GNOME Foundation:
Over the past several weeks, the board has been working to put together
a more formal set of GNOME Foundation goals. Aside from the obvious
benefit of having goals better enumerated, these goals are needed in
order to compute the bonus that the GNOME Foundation CEO receives.
When the GNOME Foundation hired Stormy to act as the GNOME Foundation
CEO, it was agreed that she could receive up to $24,000 as a bonus per
year, and that this money would be tied to specific goals as incentive
to accomplish important tasks.
Over the past year, the process of defining goals and calculating
Stormy's bonus has been managed internally by The GNOME Foundation board
of directors. However, moving forward we would like this process to be
more open and transparent. It would be ideal if the GNOME Foundation
community could be more involved with both defining the goals and
determining how Stormy should be rewarded when goals are achieved.
So, our hope is to create a document that accurately enumerates the
GNOME Foundation's overall goals, and to list metrics by which the CEO
bonus will be computed over the upcoming (2010) fiscal year. To make
this happen, we would like GNOME Foundation members to help by doing
the following:
1) Review the attached goals-goals-2010.txt document and provide
feedback about how well we have captured the goals of the GNOME
Foundation. Note that this document has already been reviewed by
the GNOME Advisory Board and includes feedback from that review.
2) Since Stormy's goals should be tied to the general GNOME Foundation
goals, we would like the attached document to be enhanced to include
more concrete and measurable metrics by which her bonus can be
computed over the upcoming (2010) fiscal year. Some metrics are
suggested in parenthesis; however, they are currently very vague.
We are hoping that these metrics can be made more concrete based
on community feedback and discussion.
To provide background and transparency to the process that has been
used to date, I also wanted to share the following information to
highlight how this process has worked so far. The attached
gnome-goals-2009.odt document enumerates the goals and metrics that
were used in the previous (2009) fiscal year. This document also
contains some information to help justify what activities were done to
meet various metrics.
Considering the economic situation over the past year and the additional
expenses relating to increasing the GNOME Foundation staff, the board
felt that it made sense to be conservative and focus a larger
percentage of the bonus towards fund raising in 2009. Thanks largely
to Stormy's efforts, the GNOME Foundation is now in a much more
sustainable financial state going forwards. So, we anticipate that in
the next year that we will rework Stormy's goals so that there is more
focus on community building and less on fund raising.
As you can see in the gnome-goals-2009.odt document, in the past fiscal
year the $24,000 total was split into two categories: $18,000 towards
Fund Raising and $6,000 towards Discretionary goals. Fund Raising goals
were based on percentage while the Discretionary goals are further
broken down into three categories:
- Eyes Ears
- Marketing
- Housekeeping
When Stormy was first hired, reviews were done on a quarterly basis. As
Stormy became more familiar with the job, reviews switched to being
done bi-annually since the last review. For the past fiscal year
Stormy received $14,650 (or ~58% of the possible $24,000 bonus). Also,
note that Stormy received a $1,750 bonus for the last quarter of the
2008 fiscal year. The following breaks down how much bonus Stormy was
paid for each review cycle and details the reasoning behind awarding
the bonus.
Bonus Summary
=
Discretionary (Jul-Sep 2008) $ 1,750
===
Total for 2008 fiscal year$ 1,750
Discretionary (Oct-Dec 2008) $ 600
Fund Raising (Oct-Dec 2008) $ 2,000
Discretionary (Jan-Apr 2009) $ 750
Discretionary (Apr-Sep 2009) $ 1,800
Fund Raising (Apr-Sep 2009) $ 9,500
===
Total for 2009 fiscal year$14,650
Bonus History Detail
Jul-Sep 2008
$500 - Improving relations with the advisory board, starting
regular 1-on-1 meetings with them, etc.
$250 - Improving relations with the community (keynotes, blogs)
$500 - Working with the board.
$250 - Organized mobile team.
$250 - Working to develop additional advisory board partners (BMC,
Motorola, Adobe, etc.)
Oct-Dec 2008
$500 - FoG launch
$100 - Working with Asus/Xandros to consider switching to GNOME on
their netbook software.
$2,000 - Fund
