anne Oestergaard Jonathan Blandford Zana Yuen Regrets: Vincent Untz Quim Gil Federico Mena Quintero Absent: Jeff Waugh Minutes: * ACTION: Anne to mail the members of gnome-legal to organise required actions for contacting Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Roseti - Scope of relationship with SFLC - We need to contact WSGR and make sure we have a channel of communication open - Setting up a meeting with WSGR is urgent now * ACTION: Anne to mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] requesting the creation of the gnome-legal mailing list with the four initial invitees. * Anne requests a vote on the mailing list on whether the board approves Murray's code of conduct. ACTION: Anne to mail board-list * DECISION: Budget for event box shipping: $1000 for US box, €1000 for EU box approved * WSOP cheques are in the process of being paid, and Google has been invoiced * Mandates for subcommittees: The following board-mandated subcommittees exist: - sysadmins - accounts team - membership committee - GUADEC organisers - release team - marketing-private - GNOME Legal (NEW!) The mandate of the legal team is: - Handle communication with the lawyers - Own legal issues within the community (redrafting proposals based on community feedback, for example) - Interfacing with the board on legal issues as needs be ACTION: Anne to write a few lines on the mandate of the legal team * Announcements: ACTION: Anne to mail the membership committee asking them to announce the arrival of two new members to foundation-list * Consolidation: Anne feels that we need to agree an agenda of priorities - Avoid dispersion on non-priority initiatives - Concentrate on top priorities and get them through to completion * We need to reimburse Murray for expenditure on the EU event box - Reimburse him fully on production of receipts - ACTION: JRB to contact Murray to get receipts and bank information off him * DECISION: Event box policy - Event boxes will go to GNOME user groups or GNOME events - Event box must be the responsibility of one person of standing in the community - That person will be responsible for replacement of any broken or damaged equipment while the box is under his control - The board has set aside a budget for event box shipping, which can be drawn down on with receipts by user groups who pay for shipping * Invitation letter policy - We should at least try to avoid issuing invitation letters to fraudulent requests - ACTION: Zana to mail the mailing list a propoed policy * Anne wants to know where the best place to send an ODF alliance newsletter is - she feels that foundation-list is inappropriate, but wonders if there is a standardisation list. Decisions: -- * DECISION: Budget for event box shipping: $1000 for US box, €1000 for EU box approved * DECISION: Event box policy - Event boxes will go to GNOME user groups or GNOME events - Event box must be the responsibility of one person of standing in the community - That person will be responsible for replacement of any broken or damaged equipment while the box is under his control - The board has set aside a budget for event box shipping, which can be drawn down on with receipts by user groups who pay for shipping New actions: * ACTION: Anne to mail the members of gnome-legal to organise required actions for contacting Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Roseti - Scope of relationship with SFLC - We need to contact WSGR and make sure we have a channel of communication open - Setting up a meeting with WSGR is urgent now * ACTION: Anne to mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] requesting the creation of the gnome-legal mailing list with the four initial invitees. * ACTION: Dave to contact marketing-private to get a press release drafted for all of the new advisory board members. It's old news now, but perhaps we can stir something up by announcing 6 new members in one go * ACTION: Anne to mail board-list requesting a vote on the code of conduct * ACTION: Anne to write a few lines on the mandate of the legal team * ACTION: Anne to mail the membership committee asking them to announce the arrival of two new members to foundation-list * ACTION: JRB to contact Murray to get receipts and bank information off him * ACTION: Zana to mail the mailing list a propoed policy Outstanding actions: * Jeff to write a proposal on subcommittees * Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. * 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!" * Anne to start the creation of the GNOME-legal group: Luis Villa, Dom Lachowicz.
Re: Mailing lists (Re: Candidacy: Joachim Noreiko)
On Fri, 2006-11-24 at 12:19 -0500, David Bolter wrote: > Thinking aloud: > I wonder if we could expose the #gnome channel (or similar) as perhaps a > one-click "Get Help" menu item... perhaps under the "Place" menu. The > user could have an automated nick that describes their distro etc. > Friendly #gnome or #gnome-help (or whatever) lurkers could say recognize > the nick as a help-needer and invite their questions. Congratulations, you just reinvented MonkeyChat. Ximian GNOME (or was it before that - Helix GNOME?) had a patch to add a "Help/Get help" menu item. It would take you to a minimal IRC client on a predefined channel. I have absolutely no idea of how it worked out. Federico ___ 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: Research groups and the GNOME project
On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 16:44 +, Alvaro del Castillo wrote: > Right now I am working in the University Rey Juan Carlos and we are > working hard researching how free software is developed. By the way, I can vouch for the extreme jaw-dropping coolness of the work of Álvaro and his group. Their research results have been *really* interesting! 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
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/sep/13
GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/Sep/13 === Attendance: Anne Dave (chairing) Federico (minutes, 10 mins. late) Jonathan Quim Rosanna Vincent (minutes for the first 10 mins.) No attendance: Jeff (sleeping) OLD ACTIONS === * Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. NOT DONE * Jeff to write a press release for the GTK+ / Foundation announcement. NOT DONE * Quim to finish the financials from GUADEC. ALMOST DONE * Quim to finish his GUADEC-HOWTO: IN PROGRESS, draft is done. * Dave to contact Miguel Ángel López and Izabel Cerqueira about the Latin American conferences: DONE. Not clear on what they expect from us. We are in contact with them; they need to tell us what they need from the Foundation. * Anne to contact our pro-bono law firm instead of SFLC about the trademark licensing agreement. IN PROGRESS * Quim to talk with Killermundi about the GNOME Store. IN PROGRESS - Problem: not clear if it's the Foundation's initiative to say, "you'll print this t-shirt, etc.", or if it's Killermundi's. - Problem: sending merchandise out of Spain. Within the EU it's already expensive. - We need a more franchised system so that local vendors can print merchandise in different countries. - Next step: discuss on marketing-list. * JRB to mail the draft criteria for an interview for the executive director to board-list. POSTPONED * Dave to ask O'Reilly about comissioning a GNOME book for ISVs under a free documentation license. IN PROGRESS, Dave is in touch with Andy Oram. * Jeff to draft a press release about Canonical joining the Advisory Board. NOT DONE MINUTES === * GUADEC financials * Sponsorship: - We need to fund a speaker for the GNOME Day in Chile, we can pay USD 1500 for travel (November 9). * Trademark application: We are going to apply for these: * New GNOME foot + wordmark modified BS Vera font * Certification mark * Community mark To be discussed with gnome-legal. * Embedded initiative: Nothing to discuss for the moment. Conversation is ongoing in the mailing list. * Other business: Someone who is not a GNOME developer nor a Foundation member is asking for an account in blogs.gnome.org. ACTIONS === * Quim to answer Fernando that we can cover up to 1.500USD for travel expenses of a developer invited to The GNOME Day in Chile. DONE * Anne to start the creation of the GNOME-legal group: Luis Villa, Dom Lachowicz. Need a private mailing list. * JRB to set up the infrastructure for the interviews. Deadline: Monday Sept. 18. Old actions: * Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting. * Jeff to write a press release for the GTK+ / Foundation announcement. * Quim to finish the financials from GUADEC. * Quim to finish his GUADEC-HOWTO. * Anne to contact our pro-bono law firm instead of SFLC about the trademark licensing agreement. * Quim to talk with Killermundi about the GNOME Store. * Dave to ask O'Reilly about comissioning a GNOME book for ISVs under a free documentation license. * Jeff to draft a press release about Canonical joining the Advisory Board. DECISIONS = We'll register the trademark like this: certification mark, community mark, a normal registered trademark for the foot. Next meeting: Wed. 2006/Sep/27, 19:00 UTC. Same bat-channel. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Who should get a Sun Ultra machine?
On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 14:54 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > Now the Board would like to ask the Foundation members: who should get > the other machine? Do you have a favorite hacker whom you would like to > thank with a ridiculously powerful x86-64 workstation? Thanks to everyone who sent their suggestions! We have the two recipients now; we'll announce them once we sort out the export clearance for the machines. 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
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
Re: Hello world
On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 16:46 +0200, Carlos Fenollosa wrote: > I'm Carlos. At the Guadec I become aware that a Gnome Foundation > existed... and applied to join. And, thanks to somebody, now I'm here! > Thanks again! Welcome to the zoo^H^H^HFoundation, Carlos :) Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Who should get a Sun Ultra machine?
Hi, Sun Microsystems kindly donated two Ultra 20 workstations to the GNOME Foundation, with the intention of giving them away to people who have been kicking ass in GNOME development. The Board has already picked one of the people who will get one of the machines. I'm sure he'll tell you who he is once we sort out some issues. http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra20/index.jsp Now the Board would like to ask the Foundation members: who should get the other machine? Do you have a favorite hacker whom you would like to thank with a ridiculously powerful x86-64 workstation? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Jul/19
GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/07/19 == Attendance: Dave (chairing) Federico (minutes) Quim Jonathan Vincent (phone trouble; stayed on IRC for the rest of the meeting) Zana No attendance: Anne Jeff AGENDA == 1. Hire - status (who's contacted who) * Widely distributing job description and role 2. Licencing agreement - going to lawyers with Dom's work 3. Event participation - COPU, GOSCON, Siggraph, aKademy 4. GUADEC leftovers - final budget, hardware, donations, returning loans, announcements, actions/promises 5. Mellon awards nomination 6. OSDL 2007 budget requests 7. Any 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. NOT DONE - Update: JRB hasn't sent that, but there's more stuff in the event box than there used to be. JRB will send the full list of items to board-list. * Vincent to work with the membership committee on problems and governance NOT DONE * 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!". IN PROGRESS * Get quotes for back-office services (jrb to ask owen) - OBSOLETE (we will hire Zana) * Jeff to write a press release for the GTK+ / Foundation announcement. NOT DONE MINUTES === * Budget. Quim is finishing the numbers from GUADEC. ACTIONS: - Quim to finish the financials from GUADEC (should be ready by the end of July or August). - Quim to finish his GUADEC-HOWTO. * Hardware: We have the four machines we used for streaming GUADEC. They are on the inventory of GNOME-Hispano; the machines are physically in the Fluendo office. Thomas Vander Stichele says they'll use the machines for tinderboxing. We have the donations from Sun on two Ultra 20 workstations to give away to community members. ACTION: Federico to send question to foundation-list: who should get the machines? HP loaner laptops are back in the HP offices. * Latin American conferences: Miguel Ángel López wants to organize a Latin American GUADEC; needs to be put in touch with potential sponsors. Izabel Cerqueira (Brasil) asked for help with contacting people to come as speakers for Fórum GNOME in Brasil. ACTION: Dave to contact Miguel Ángel and Izabel. * Trademark licensing agreement: We got a lot of work from Dom Lachowicz. We got a new revision from DW Price. The contract has been sent to Killermundi, Quim is negociating with them. ACTION: Anne to send the trademark licensing agreement to SFLC for approval. ACTION: Quim to talk with Killermundi about the GNOME Store. * Hires: Zana is our new administrator. Previously she worked for us as a consultant, so did not have a contract. She obtained a sample contract; we can review it. It needs a few changes from its sample form. ACTION: Dave to mail Zana about rewording the sample contract. We will not be hiring our Executive Director / Foundation Development Officer until September, when we review some candidates. JRB and Jeff put together some interview criteria during GUADEC. ACTION: JRB to mail the draft criteria for an interview to board-list. We need to nail down the job description for the Executive Director / Foundation Development Officer. Greg Kelleher, Simon Phipps, Bdale Garbee, Mike Jennings may know good candidates. * Event participation: Tink Bastian mailed board-list inviting us to aKademy 2006 (Dublin, September): Dave contacted Bill Haneman to go there for accessibility discussions. John Palmieri will go to talk about D-Bus and other Portland stuff. SIGGRAPH - Dave talked to JP Rosevear about someone from Novell coming to SIGGRAPH. ACTION: Federico to ask JP Rosevear about Novell's people going to demo GNOME at SIGGRAPH (Aug 1-3, Boston). Jonathan says Red Hat will try to send some X and GNOME people. Owen Williams, David Trowbridge, Chris Lahey will go (from boston-social). GOSCON (Portland, October 12-13) - Stuart Cohen CEO of OSDL will be there. We could send a person from GNOME to demo how professional we are for government purposes, like Dave Richards from the City of Largo. ACTION: Federico to contact Dave Richards about going to GOSCON - ASAP, because we need an abstract to be submitted. Chinese COPU - not discussed; Jeff is missing. * Mellon award nomination: "We support education via blah blah"
Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Jun/25 (GUADEC face-to-face meeting)
Here is your secretary sending out minutes, late as always!
GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/06/25 (GUADEC)
===
Attendance:
Anne
Dave (Chairing, Minutes)
Federico (Minutes)
Jeff (the man with the packs of Tim Tam chocolate-covered cookies)
Jonathan
Quim
Vincent
AGENDA
==
* Executive director and administrator hire
* SWOT analysis of foundation
* GUADEC 2007 (sans Vincent and Dave)
* Interview representatives from candidates
* Get report(s) from GUADEC sub-committee and choose candidate
* Trademarks & legal - setting them free to the community without losing them
* We should get Luis to follow up (since he started the process) on the state
of the trademarks
* Budget
* Let's nail down, starting with how much we have, what we want to
spend money on for the remainder of the year, and how much we want
to carry over to next year's board
* Business development
* Online store
* ISV initiatives - certification?
* Foundation elections
* Shifting elections to May
* Increasing terms?
* Elected executive positions?
* Any other business - the rest of the time
OLD ACTIONS
===
* Luis to find out which lawyer we worked with on the contract
revisions last year - NOT DONE (dropped)
* Get quotes for back-office services (jrb to ask owen) - NOT DONE
* Federico to send a draft job announcement to board-list for the
executive director and the administrator. DONE (mostly)
* JRB to mail board-list about invoicing Intel (hard disk crash). NO
NEED - INVOICE GONE
* JRB to send an update on what hardware has been bought for the event
box. DONE? (Can I have the list)
* Federico to send minutes of advisory board meeting - DONE
* Federico to send minutes of last 3 board meetings - DONE
* Jeff to write a proposal on subcommittees / technical working groups
- NOT DONE
* Jeff to ensure all board members are on board-only and
marketing-private - DONE
* Dave to send draft agendas for GUADEC - Foundation AGM, board
meeting and advisory board meeting - DONE
MINUTES
===
* Executive director hire
- We'll announce the open position right after GUADEC.
- We already agreed on the requirements for this person; they
are on the wiki.
- If the ED goes to advertise GNOME to a potential deployment,
we don't want a situation where the Advisory Board members
fight with each other about whom will serve the deployment.
"Which distro do they pick?"
- Roles:
- Increase revenues
- Manage relationships
- Advisory board
- Deployments
- Co-ordinator/community manager
- Third-party developer programme
- Profile:
- Experience in computer industry (ICT: Information and
Computer Technology) in business development
- Quick learner
- Objective
- Willing to do some travel
- Goals (Performance measurement):
- Increase revenues - $1M budget for 2007
- Contact all large GNOME deployments we know about, and visit at
least 3 in person
- Start online merchandising sales in 2007
- There is a danger of upsetting either the advisory board
("you're competing with us") or the community with this
role. Need to be careful how it is communicated.
- Hiring process:
- Get candidates through personal relationships (Advisory
board - Simon Phipps, Bdale Garbee, Greg Kelleher, Mike
Jennings at Intel)
- Pre-interview by email (same as Joanna's)
- From short-list, do phone interviews (Euro team +
US/Pacific team, perhaps? Which makes 2 interviews, with
3/4 people at a time)
- Timescale: roughly 3 months
* Zana as our part-time administrator:
- She was the only applicant.
- She did a great job when she was our temporary admin a few
weeks ago.
- Jonathan did not take part in the decision, and consciously
stayed out of all discussion.
- Let's announce this during the Foundation Annual General
Meeting (AGM).
- Anne: We need a very good public explanation on why decided
to hire Zana again for the administrative position. Is this
a conflict of interest with JRB on the board? Jeff: "She's
done a great job, she's highly qualified, Jonathan didn't
participate in the decision to hire her, and she was the
only applicant".
- Part-time admin, 20 hours per week, USD 22,500 per year,
work from home.
* Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT):
- Strengths:
Software
Community
Brand
Commercial involvement
"Universal Access"
C
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/26
GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/04/26 == Attendance: === Dave Neary (Chairing, minutes) Luis Villa Anne Oestergaard Vincent Untz Jeff Waugh Missing: Jonathan Blandford (arrived :50) Federico Mena Quintero Actions === * Dave to request a contract from Quim for GUADEC - ongoing * Jeff to write a proposal for the technical project meeting - outside scope of the board * Dave to resurrect German contract from last year so that we can use it for Axis Informática - ongoing (sent to foundation-list for round of feedback) New actions === ACTION: Announce US event box & contents (Vincent) ACTION: Announce final shortlist of GUADEC 07 candidates (Anne) ACTION: Dave to get feedback off Dom on the old contract, and mail the result on to foundation list ACTION: Anne to contact Tim for the name of the lawyer who worked on the agreement last year Agenda: === 1. Administrator * Process for hiring full-time executive director * Refine job description, and talk about the profile we're looking for We would like to hire an executive director to develop business strategy and manage our relationships with commercial and non-profit partners. We're going to take the time to hire the right person. We also need to make sure basic administration and accounting are taken care of in a timely fashion. We can continue to hire a part time administrator or out-source office services. It was agreed that outsourcing in the Boston area, where our lawyers and accountants are located, makes sense. 2. Summer of Code * Let's make sure GNOME does better (from an organisational point of view) this time Vincent and Behdad took care of organising GNOME for this. 3. GUADEC 2007 - declare list of candidates Candidates to be proposed publically on foundation-list for a public comments period. 4. Decision for the US event box (Carried on mailing list: no discussion needed) -- Federico Mena Quintero <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ___ 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: Mellon awards
On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 17:37 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > http://rit.mellon.org/awards > > The GNOME Foundation qualifies for these awards, surely. > > Who would like to write a first draft of a (max. 1000 words) nomination? > In my experience, the shorter the better, if you can do it in 200 words, > that would be great. Please reply here with efforts. > > We just need to figure out how the GNOME project provides a direct and > demonstrably significant benefit to the arts or the environment. [begin nomination] 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. 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. It has become one of the dominant desktop environments used in GNU/Linux systems. [contribution to the arts; this comes from http://www.gtk.org/success/] GNOME allows custom software to be written, such as the National Gallery's VIPS image processing system (http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk), which is used in the VASARI project for archiving and cataloging of artwork in museums worldwide (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~km/projs/vasari/). [end nomination] ___ 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
Re: Boilerplate copyright agreement for commercial exploitation
On Mon, 2006-05-15 at 14:32 +0100, Alan Cox wrote: > On Sul, 2006-05-14 at 19:52 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: > > Since lawyers talk .doc, and use revision control to track changes to the > > documents, that's what we ge too. > > Disappointing. I hope the foundation will reconsider that decision and > post its documents in open formats as well. This is not the final agreement that will get posted to foundation.gnome.org; this is a friendly RFC from Dave on this list. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
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/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. ACTI
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: - Lu
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
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 for 2006/01/18
Hi, Sorry for the late minutes. That's what happens when we lose Daniel ;) Federico GNOME Foundation Board Meeting, 2006/01/18 == Roll call - New board: Luis JRB Anne Vincent Dave Federico (minutes) Jeff Old board: Owen JRB Daniel Jody (missing) Miguel (regrets) Tim (missing) Murray Christian - Agreed to stay with the same meeting schedule (bi-weekly, Wednesdays, 14:00 Mexico City time) - Nominations for secretary, treasurer, chairman: Treasurer - JRB Chairman - Federico, Dave - Federico to chair this year unless Dave wants to challenge during GUADEC through mud-wrestling. Notes = This call was about making the new Board members know what happened during the past year. We exchanged observations about what did/didn't work, and reviewed pending actions. Highlights of the year == - GUADEC, GNOME Summit. Involvement on the Board for GUADEC is not central; it was mainly the volunteers and Tim. Summit: a small event; Board not very involved in organization (mainly Tim). The Foundation paid USD 5000 for the venue and food, so it was pretty cheap. There were about 100 participants. - [ACTION]: JRB volunteers to contact MIT for this year's Summit. - GNOME Store: Dave has been organizing it. In contact with several possible vendors, chose one which did a good job for GUADEC, had legal problems due to non-USA location. Contract didn't get signed, got us back to square one. Intends to get more vendor candidates in February. - Trademarks: Finished submitting everything to the USPTO, we are on a waiting period before they'll finalize everything. Responsible contact: the Foundation's lawyer. JRB is in contact with lawyer. Got the User Group Trademark Agreement finalized. Got a Member Logo for business cards finalized. - Efforts to promote GNOME as an ISV platform: Federico on it. Hired Shaun McCance to write an "Overview of the GNOME Platform" document; ongoing. JRB suggests asking for funding to be directed to specific ISV-friendly projects (documentation, infrastructure, hacking). Conference stuff - Anne thinks we should stretch out to the parts of the world we haven't emphasized. Luis mentions talk of GUADLAC in Latin America. We got a proposal for a Southeast Asia conference, and gnome.conf.au. We have FOSDEM presence. GUADEC organization === - Quim is leading. - We should probably have Quim on every other board call or so, to keep up with GUADEC organization. - Dave: we have a location (Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain, very close to Barcelona), dates (week of 2006/06/24). 24-25 is Spanish days, 26-28 is GUADEC proper, 29-30 is hackfest. Confirmed keynote speakers: Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users), Jim Gettys (One Laptop Per Child). - Christian: says venue is pretty nice, next to the beach. - Need to start making reservations, etc. - Web side of things: need update from the sysadmin team. Need to re-setup the registration infrastructure. What worked, what didn't + Bi-weekly conference calls worked well. + Wiki worked well. - People sometimes assumed that someone would take care of something, but nobody replied and so nobody did. Example: the gnome.de situation. + This board got a lot more done than other years, due to internal process of waiting for opposition rather than waiting for confirmation of permission. + More presence in local events than before. - Dropped the ball on Google Summer of Code. Mistake: thinking of them as bounties rather than mentorship opportunities. + Owen was a good chairman; he kept good track of things. + Thanks to Daniel for being our secretary. + Thanks to the Foundation members who voted! Sidetracks: - We have public Board page in the wiki now; Murray wants to have the agenda there before every meeting so that people can monitor us. Outstanding: - Dave contacted Sriram Ramkrishna about presence on Innotech in Portland. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections - Preliminary results
On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 22:40 +0100, David Neary wrote: > /me checks http://foundation.gnome.org/stats > > Nope. Interesting! I didn't even know such stats existed. These are sorted by number of hits this month: http://www.gnome.org/stats 429468 http://planet.gnome.org/stats 236990 http://developer.gnome.org/stats 70015 http://foundation.gnome.org/stats 5340 So, www and planet *are* our most efficient vehicles for communication. Hopefully we can get developer/library to be just as effective in the near future. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections - Preliminary results
On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 20:22 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: > I'm a bit sad that only 169 members (out of more than 350) voted, > though. If anyone has some ideas on why less than 50% of the members > voted or on how to change this, please share them. I'd really love to > see this figure at 80% in the future. We need to inform people of the voting deadline through a channel that is not email. Change the www.gnome.org main page during the elections. Put a big banner in planet.gnome.org, etc. [Nobody ever checks foundation.gnome.org, do they?] Federico ___ 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 w
Re: Questions to answer
On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 20:26 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors? What will you do more or > better than previous years Boards have done? I am running because I think I can be useful in figuring out the technical direction in which GNOME needs to go in order to be accepted by more deployments and ISVs. You'll immediately ask, "isn't the Board supposed not to take technical decisions?". I think that question would be valid if you had a Board where no GNOME hackers were involved. That is not the case: in particular, the Board has had very visible hackers during its years. Thus, I think that the Board, and the Advisory Board in particular, can be a useful place to collect and sort out the technical needs of organizations who have an interest in GNOME. More or better than previous years -> I don't think there has been much interest in the past toward figuring out the needs of our users, or of the big deployments of GNOME. Say we took the top 5 most important problems in GNOME from the viewpoint of big deployments, and fixed them this year. I think that would let us capture users at an increased rate. I will keep close contact with the Advisory Board, and organizations with GNOME deployments who are not yet in the A.B., and gather their wish-lists for GNOME. > 2) How familiar are you with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME? How much > do you follow and participate in the main GNOME mailing lists? Very familiar with the technical side of things, and I participate in the development lists reasonably often. I guess I am more active in Bugzilla. In particular, I have a good ability to identify long-standing problems in the GNOME technologies; being here since 1997 does give you hindsight. I am not so familiar with the marketing efforts. > 3) What sources of funds do you as a candiate try do establish? And what > will you spend it on? Not counting revenue from the shop and Friends of > GNOME. Think more like the recent move by Mozilla or a subscription based > bounty system. I have not been involved in looking for funding. This year I directed the effort to hire Shaun McCance to write a document called "Overview of the GNOME Platform", which is in progress. I think it is valuable to spend money into writing documentation that will help people develop and deploy GNOME. Our sysadmin guide is quite stagnant, and the integration guide for ISVs is not finished. Those are good candidates for being written by a paid author. We need to make it as easy as possible for people to deploy GNOME, and we need to tell them how to integrate their current applications with it. I will dedicate Foundation funds to ensuring that our documentation is useful to new hackers. > 4) Gnome is mostly a european and US based project, but seems to have > some following in Latin America and India. How will you as a candidate > grow the contribution base, especially in Asia, Africa and South America? Deployments in those locations have come mostly from government initiatives. Thus I'll repeat myself: we need to make it as easy as possible for this deployments to happen. Are there technical difficulties which they consistently experience, and which we could fix? Are there missing pieces in GNOME that would make their job easier? I will work toward figuring out these issues, and proposing technical solutions to them. Then it will be easy to find hackers to implement them: once you know *what* to write, it's easy to find someone who will write it. Also, we need to ensure that our documentation for developers is complete, up to date, and in particular, that it is easy for newbies to understand. GNOME is a very big platform, and getting started in developing for it is very hard: documentation is outdated, scattered all around, and not directed at newcomers. Plain API references are not useful to newcomers. I will make a big effort to ensure that this documentation gets written. I will dedicate Foundation funds to this, or look for volunteers who are suitable for writing these documents. > Or in general what would you do to increase community participation in the > GNOME community and GNOME elections? I would try to make it easier for new hackers to jump into the community. We need technical overviews of the GNOME platform, documentation on the internals of each subsystem, and useful tutorials rather than disconnected API references. I would encourage those hackers to become Foundation members, since they would be building the software that our Foundation refers to. Then, they would naturally become participants in the elections. > 5) The board meets for one hour every two weeks to discuss a handful of > issues. Thus, it is very important that the board can very quickly and > concisely discuss each topic and come to consensus on each item for > discussion. Are you good at working with others, who sometimes have very > differing opinions than you do, to reach consensus a
Board size referendum: we'll have 7 members
As you all know by now, the referendum to resize the board down to 7 members had a "yes" result. The Board has of course ratified this decision. The Board next year will indeed be composed of 7 members, with no executive director for the time being. Good luck to all the candidates! Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Federico Mena-Quintero
Name: Federico Mena-Quintero Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Affiliation: Novell, Inc. I have been working on GNOME since it began in August 1997. Since then, I've maintained or done substantial work on several modules. I have served as a Foundation Board member for two periods, once four years ago and once this year. I also acted as treasurer of the Foundation three years ago. GNOME has gained the interest of many companies and large deployments by now. My intentions for this year are to communicate extensively with such companies and heads of deployments to see what they need from GNOME: we have seen interest for better manageability, better developer's documentation, a clear plan for ISVs, and better integration with other large projects like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2005 Oct 26
On Sat, 2005-10-29 at 18:48 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote: > > SUBJECT MATTER DESCRIPTION: Introduction, The GNOME Family, > > Overview, Core Technologies, IPC and Network Support, Desktop > > Technologies, Language Bindings, Appendix > > Who's the target audience of this document? > > Seems like there is a lot of potential libraries that *aren't* part of > our official platform stack that we're advertising, and even those > libraries that are could be considered as very dubious ISV interfaces. This is not the guide that tells you "these are the stable interfaces in GNOME per Sun's terminology". This is the guide that tells you "if you want to write a GNOME app and want to do $foo, then you use libbar to do it". The guide may very well tell you that libbar is not particularly stable ABI-wise, but at least you'll know what you can use. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Reducing the board size
On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 22:55 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: > > There have been a couple of *really* good examples this year - the hiring > > of someone to do a contract on docs (which stalled for 3 months on the > > writing of a job contract, until the person got another job) is one. > > How is it that with a full time employee, a small task such as this was > stalled for three months? This is entirely my fault. I dragged my feet in writing the text of the contract, because I had no idea of what it should look like. Then I asked other board members to see if they knew of sample contracts I could use. Unfortunately, by that time I got swamped in Real Work(tm) deadlines and could not allocate time to finish the contract. The contract is just pending being signed now; I expect that to be done this week. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Certification for GNOME apps
Hi, One of the marketing efforts that the Foundation Board discussed during GUADEC is the possibility of having "certification levels" for GNOME applications. Apps that get rated higher are "nicer" or "more GNOME-like"; hopefully we can use the rating metrics to let users gauge how well a particular app integrates with the rest of their GNOME desktop. Remember that this is a MARKETING thing. ISVs are starting to develop GNOME-ish apps (c.f. Adobe Acrobat Reader). We need several things: - A sort-of checklist to let ISVs know what they should do in their apps to integrate well with the desktop --- to make their apps more GNOME-like. - A way for GNOME to say, "app Foo integrates better with GNOME than app Bar". - A way for users to know which app is more GNOME-like; hopefully this will give them a way to pick the better product. You know those printers or modems that have a penguin sticker that says "works with Linux"? Don't they give you a warm and fuzzy feeling? GNOME certification is the same thing: it means that someone tested your app to see that it works well with GNOME. I don't have names for the certification levels yet. They are something like this: Level 0 - the app runs without doing idiotic things like taking over your desktop. It appears in the panel menus, and it installs its MIME handlers. Pretty much any X app can be made to conform to this. Level 1 - the app uses the standard GNOME dialogs (file, printing). Drag-and-drop works. See OpenOffice.org a good examples. Level 2 - the app is actually written with GTK+. Level N - etc. The idea is that lower levels are easier to implement, and higher levels denote that you actually put in a good effort to make your app GNOME-like. This will benefit ISV apps and core GNOME apps. In the case of core apps, the certification checklist can be a way to keep ourselves honest: we can say that an app cannot ship as part of the GNOME platform unless it attains level N of certification (e.g. drag-and-drop would work, it would have online help, etc.). Having the checklist also allows one to plan a project better, because you can start making technical decisions from the start. The certification effort is here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeCertification Your ideas are most welcome. Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
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
