Re: GUADEC Schedule online!
Hi all, After the announcement, the errata... Dave Neary a écrit : In the morning, we will have lightning talks (5 minutes or less to impress), a Topaz/GNOME 3.0 planning session, ... The Topaz session is currently listed for the afternoon. A big welcome too to a multimedia mini-conference, with 9 multimedia related talks spread over Sunday and Wednesday. The talks are spread over Sunday and *Tuesday*. Wednesday we all get back to work. As Mike Myers said best in the Cat in the Hat, I'm so excited!. Apparently this quote predates the cat in the hat film by some year, and is attributed to either the Pointer Sisters or some guy on the home shopping channel. Cheers, Dave. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Trademark license and useage guidelines
There's a problem with attachments on the wiki. Don't know when it started, but it was before last week's meeting. Dave. Murray Cumming a écrit : The links to the PDFs are not working anymore. Did someone change something? On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 17:16 -0500, Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation wrote: The GNOME Foundation board has posted two documents for use with our trademark foot and name GNOME which were prepared by the foundation's lawyers. The drafts of these documents are now available for review by foundation members and the public. The first document is a license intended for User groups which have a need to make use of the GNOME trademarks in such ways as creating and distributing marketing materials or creating web sites. The second document is a set of Trademark usage guidelines. These documents may be read at http://live.gnome.org/Trademark. The board welcomes comments from foundation members concerning these two documents, as well as the need for any other license. We are particularly interested in examples where you think these guidelines/ agreement might be a problem or where you need clarification. Please post your comments to the WiKi page above on or before 5 April. Best regards, tim ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- David Neary Director, GNOME Foundation [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Kicking off planning session planning
Hi Brian, Brian Cameron a écrit : One topic that might also make a good track would be stability. This year Sun is sending two Architecture Review Council chairs to GUADEC to speak on this topic. I think this is a significant and timely gesture from Sun. One reason that GNOME has difficulty competing with operating systems from Microsoft and Apple is that their platforms tend to be more stable. ... Perhaps this could fit into one of the tracks you suggest (Developer, or Interoperability), but this is a pretty big topic itself. This is exactly the kind of this that we have set planning time aside for. I'm only sorry that it's just 3 hours. You should try to have a BOF at another time too, if that tickles your fancy. But interface stability is something that I'm sure could use a session, particularly after the ARC presentation on Sunday. How about copying pasting the basics of your mail into the wiki as a skeleton to hang a session on? http://live.gnome.org/Stuttgart2005/FreeformSessions I hope we have a problem of overlap - which will mean that there are lots of great sessions planned. If that's the case, we will probably rely on our (as yet unknown) session leader to merge sessions of common interest. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Member card
Hi, Selon Philip Van Hoof [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 12:13 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: Please remember, this is not a commercial business card. We can't allow people to use the trademarked GNOME logo on their business cards without explicit permission from the GNOME Foundation. What are the terms for this? Where can I find more information? Both me and my employer would like to put such a logo on my professional business cards. When doing free software things, I'm being the same person as when I'm doing things for customers of my employer. I'd like to use the same card. How does one get that explicit permission? This is covered by typical trademark usage. You ask for permission to use the logo for a particular purpose on [EMAIL PROTECTED] We have a stock professional use trademark agreement that we have worked on, and if we're OK with the professional usage you're asking for, we'll sign the trademark agreement, then send it to you to sign, and you're good to go. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Software freedom day
Hi, Jeff Waugh a écrit : Don't know why it didn't occur to me to pimp this to GNOME, we've been doing lots of stuff about it in Australia and Ubuntu-land. I just noticed :) Andreas, got any thoughts on an SFD-inspired image for gnome.org? (I just got a sudden flash of New GNOME. New World Order. but I don't think that's very SFD compatible.) http://www.cafepress.com/sfdstore has soem t-shirt designs which appear re-usable. I like the Got freedom? tagline with the mountains. Just another data point for people doing stuff for the day. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Changing the name of GUADEC
Hi, Vincent Untz a écrit : To answer Dave: I like GUADEC (more than GConf, to be honest). But look at various other conferences: is their name easily understandable? I don't think it's more understandable than GUADEC, but once you know what it means, you remember it. OSCon DefCon Linux Expo Desktop Summit GNOME Summit LinuxTag XConf ApacheCon LinuxWorld All have a clear link to conference/expo/day, and in some way evoke what they're about. On the other hand, some geek conferences have really bad names that have stuck (and some of them even do quite well) YAPC RMLL (although it's now better known as the Libre Software Meeting) FOSDEM GUADEC (and for the record, aKademy is a better name than GUADEC). I was talking to Glynn Foster last night on IRC, and he said that one of the main reasons for GUADEC was outreach - getting new people to GNOME. And that changing the style and content of the conference was more important than changing the name. I agree, but I think that the name doesn't help towards that goal. It's more of a hindrance than a help. So why not change it? Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Changing the name of GUADEC
Hi, Vincent Untz a écrit : Let's try another question: who are the new people we want to see? People who know GNOME? People who don't know GNOME? If they don't know GNOME, GnomeCon/GConf is not clearer than GUADEC. If they know GNOME, there are some chances they will learn about GUADEC being a GNOME thing, aren't they? It's not quite black white. One of the things that I want to see happen from a GUADEC is to convert people who know and hate GNOME (or who know about it, and aren't bothered by it) into disciples. GNOME has a bad rap in the über-geek world. We're elitist, we don't listen to our current users, instead preferring to make decisions for some imaginary conservative home user that we don't have yet. That is the reputation we have for a big chunk of the Linux using public. GUADEC and other similar meetings are a chance to open up, explain to people why we do what we do, listen to what our high-end users actually want, and maybe integrate some of that into our Master Plan. So GUADEC is, for me, aimed at 3 main audiences: - GNOME hackers, to get together, work, have fun, change the world. - Developers who aren't currently writing GNOME software, but who might like to, to teach them what's great about our software stack. (this also benefits existing developers who don't know all the stack). - People who are currently using free software, or who are planning to use it soon, and who are ambivalent about GNOME, to turn those people into our advocates. Also, it seems the main idea is to change the name so that the new name shows that it's an event. In what context can we see GUADEC without any reference to the fact that it's an event? The main idea to change the name is because it's yet another meaningless acronym which sucks. It's not a good name. The only reason to keep it is because we've been using it for 6 years. But it has never served us, and GUADEC, in spite of the best intentions of Tim, Anne, Leslie and others, has never become a mainstream general public conference, and the stuff aimed at the enterprise and government markets just seems to annoy the people who *are* there. Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Changing the name of GUADEC
Hi, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller a écrit : So the solution is that we dump the name that a lot of people in the free software world knows by now and instead switch to a new name... Building up name recognition and brand takes a lot of time. Let's kill this excuse dead straight away. GUADEC has *no* mindshare outside the existing GNOME developers community. Most people don't know what it means, what it is, or who it's for. There is no name recognition. GUADEC has no brand value. Changing it will help sponsorship, not hurt it. No-one outside the geek community likes the meaningless acronym tho,ng. It's *so* 1990s, already. And lets face it, the only reason we find GConf a good option is because of the inside joke with the name. For anyone not a core member of the community that is lost. I like GConf for that reason, and because it's got Conf in it, and it's a better abbreviation for 'the GNOME Conference' than GNOMECon or GNOME-Con(which has too many capitals) and GnomeCon violates the religious doctrine on GNOME capitalisation. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: What is GUADEC?
Hi, Tim Ney, GNOME Foundation a écrit : On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 16:05 +0200, Quim Gil wrote: For some the GUADEC is an opportunity to meet, for others is a way to get new contributors, for others is a way to get some money for the Foundation, for others is a way to enhance a common vision of GNOME, for others That's a fair summary of what the board has discussed, as recently as June. Jonathan Blandford once termed GUADEC as GNOME's mothership, an annual place to meet and recharge batteries. It has played at least four important roles for GNOME and the foundation over the last six years: *Technical *Outreach *Community (Social) *Fundraising Press announcements about the event state: About GUADEC The GNOME User and Developer Europe Conference (GUADEC) is an annual gathering of GNOME developers, enthusiasts and individual, business, education and government users worldwide. It provides a forum for members of the GNOME project to showcase their work and to discuss the future of GNOME development. Housed in a different European country each year, GUADEC is a catalyst for the future development and direction of GNOME. The point is, Tim, that is is huge. It's wide open. And aiming too wide is at the root of the problems that there have been with GUADEC over the past two years, where a large portion of the attendees were either completely uninterested in the first two days, or completely uninterested in the 3rd. Aiming a conference at developers, enthusiasts and individual, business, education and government users worldwide is madness. We might as well say everybody, and be done with it. If it's outreach, who are we reaching out to? There is no argument on at least 2 of the points - everyone who goes sees GUADEC as a technical, social conference. No-one disagrees with having outreach either - but I would prefer to see us reaching out to people just off our radar - converting GNOME users into advocates, converting local free software developers into GNOME developers, and converting local hobbyists into free software and GNOME users. The ROI for the enterprise government outreach has been small, and I'm not sure we should continue it. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME trademark guidelines and user group agreement
Hi, Mohammad Anwari a écrit : http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/usergroup/ in 2.c: You may not modify, create derivative works or make any use of the Licensed Works other than as expressly permitted by this License; Does it mean we can't use our own logo derived from GNOME's logo? http://id.gnome.org/wp-content/themes/idgnome/images/logo.png That's what it says. I believe that we are going to handle logo modifications on a case-by-case basis. Please let us know if you want to use a modified logo, and as long as it's a reasonable usage, there will be no problem. We will soon have logo usage guidelines which outline what we consider good and bad logo use. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: poor man's SWOT analysis of GUADEC
Salut, Vincent Untz a écrit : I'm not sure what kind of other conferences you're talking about, but isn't this the role of local groups (if they exist, of course)? E.g. events in France are pretty much covered by GNOME-FR people and it's probably the same for Germany/GNOME-DE and other countries. There's lots we can do at the foundation level to help. - Collect and maintain a calendar of events which are relevant and which happen annually - http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/AnnualEvents - Co-ordinate regional groups, keep in contact with the organisers, and make sure that the regional information in this calendar and contact details for the regional group are kept up to date - http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups (needs constant care attention). - Collect the names geographical location of people from GNOME who give shit-hot presentations. Having a big-name GNOME persopn at a conference is great for us. TODO. - Encourage new people to start giving presentations - we can help out with stock presentations and advice. You don't get good at giving presentations except by giving them. TODO. - Collect (and create?) presentations on GNOME, so that they can be reused or pilfered. http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/MarketingMaterial (this is a mish-mash with no quality control). The foundation should be a conduit for this type of information - making sure that people know who's doing what, and who can help. I would like to see regional organisations who are planning stands, or looking for speakers, or organising a conference/meeting/hackfest get into the habit of adding [EMAIL PROTECTED] to the announcement mail, and asking us for help whenever they need it. We may not be able to help, but usually we can give e-mail addresses of people who've worked on similar stuff, and pointers towards material which exists (usually somewhere in the wiki or on ftp.gnome.org). Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Petition for referendum
Hi Mark, I fully recognise that this would have resulted in my not being elected last year. I also think that's a complete straw-man argument, for the reason you state. I agree it's taking far too much energy - part of that is that we're working *around* the board, not with it. I'm not saying it's a panacea, I'm saying it's a start, one of many things we need to do to make the board more effective. Cheers, Dave. Mark McLoughlin a écrit : On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 18:27 -0400, Daniel Veillard wrote: The section of our bylaws defining the number of elected directors is Article VIII section 2 c) , a reduction to 7 would also affects the maximum number of directors, as no more than 40% of the elected members can have the same affiliation: 40% of 7 is 2.8 , this mean that a reduction to 7 would not allow more than 2 representatives from the same affiliation. That's an interesting point. By my reckoning, that would mean that this years board would consist of[1]: Owen Taylor Luis Villa Jody Goldberg Daniel Veillard Tim Ney Murray Cumming Christian Schaller instead of: Owen Taylor Luis Villa Jody Goldberg Daniel Veillard Jonathan Blandford Federico Mena-Quintero Tim Ney Miguel de Icaza Murray Cumming Christian Schaller David Neary Meaning we'd have the same board, but without Jonathan, Federico, Miguel and Dave. Would that make for a more effective board? Cheers, Mark. [1] - Yes, its not entirely accurate. Some people on the hypothetical board-of-seven may not have run for election at all if the board size was smaller. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation affiliations list/page?
Hi, Luis Villa wrote: OSSI is the only thing I can think of offhand, though I know we at one point had a relationship with SPI, and I know there is at least one other I'm blanking on at the moment. There's the UK based Open Source Consortium, but they seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth (at least, they're not answering their mails). Seems a GNOME presentation to a working group they're involved in didn't go too well because of a communication problem. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Producing open source software
Hi, http://producingoss.com/html-chunk/index.html Karl Fogel wrote a book on producing free and open source software, which discusses everything from technical and social infrastructure to handling money and managing colunteers. It's an interesting read, so far. It's particularly interesting in the context of our recent reduction in the size of the board, which will require us to better manage delegation of foundation tasks. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How does the board work?
Hi, Selon Vincent Untz [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Two days ago, I wondered: what is the daily job of the board?. I was not wondering what the board is doing, but how it works: is there a lot of mails on the board mailing list? What's the frequency of the meetings? (one per month? more?) Are the meetings done by phone, on IRC? etc. The traffic varies. I'd guess (without checking) that there is an average of about 20 mails per month, mostly between board members - perhaps fewer than 5 emails per month coming from people outside the board asking questions. Meeting frequency this year has been mostly every 2 weeks, apart from a period recently which was slightly perturbed by the GNOME summit. Normally, we're having a board meeting next Wednesday. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Fwd: Re: Beginning of the 2005 GNOME Foundation elections]
Anne Østergaard wrote: I remember that Miguel de Icaza one year was announcing his candidacy a little after the time limit and his candidacy was not accepted by the committee. He also was on travel and was a very serious candidate for the board. With the difference that he had not expressed the intention of running during the period when candidacies were open on foundation-list. Unlike Jeff. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Additional questions for the board candidates
Hi, Philip Van Hoof wrote: So basically you guys will be responsible for being the official voice, steering the releases, communicating with vendors and customers, GNOME related conferences and promotion. You guys being the foundation. Not necessarily the board. 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? I never like to see repeated work. It's always disappointing to me to see KDE people say that fd.o is a GNOME effort, that the standards there are imposed on them. I'm not really in a position to help change that, but I know that fd.o houses a number of efforts to encourage inter-project co-operation (like the Create project) which are desktop independent. In fact, I dislike seeing duplicated work at the distribution level too, and I think the foundation would be a great place to consolidate some of that duplication, and make the integration job easier and cheaper for distros, and making the core desktop better in the process. 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)? It's going to come from bottom-up, and from top-down. First, as individuals, we need to avoid a them us situation - and that means watching your tongue sometimes. I think we do OK at this at the moment. Second, as an organisation, we need to make sure that we're talking to each other. I'd like to see GNOME talking part in the OSDWs organised by Aaron Seigo, for example. It'd be better to start working together on that kind of thing that each person organising essentially the same thing in their corner. I'd like to see KDE e.V and the GNOME Foundation co-sponsor development work that benefits both desktops. I'd like to see us applying for grants together. 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? I guess it's the board's job to make sure that some kind of leadership exists, but it's definitely not the board's place to make that kind of decision. Otherwise someone would be asking prospective board members whether they though Mono should be added to the bindings, and Beagle to the platform. One problem we have on that particular issue is that at the moment, we don't have anyone ready to make that call, because making the obvious call will alienate at least 2 distributions supporting GNOME. But the call will need to be made soon, because in about 6 months, we're going to be in a situation where we have a de facto fork. Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project for the GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve yourself in the One Laptop Per Child concept? I'm happy that people in the GNOME project are working on the project, and I will try to keep in contact and make sure we know what's happening. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Voting reccommendations
Hi, Following on from Reinout's example, I'd like to reccommend votes for the following candidates, some of whom are perhaps not as well known as others: * Vincent Untz - he's great. A nice guy, a great worker, and a born leader. The kind of person you'd like to have on the board. * Quim Gil - a new member of the GNOME community, through the Barcelona GUADEC proposal (of which he was the architect, along with Jordi). Everything I've seen of Quim so far is great - he understands our community, and is a creative problem solver. * Germàn Poo Caamano - I don't know Germàn very well, except by reputation. He is one of the main organisers of GNOME in South America, including the GNOME developer meetings, and that kind of drive and diversity will be good for the board. I hope you'll consider giving them a vote, the board will be less well off without these 3 next year. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Off Topic] We need Vendors? [was Words to Avoid Vendor]
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 21:06 -0500, Richard M. Stallman wrote: We want to encourage non-free apps to use GNOME, but we don't want to appear to grant those non-free apps ethical legitimacy. We have to choose our words with care to achieve both goals at once. These are your priorities. Other people have other priorities, though they have the same aims. It's a difference of strategy, not of ideology. Isn't our priority (globally) to create a free desktop environment? Personally, I'm uncomfortable with putting the LGPLness of our platform forward as a major selling point of the platform - I prefer to put forward the freedom of what we do (community, access for all, and an open development platform and set of applications), and encourage 3rd party vendors building software for GNOME to move towards freeing their software (as happened with Real and HelixPlayer), rather than putting forward, as a major selling point, you can build software for GNOME and keep it secret for no cost, and you can't do that on KDE. That said, while I'm uncomfortable with it, it would be naive to think that it's not something people consider. Luckily, I don't believe any of the candidates share your ridiculous extremist self-belief. I want GNOME to be a free software desktop. And while I welcome 3rd party developers building software on the platform, I don't think it's consistent with the goals of the project to encourage it, by putting this aspect of our platform forward as a major selling point. Does that make me a ridiculous extremist too? Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Lyon for GUADEC 2007
Rodrigo Moya wrote: On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 13:39 +, Calum Benson wrote: Ooh, UK v. France... it's the Olympic bid all over again :) IIRC, someone mentioned Vilnius, in Lithuania, as a candidate also some time ago. Any news on that? Someone from Vienna also expressed an interest. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2006/Feb/15
Selon Bill Haneman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 13:05, Luis Villa wrote: ... we didn't sign anything, should we? It's a bit surprising since we have this in the trademark usage guidelines: Do not use GNOME logos unless you have explicit written permission to do so. http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/ We should probably fix this :-) This is one of the things I want to kill, FWIW. Luis We can't have it both ways. Either we keep the GNOME trademarks, which requires us to enforce them, or we abandon them. We (the Foundation membership) have the right to do either I suppose, but there does not seem to be a good middle ground, if we do not enforce the trademark, then anyone who wants to use the GNOME logos for any purpose, even one that is potentially damaging to GNOME, can do so. To take an extreme case, someone could even make a release and call it Official GNOME and we could not stop them. Bill ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting 2006/Feb/15
Ooops... that wasn't supposed to happen. Selon Bill Haneman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 13:05, Luis Villa wrote: ... http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/ ... This is one of the things I want to kill, FWIW. We can't have it both ways. Either we keep the GNOME trademarks, which requires us to enforce them, or we abandon them. We can at least try to administer our trademarks in a way which is coherent with a free software community. I'd like to see people playing with the marks, remixing and hacking on them in a visual sense, producing t-shirts and posters and car stickers and the like. The foundation should be the final arbiter of what is acceptable and unacceptable, but the default should be go for it. The problem is that when you start talking about trademarks, there are so many assumptions flying around that most people (even most lawyers) are just repeating what they've heard elsewheer, and when talking about what you have to do to protect a trademark, most people (including myself) are offering pure supposition. I think it'd be a good idea to get a proper legal opinion on defending our marks, and setting up our trademark policy to be as liberal as possible without losing them. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADEC participation and registration fees
Hi Martyn, You need to make sure you're registered for the site first - you can register and/or log in at http://beta.guadec.org/user Cheers, Dave. Martyn Russell wrote: On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 02:02 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: Just as a reminder, the GUADEC 2006 Call for Participation is open until March 31st: http://beta.guadec.org/callforpapers Hi Quim, Any chance this is broken at the moment? http://beta.guadec.org/submitpaper A couple of us at Imendio are trying to submit papers but keep getting Access Denied. I asked a few people in #gnome-hackers too and they had similar issues. We have had one person successfully submit a paper though, perhaps this is a recent problem? -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADEC participation and registration fees
Hi, I should have tried before saying anything... there's a problem and the site is giving access denied. And yes, this is a recent problem. Cheers, Dave. Martyn Russell wrote: On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 02:02 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: Just as a reminder, the GUADEC 2006 Call for Participation is open until March 31st: http://beta.guadec.org/callforpapers Hi Quim, Any chance this is broken at the moment? http://beta.guadec.org/submitpaper A couple of us at Imendio are trying to submit papers but keep getting Access Denied. I asked a few people in #gnome-hackers too and they had similar issues. We have had one person successfully submit a paper though, perhaps this is a recent problem? -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
New foundation employee, and open position
Hi all, To fill the gap while we get our act together and get a hiring process in order, the board has decided to hire a temporary administrator for a few weeks. Rosanna Yuen joined the foundation staff on the 10th of March, and will work for us until mid April, or until we have a new administrator. So far she has done a great job of putting some order into the chaos that has built up since Tim's departure last year. Let me take advantage of this announcement to announce that we are also opening the hiring process for a full-time, permanent foundation administrator. We hope to move forward quickly with a hire, conditional on getting the right candidate, and the position is available straight away. Our job description is quite simple. Our administrator should: 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. Have fund-raising experience 11. Be computer literate. Preferably Linux literate If the administrator is prepared to help with event organisation (in particular the summit) and be a source of experience for GUADEC organisation, this will be a plus. For practical purposes (office space, the foundation being incorporated in the US), the administrator position will be based in Boston, and all candidates should be willing to be based there. We are opening up the position for 2 weeks (until April 14th) to the GNOME user and developer community, and will be making a public call for candidatures only after that period, if we don't have a good candidate. Candidates should send a résumé to [EMAIL PROTECTED] in plain text. Thanks for your time! Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Summer of Code
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: I have some Glom tasks that are quite involved. They seem suitable because a) They need some investigation and hacking time b) They don't need development of any fundamentally new techniques or technologies. It's not an official part of GNOME, but I wonder if it would be OK to add them to the GNOME list? A big tent approach seems sane. Please add your ideas to the page, and if you get candidates, I'm sure there will be no problem having you as a GNOME mentor. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Agenda for board meeting 2006-04-19
Hi all, Here's the agenda for the board meeting tomorrow. If you're waiting for a decision from the board on something, and it's not here, shout. Cheers, Dave. Wednesday, 19 April 2006, 19:00 UTC (21:00 CET, 15:00 EST, 14:00 CST) == ACTIONS == * Dave to request a contract from Quim for GUADEC * No contract yet, but it will arrive - reminder sent - ongoing * 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. * Contract sent to board, need to make it general. Should probably go to the lawyer. == Public Agenda == 1. Administrator * Process for hiring full-time executive director * Refine job description, and talk about the profile we're looking for 2. Summer of Code * Let's make sure GNOME does better (from an organisational point of view) this time 3. GUADEC 2007 - get list of candidates 4. Any other business === Outstanding issues === * None? -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: overwhelmed board + lack of employees
Hi, Quim Gil wrote: There was a comment in the minutes about board members being overwhelmed. The Foundation is also looking for an executive director and there seem to be not many responses. The combination of these two factors must be a pain, specially when the GNOME project and Foundation itself seem to be in a good momentum. Zana being administrator of the foundation over the past few weeks has really lightened the load. We had a couple of meetings specifically focussed on delegating action items, or doing away with them, and that was a great success. The problem of overwhelmed board members came more from the fact that board members tend to take on more stuff alongside - Jeff's working on Dapper, Federico on Novell's desktop, JRB has taken on more of RedHat's desktop group, I'm involved in GUADEC again this year, and was organising the libre graphics meeting, and so on. I will admit to having had doubts about the 7 member boardand even proposing that we discuss increasing the number by by-election or co-option a few weeks ago. With the success of Zana's short term as administrator, I'm now confident that a full-time employee will solve most of our problems. During the board election and the resize board referendum there was some discussion about what the board members are and aren't supposed to do, and also how much time they should invest in tasks. Can you give a brief feedback of the current situation in the context of those discussions (if you have the time)? ;) There's the big stuff and the little stuff... Big stuff: I want a GNOME store. We were within touching distance of a decent one last year, and it fell through. I haven't ressurrected the idea yet, and will gleefully hand off the project to someone else if they're interested. We need a stock contract for commercial trademark usage. I have one that we came up with (with our lawyers) last year, and we should rework that to perhaps make it a little less constraining, and start getting people to sign it. We want to get momentum behind GNOME's communicatiuon with the press, and our promotion, and try to provide some direction to the marketing project. There's been a bunch of stuff done here, but nothing really identifiable and cohesive. We want to focus the organisation on the needs of third-party developers. This doesn't just mean tutorials, docs and training seminars (although they're all important), it means selling the GNOME development platform, and providing value to consumers of the platform at all levels. It means investing too. We want to hire an executive director who will drive change and start putting the foundation in a position where we can hire people to fulfill needs we have which haven't been fulfilled by the community. Little(er) stuff: We're going to make up an event box for the US, following on from the success of the European event box We've been in contact with more more companies around GNOME, with great success We're keeping a decent eye on the money Zana has put in place a bunch of tempates and procedures to make the job easier for a new administrator We have to be present on the board list, answering queries promptly. We've been doing pretty well at this. All in all, we've been doing a good job with the small stuff, and the big stuff is all either stalled, or taking longer than expected, or lacking community buy-in at the moment. All of these things take someone's time to drive them through and get that community adoption. Delegation takes effort too. About hiring someone, maybe the profile required is just too complex. Not for the complexity of each requirement but the combination of both. Speak on behalf the Foundation, sign checks, send mugs and live in Boston are a fairly diverse set of skills / features. Speak on behalf of the foundation is optional, signing cheques and sending mugs isn't hard, and living in Boston is a reasonable requirement given the nature of the job. We want someone who will aggressively seek partnerships for the foundation, and allow us to do more things like the hiring of Shawn, which worked very well. Hiring a full-time GNOME sysadmin/webmaster would be a decent first hire after the executive director. Put that on the top of the fact that the person to be hired needs to be competent but available and you get an equation difficult to solve. I agree, competent and available is hard - but do we want someone incompetent? ;-) Wouldn't be better to hire an accountancy company to deal with all the money tax legal related stuff and then liberate a GNOMEr to do the rest? I see your point, and subcontracting parts of our administartion is something we've discussed. Apparently it's more expensive than hiring someone to do it, and with a hire we get (hopefully) someone who will be prepared to go outside the bounds of pure administrator. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list
Agenda for board meeting 2006-04-25
Hi all, Last week's board meeting got pushed back a week because of a high nomber of people who weren't available last week, and a light agenda. The next meeting will take place tomorrow evening. Here's the agenda. Please feel free to let me know if there are outstanding issues waiting for an answer or decision which aren't on the agenda. Cheers, Dave. Wednesday, 25 April 2006, 19:00 UTC (21:00 CET, 15:00 EST, 14:00 CST) Please Dial: (phone details to be confirmed, last time they were:) +1-919-334-5215 or 1-888-HELLO-RH (888-435-5674) Date: Apr 19, 2006 Conference Participant Code: 33450 To mute (to avoid background noise), with the Red Hat conference-call system: Press * then press 6 on your phone. Use the irc.gnome.org #board channel for URLs and other unpronouncables. == ACTIONS == * Dave to request a contract from Quim for GUADEC * No contract yet, but it will arrive - ongoing * 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. * Contract sent to board, need to make it general. * FoundationBoard/Tasks has other ongoing tasks == Agenda == 1. Administrator * Process for hiring full-time executive director * Refine job description, and talk about the profile we're looking for 2. Summer of Code * Let's make sure GNOME does better (from an organisational point of view) this time (this looks to be taken care of, yay Vincent and Behdad) 3. GUADEC 2007 - declare list of candidates 4. Decision for the US event box (Carried on mailing list: no discussion needed) 5. Private agenda items 6. Any other business -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boilerplate copyright agreement for commercial exploitation
Selon Alan Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 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. I can certainly post a copy in ODT later in the week which gets converted into .doc every time we need to go to the lawyers... I won't always have the time to do it promptly, though. I will note that there are several high-quality free software programmes that can read and write the bits of the .doc format which are important for lawyers. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for comments on where to have GUADEC in 2007
Hi, Selon Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Yeah, the venue (and it's potential price/cost) is the biggest risk. I think that a letter of committment from the venue should be possible before the host city is chosen. I'd just like to point out that our bid *is* the result of work with the school, and a committment from the school. The bid is signed by the director or the school, their director of communications, and their head of computing. Also, we have the support of the local LUG (I have presented the bid to them on several occasions, and am an active member myself) and gnome-fr collectively - even though we did not want to get everyone to sign the proposal. The policy we adopted was that the organisations, and some key people, committed to organising the conference, and we'll sort out the details in function of time availability when the time comes. We also have a letter of support from the mayor of Lyon, Gerrard Collomb, supporting the bid, which came in after we submitted, and which I'll be adding to the dossier. If accepted, we will be discussing with the city at the start of July the ressources they can put at our disposal. In preliminary discussions, they indicated that this would go as far as providing city facilities for conference events, and perhaps administrative help during the organisation period. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for comments on where to have GUADEC in 2007
Hi, Glynn Foster wrote: Neither of the bids have any details about financials and budgets - I think the decisions can't possibly made until we know the details of what the costs involved of hosting in each of the bids. Aside from the cost of the venue, which we have never paid (at least not since I've been involved), the conference is actually pretty cheap to organise. This year, the majority of our budget is being spent getting people to the conference - this was also the case in previous years. Even in Stuttgart, where the cost of extras like the sandwiches, projectors and so on was more than expected, this represented a small portion of the budget. I certainly agree that we need to consider the financial risk of a conference, but GUADEC is cheap, and could even be cheaper. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Trademark agreement (ODT update)
Hi, First off, I'd like to thank Dom and DW Price for their comments on the contract. In fact, DW did a *huge* job going over the contract, and I've put his commented version and the original on ODT format in the wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark at the top of the page. We now probably have more questions than answers, and another round of comments would be appreciated. If people would like to make revisions to the original (or the DWP edit) ODT, I will do my best to reintegrate those and get something coherent out at the end. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Mellon awards
Hi all, 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. To be elligible, an organisation: 1. Provides a direct and demonstrably significant benefit to one or more of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s traditional constituencies: higher education, with a special emphasis on the arts and humanities; libraries and scholarly communications; performing arts; conservation and the environment; or museums and art conservation; and 2. Meets the Foundation’s strict standards for excellence; and 3. Includes the development of intellectual property that is freely available to the academic community under one of the approved open source licenses. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Mellon awards
Thanks for this Federico. Federico Mena Quintero wrote: On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 17:37 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: We just need to figure out how the GNOME project provides a direct and demonstrably significant benefit to the arts or the environment. snip 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. I think we can concentrate on this a little - GNOME in higher education. Specifically, http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScienceCD the GNOME Science CD which contains a list of software targeted for universities, and the schools/school districts in http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/GnomeDeployments [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/). This is a great example, but we would be hard pressed to justify that GNOME did this - we do provide the infrastructure, but GNOME allows custom software to be written seems a bit weak. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Asking more information to prospective members
Hi, Baris Cicek wrote: Murray asked on membership-committee list if we should ask to prospective members these questions, which are optional to answer: gender, to track lack of female involvement; nationality, to track lack of Asian involvement; I have no problems with these. And one more can be: public key, we can encrypt ballots in future. But I think that requiring a PGP public key is setting the bar too high technically for joining the foundation. Most existing members probably don't have a public key. And public key encryption is non-trivial. And for nationality we can limit it just for regions instead of all nations as this thing gets too political when you include one or forget to include another. That seems sane. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code Of Conduct
Hi, Davyd Madeley wrote: Also of interest, a (female) colleague asked where we're getting our 1% contribution statistic from. It sounds believable, but is it people with CVS accounts, or does it include translators who send translations to their i18n team leader. Did someone just look through a list of names and guess the genders? Similarly for asianness (sic). Are we just using the domain names on their email addresses? The 1% comes from the FLOSS-POLS report on women in free software, among others. Hanna Wallach's presented a 1.5% figure from that result before: http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/11/22/debian-women/ That's 1.5% in free software compared to 28% in proprietary software. Women are not less idealistic or more calculating than men (contrary to one comment I saw that perhaps women were more practical, and wanted to get paid for their work. So we're doing something wrong. Perhaps we should be looking towards going forces with other groups for a women in open source drive or even a women in IT drive. I know that Pia Waugh has really gotten behind this in Australia. Yup. Definitely a great idea. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Women in GNOME (Was: Code Of Conduct)
Hi, Luis Villa wrote: Such a plan should be written by someone who has actually been involved in IRC, our mailing lists, bugzilla, etc., *as a developer*- which, sorry, isn't Anne. It will not work if it is not driven by someone with such experience. That's not so. There's nothing preventing someone who isn't a developer from comping up with a credible strategy for getting more women involved in GNOME (although that's totally off-topic to the code of conduct discussion). Any such plan would have to appeal to geek women - so who's better placed to come up with a plan? A male geek or a female non-geek? Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Draft agenda for foundation AGM during GUADEC
Hi, David Neary wrote: The agenda will be pretty basic - we will present what the board has been working on and will work on for the rest of the year, get a report on our finances from the treasurer, and have a QA session for the rest of the time available. Following on from feedback, a partial list of the various initiatives and projects we'll be including is below: Agenda == 1. Chairman's report Presentation of the board, and overview of the foundation's activities since last GUADEC. I will be handing off the conch to other board members for particular topics. * Documentation contract * Public service * Foundation administrator role * Google SoC * Foundation organised/funded Conferences * Conference presence - EclipseCon, LinuxWorld, FOSDEM, linux.conf.au, ... * Event boxes * Communication promotion 2. Treasurer's report The state of the finances - how much money we have, what we've spent money on, and what we plan to do with the rest. 3. Ongoing projects and their status * Web site redesign * Trademark agreements * Executive director * Merchandising (dormant) 4. Questions Answers Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Membership Committee Mailing List Archives
Hi, Calum Benson wrote: On 10 Jul 2006, at 19:34, David Neary wrote: The reference mails can perhaps go off-list, but honestly I can't think why that might happen - in general, if you're replying it's to give a good reference, and if the reference would be bad, you don't reply. Hmm... so if a dozen people have bad things to say about someone, and only a couple have good things to say about them, we only get to see the good ones and the application is accepted? It all depends on the scope of the question. For a GNOME Foundation membership request, the question is has this person donated considerably more time and effort to GNOME than could normally be expected of a user? - filing one bugzilla bug is a no, writing a QT application is a no, I think writing a GTK+ application would probably qualify as a yes, being a volunteer during a GUADEC would be a yes, etc. At what stage of the process does the question of whether the person is a good contributor or a bad contributor come into play? Should it come into play at all? Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADEC/GNOME build machines
Hi, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote: So, this is the EXCITING NEW proposal I am proposing to you today. The machines were bought on the GUADEC budget, and that means this plan needs approving by a higher authority than myself. I am unsure what this authority is, or if this is considered a good plan at all. Who can help me give these machines a final home with a useful task to perform ? Save the machines ! So, it's complicated, but here's the summary: GUADEC is in the foundation's budget, so GUADEC money is foundation money, but... to make things easy for purchase of stuff in Europe and also for European sponsors, GNOME Hispano agreed to take a fair amount of money into their bank account, and the machines were bought with that money, so... it's not clear whether the owners of the machines are GNOME Hispano or the GNOME Foundation. If we're assuming that there aren't going to be any law-suits, here's the easiest way to handle things: The computers are GNOME Foundation property, bought with the GUADEC money, and GNOME Hispano was just an agent for that operation. Fluendo offered to host the machines somewhere in their office, and the GNOME Foundation graciously accepts this offer. The computers will be accounted for by the foundation as an asset in the end-of-year accounts. All in favour? Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Local user groups
Hi, Quim Gil wrote: Definitely, this is a very good start. I searched local by title (no relevant results) and by text (too much results) and din't find this page. Yeah - it's linked off TeamWorkspaces - I've added a link to the top of GnomeWorldwide too, which seems like a logical place to look for user groups. A first step into certification would be to agree a name for these groups. :) GNOME user groups. Another step could be to agree on a checklist of required + desirable points. Some of them are already there as recommendations. - Active mailing list for coordination Required - Website up to date Desirable - Responsive IRC channel Desirable - GNOME Foundation members in the group Desirable (I'd like to make this required - it would be nice for all user groups to maintain a full membership list) - Agreed contact with the GNOME Foundation English speaker - for the gugmasters mailing list we discussed during the marketing BOF. The idea is to have one mailing list where user groups co-ordinate (announce event participation, ask for help from others, communicate results of stuff they're doing and so on) - the resource should be enormously valuable, if we get buy-in from the various groups. See the Infrastructure section of http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/GuadecBof2006 for more details (and I will be looking for volunteers in September to get the infrastructure mentioned in there off the ground and living and breathing). - Local press contact Required, probably. And this should be a person. No more mailing lists as press contacts! - Democratic and non-profit structure (legal existence desirable) Definitely not required. Perhaps a first question would be whether we need to have something like an official list of GNOME groups and a checklist to know if your group is official or not. I don't think so. We should simply have a list of all the groups we know about, but you don't need a stamp of approval to support GNOME in your town/region. The whole point of bottom-up marketing is to avoid any approval process (even tacit or unwritten) and empower people to do things on their own. We want to know what you're doing, to benefit everyone, but there will be no official and unofficial GNOME groups. I think some kind of certification is needed to avoid conflicts like i.e. which is the real Russian GNOME website (or are both as real?) or risks like some guys linked to a profit company weaving the GNOME flag for selfish interests in a part of the planet where it is difficult to us to check what's going on. I disagree quite strongly. We can take out the bad guys one at a time, using the community mark idea. But we need to allow people to self-organise without passing through the GNOME Foundation. Since organization of meetings, participation in events and fundraising for such activities are a common and primary mission of the local groups, I wonder if it would be useful to have a gnome-local or gnome-events mailing list to exchange ideas and experiences. Now this is supposed to go to marketing-list but, really, I think many people very active in local activities can be not interested in many discussions going on in marketing-list. A GNOME user group masters mailing list is on the TODO list. Language is one barrier, but if we can find one committed volunteer per user group who speaks English, then we can avoid the problem (at least partially). I insist, though, that the foundation is not the place where groups get created or made official. We will be a service provider for user groups - a place for information exchange and co-ordination - not a centralised command control structure. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Local user groups
Hi Luca, Luca Cappelletti wrote: Please, which is the important GNU package you mean? I'm guessing that it starts with G, ends in ME, and has a NO in the middle. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of Conduct final draft?
Hi, Adrian Custer wrote: The foundation could certainly impose a code of conduct on its members; an elegant requirement might also be an hour a month dedicated to helping newcomers. s/impose/suggest Or perhaps codify. The idea of a code of conduct is to document what is already acceptable/inacceptable behaviour in our community, to allow it to be more easily identified. When unacceptable behaviour arises, a code of conduct may be a useful document to point to when saying this is how we expect people to behave. It also sets expectations for a tone and environment for new people coming to the project. However, the foundation has *nothing* to require of the general GNOME participant. Its role was originally to provide commercial entities with a point of contact. It has taken over a role in helping GUADEC and the SUMMIT. It is not a steering committee nor a politburo. Let's separate the board and the foundation. The board is certainly not a steering committee or politburo (although at the start of the foundation, it was certainly envisaged in that role). It has morphed into a hands-off, handle commercial and legal relationships entity (although looking through the minutes and resulting action items, we do a fair bit more than that). The foundation is the GNOME community (or at least a substantial part of it). The code of conduct is not a foundation initiative, it's a GNOME community member's initiative. If Murray is asking for a board stamp of approval, it is only because that is perhaps the best way we have right now to say this represents the concensus of the community, and we're running with it. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
And the recipients of the Ultra 20s are...
Hi, As you may remember, Sun very generously gave the GNOME Foundation two Ultra 20s during GUADEC to give to deserving hackers. After the consultation period post-GUADEC http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2006-August/msg00013.html the board decided that the two Ultras would go to... Elijah Newren and Behdad Esfahbod Thank you both for your stirling work over the years, and I hope that this finally helps you build GNOME faster, Elijah ;-) Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME.conf.au and sponsorship
Hi Davyd, Davyd Madeley wrote: It seems to me that sponsorship to this event should really be handled by linux.conf.au, but I was wondering if the Foundation saw any place for itself here. I tend to agree with you. We have helped bring people to conferences in the past, and are doing so at the moment for a Chilean conference, but in that case, it's paying for the flights of someone who will be presenting, which (if I understand correctly) isn't the case here. I think the best thing is to let linux.conf.au see if they can help out. If you feel that the presence of this person will dramatically improve the gnome.conf.au experience, then write a short proposal (that is, include the name of the person, why they rock, and how much the ticket will cost) to board@ and we'll consider it. While we're on the topic of money. Last year we put together t-shirts, which were highly successful and I'm hoping to do the same again. I was thinking that it might be nice to give each person who presents a complementry t-shirt. Unfortunately, to do this requires funding. Does the Board think this is a good idea, and would Foundation be able to fund such an initiative? This is something we'd be prepared to consider. We have set aside a budget for conference material and marketing for things like printing flyers and t-shirts, and we'll consider requests against that budget. Send us a proposal (cost per t-shirt, number of prints, total cost) today if possible, we'll consider it at tonight's board meeting. Cheers, Dave. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME.conf.au and sponsorship
Hi, Davyd Madeley wrote: Send us a proposal (cost per t-shirt, number of prints, total cost) today if possible, we'll consider it at tonight's board meeting. I don't have anything harder than an idea so far. So I'm not going to be able to get anything to you today. I was more hoping to gauge the current situation with regard to funding and establish what possibilities are available. Sometime in the next two weeks should be fine. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Software Freedom Day on the 18th November, 2006
Hi, Of course we're aware of NUI (the Reverend is well read around here), but it is the tenuousness of the link with GNOME which bothers me. I am sue that this will bother me less over time, and certainly if there are gnome-fr members coming to the meetings to give presentations, we'll be happy to reconsider (have you considered joining gnome-fr?). But for the moment, I'm not sure what you will do with the computers if we send them, and this doesn't seem in line with the mission we envisaged when creating the box, so I prefer wait and see. Cheers, Dave. Jimmy Pierre wrote: Hi Dave, I understand your philosophy behind the box, but do try this for being famous or not : http://www.google.com/search?hs=yAshl=enlr=client=firefox-arls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_sq=%22Novell+Users+international%22btnG=Search Did you want Novell to take responsibility for the box? I could have arranged that. FYI, we are going to have a venue every two months... Anyway, thanks for your reply. Cheers, Jimmy -Original Message- From: Dave Neary [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, October 16, 2006 9:04 PM To: jimmy Pierre Cc: foundation-list@gnome.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Software Freedom Day on the 18th November, 2006 Hi Jimmy Pierre, I think the link between organising a GNOME stand at a conference (the goal of the box) and having equipment for an NUI meeting is tenuous. But it would be possible if: 1. Someone well known in GNOME takes responsibility for the box 2. You pay the transport costs to from the conference (approx. €150) 3. You've reserved the box via the wiki Unfortunately, I don't think that you're well enough known, and the purpose of the meeting doesn't seem in line with the idea we had in mind when creating the event box, so it seems to me like we won't be able to send you the event box (at least for this meeting). Cheers, Dave. jimmy Pierre wrote: Hi, The mail below is self explanatory. We are planning an event every two months, so help us God! Please advise modalities in order to satisfy your requirements and qualify for such benefits and facilities. Cheers, Jimmy Pierre President Novell Users International 49 rue de Sotteville 76100 Rouen +33 680 465942 www.nui.fr http://www.nui.fr [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 12:27:18 +0200 From: Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Greetings from Novell Users International - France To: Jimmy Pierre [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 06:20 -0400, Jimmy Pierre wrote: Hi Murray, We are having a Software Freedom Day on the 18th November, 2006. I was just wondering if the Events Box could be lent to us. Here is our site : www.nui.fr http://www.nui.fr It's in French, but you will get the zist :-) The event page : http://www.nui.fr/jmll_18novembre2006.html I look forward to reading you on this. The GNOME Events Box is really for GNOME events. You might ask on foundation-list@gnome.org mailto:foundation-list@gnome.org, if you really want it for a non-GNOME event, and/or would like the GNOME Foundation to fund delivery of the box to and from your event. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com http://www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com http://www.openismus.com - End forwarded message - ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: My interests in the GNOME Foundation
Vincent Untz wrote: Le mardi 07 novembre 2006, à 14:43, Quim Gil a écrit : I would have resigned from the board back on September if my colleagues would have requested it. I can resign now if you think it's appropriate. As I told Dave last week, I will do whatever it's best. I just want to defend my candidacy for the job like any other candidate. FWIW, I don't think it's necessary that Quim resigns for now. Quim is doing a great job on the board, and it'd be a shame to lose him. I agree. We don't need to lose a good board member, and as Jeff has said, we have been handling the conflict of interest (not without precedent) over the past few months. I appreciate the transparency. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: My interests in the GNOME Foundation
Hi, Anne Østergaard wrote: I strongly feel that under the present circumstances it would be the only acceptable solution to let the next elected board hire the new GNOME Business Development Director. I disagree, strongly. We started this process during the Summer, and have several candidates to whom we owe (at a minimum) respect. That means not saying not our problem, sorry just because we haven't quite gotten the response that we desired. There are some people who have been candidates for this position for over 2 months. The position as the new GNOME Foundation Business Development Director should be announced broader. Please, feel free to spread the job description as you see fit. The full job description should be published along with the interview procedure, and it should be fully transparent to all how the election procedure is going to be. What do you mean by the interview procedure? I would disagree with distributing the questions we are going to ask, for example. There is less than two months till a new board is in place. We won't miss much by waiting a little longer. We will miss all our current candidates, and will lose a huge amount of respect and esteem with the people to whom we have discussed this already - the GNOME Foundation already has credibility issues, which we would do well to avoid aggravating. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO
Hi, Quim Gil wrote: On the other hand, VoIP conference calls imply broadband, which depending on countries and personal economies can be a higher barrier than a cheap call with a normal phone and one of those prefixes. As well as implying access to broadband at home, this also implies access to broadband when travelling (myself, Jeff, Jonathan and Federico have all attended board meetings this year while not at home - I think maybe Luis and yourself did also). It also assumes that we have hardware that works properly with GNOME for voip (the headset which soeone (you know who you are) offered me wasn't Just Works (TM)) Pretty much every country has low-cost pre-paid cards which allow you to call the US cheaply - once Jeff pointed this out to me, that was my preferred way to get on board calls when away from home. The biggest barrier for me to moving to SIP is actually having to be on the internet when on the call. Cheers, Dave. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board Member Application Mini-HOWTO
Hi, Quoting Jonathan Blandford [EMAIL PROTECTED]: We totally can. I don't think anyone asked this year. Or if they did, they didn't ask loudly enough. (-; I asked to be reimbursed 30 euros for a cellphone call - Jeff pointed out I was an idiot for not having a call card, he was right, and I dropped it. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Dave Neary
Name: Dave Neary Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Affiliation: Wengo Hi, I have spent a lot of time thinking about whether I will run for the board this year. In the end, I feel very invested in the success of the foundation, and I feel like we have made huge progress in the past two years. I really want to be part of keeping and growing the momentum we have. Over the past two years, I've played a part in increasing the transparency of the board's functions, improving our relations with the advisory board, getting new members on that board, and in event organisation and fundraising. All of that is ground work for fulfilling the role I would like to see the foundation have in the community - we are looking for a business development director, who will work to increase the budget through fundraising and partnerships. With that increased budget, I would like to see the foundation grow - I would like to see us hire a bugmaster to ensure that downstream distros benefit from their collective work. I would like to hire a full-time editorial resource for our user and developer websites. I would like to see the foundation invest heavily in documentation, and ensure that high-quality, up-to-date, printed documentation exists for the platform and for users. I would like to see the foundation invest also in marketing, listening to ISDs, distributors and users and ensuring that that feedback gets fed back into the development cycle. I hope to play a part in realising this vision, if it's shared by the community and my fellow board members. And so, I propose myself as a candidate for the upcoming board elections. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Answer to questions to candidates from Anne Østergaard
Anne Østergaard wrote: Who am I to think I am fit for election in this celebre Tarzan and his closest friends competition :-)? Nice to know you have such a high opinion of your board colleagues. Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: On Fri, 2006-12-01 at 15:02 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: The feeling of the board (a majority opinion, rather than unanimous) is that the code of conduct would be more hurt than helped by being pushed by us. Its adoption really needs to be bottom-up. Thanks for being the messenger. I am deeply disappointed by this. I think it's a failure of leadership and a failure to stand up for our most basic common values. From an otherwise sensible board. My personal opinion? A code of conduct is vital to the success of a project. Usually, these codes are left unwritten - the group forms itself around common principles and self-selects people who conform to the unwritten norms (that's why some projects have a disproportionate amount of assholes, and others seem heavily weighted with nice guys gals - birds of a feather and all that). We have a code. You've attempted to write it down in its simplest form. I applaud you for it. A written code of conduct is useful for what - for reminding existing members what's acceptable and not? I don't think so. The main use of a code being written down is to ensure that newcomers to the project know where they stand, what they can expect, and (if they don't respect the code) why they're being given out to. This is clearly a case where having it written and endorsed by the board is not enough - you need prominent mailing list people, project maintainers, bugmasters and everyone else who is in regular direct contact with newcomers to our community. That's what I mean by bottom-up. Leading by example. Proving the benefit of the code by showing how it improves the tone and content of a forum. As I said, Olav has been a shining example in this. This was really the only way that this could be done. It will be logistically almost impossible for me to individually persuade every single mailing list, project maintainer, and sysadmin to endose this explicitly. You don't have to persuade them all. You just have to persuade a big enough chunk that they'll be persuading others, and the cure will spread just like the disease did (if we're diseased at all). Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
Hi, Alan Horkan wrote: Code of conduct: Dont be an asshat I'm baffled as to why the board cannot agree on this. Let me be clear: The vast majority of the board (I think everyone) agrees with the idea of a code of conduct. That is not in question. But I don't think that imposing a code of conduct by High Command from the board is healthy, and I don't think it will help its adoption. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: membership
Hi Andreas, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote: the membership page at http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/ unfortunately does not indicate the procedure to follow to cease being a foundation member. Could anybody indicate to me please how to do that? There are two options - wait, and 2 years after becoming a member, don't renew, or send a mail to the membership committee, and they will remove you from the list of members. Mind me asking why you want to leave the foundation? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Code of conduct (bis)
Hi Telsa, Telsa Gwynne wrote: Ar Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 03:02:42PM +0100, ysgrifennodd Dave Neary: The feeling of the board (a majority opinion, rather than unanimous) is that the code of conduct would be more hurt than helped by being pushed by us. Its adoption really needs to be bottom-up. The issue is divisive, even within the board, and I don't think that we can come out as a group and say the board thinks we should do this - Would it be possible to find out who felt which way? I can't see it in the minutes, and this is very much a deciding issue for me when it comes to voting for the new board. We didn't vote, if that's what you mean. I certainly don't mind repeating my personal feelings about it - I don't think this is the kind of thing the board should be ruling on, but I agree with the code of conduct, and have signed up to it. Do you mind me asking whether this puts me in your bad books? :) Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Why no press releases about new AB members?
Murray Cumming wrote: We seem to have some new advisory board members, such as ACCESS (formerly PalmSource), Intel, and Canonical. This is wonderful. I wonder why there were no press releases to publicize this support, and in some cases, not even an announcement on foundation-list. Or did I miss something? We also have OLPC and the SFLC as two new non-profit advisory board members. We also never announced Nokia was joining the advisory board officially. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: debug machine (was Re: Minutes of the Board meeting, 2006/Oct/25)
Hi, Fernando Herrera wrote: Ey, maybe we could use this machine as a future debug server. What's a debug server? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can there be an Official Hardware Partner for GNOME
Hi, Josh Kress wrote: Thanks for the replies so far. [No replies from the board directly, but this might be due to bad timing on my side] Let me be the first. I didn't feel the need to reply, because Peter's reply so well summed up my thoughts. The first time I read the suggestion I felt vaguely ill at ease with it, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that having an official hardware supplier when we have 4 hardware suppliers on the advisory board already (all of whom have donated or loaned hardware to GNOME over the past two years) doesn't seem appropriate. It made me think about that subject a little more and even some other title to acknowledge an outstanding sponsorship might prove controversial. I can't see a way to define that properly and moreover I see another problem: What is more outstanding? A company donating hardware or a company employing some more GNOME developers? The foundation receives a good number of donations every year - and we try to acknowledge them all above a certain level. There's no problem, I would think, with the company sponsoring an upgrade to the GNOME event box, supplying small-form computers and having their name associated with the box (of course, their hardware will be on show during trade shows as well). I would love for you to explore this opportunity further - I'm not sure if there is alignment between the GNOME Foundation and this company such that we can invite them onto the advisory board (and nothing says they'd accept if we did). But I would also love to see the company get more visibility through a donation of hardware which would benefit GNOME user groups around Europe, the US or elsewhere. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Our annual meeting at GUADEC
Hi, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 21:55 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: - Let's schedule the AGM the afternoon or even early evening before the Core days start. Like it. We can even use the meeting to do some stuff like matching faces to IRC nicks. I know I will miss catching up with at least a couple of people I've wanted to see at GUADEC every year. If we can get all foundation members together before the core days, it's the right place to look for most people you want to meet. They are all foundation members by now, right? One note of caution - the all-day board meeting generally does need to be all-day. Perhaps a good way to have the foundation AGM, and then to continue working, would be to have the all-day board meeting be until 15h, have the AGM at 16h, and then have a board meal in the evening to allow us to relax together and continue talking about stuff that came up during the day? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting, 2007/jan/04
Hi Adrian, Adrian Custer wrote: On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 13:01 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: 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. The Gnome Foundation is hooking up with OSGeo!? This is great. Where can I find out more? We'll be making an announcement about this with a bit more info shortly. How shortly depends on how much time I can free up over the next couple of weeks :} Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Help us formulate a budget
(resend of the mail I sent to gugmasters-list) Postnote: we could do with getting requests in quickly - if your local group needs money this year, or you have a great idea for something that could use a few quid sponsorship to do with GNOME, please pipe up by the end of next week. Hi all, The board is working on a budget for the foundation for the year, and we're looking for suggestions for things which user groups are organising and would like financial assistance with. I would like to see some brainstorming here on general things which we could do to help user groups in general (like the event box, getting some big posters and t-shirts printed and sent out to groups on demand, that kind of thing) but also specific information on the events that you're planning, and the amount of help you would like to get from the foundation (and our sponsors, of course). A good proposal will be accompanied with a fairly detailed breakdown of costs - for example, if you want to invite a GNOME advocate to give a keynote at a local conference, an estimate of the cost of the plane ticket, and a short description of the conference, would be appreciated. If you want sponsorship for a local event, then some idea what the money will be used for will be needed. Open mic! Jump on in. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: New board roles
Vincent Untz wrote: Le lundi 05 février 2007, à 05:31, Mariano Suárez-Alvarez a écrit : One thing that appears to need improvement is the handling of foundation membership applications. ... However, things have been getting much better lately (I could even say they've got better since I left ;-)): applications are kept in RT, and should be processed within a month. Applicants are told to mail the membership committee if it's not the case. The membership committee got two new members last year - Clytie and Izabel. Have they been integrated into the team and do they have access to all the ressources they need to approve/deny/reply to requests? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME annual report
Hi Rodrigo, Rodrigo Moya wrote: it looks great, but I miss mentions to local movements, like the hackers meetings at Chile and Holland (IIRC), the GUADEC-ES, the addition of Mongolia to the GNOME map, etc. Not sure if you want to go to that level of detail, but it would be great to also mention these local efforts. Here's the major problem we have: http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/free-software-and-its-writers I would love to have a set of reports coming back from community run events and organisations which I could collect into an annual - it would make my job much easier. But for the most part, I either don't know what's going on, or I know, but can't find any written accounts, and so I don't know what to write about :) I would love that level of detail and I would love to see more local groups organising things. I would probably exercise constraint and avoid each new New contributor from country X! type notes but the growth of GNOME worldwide is something that's important. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME annual report
Hi German, Germán Poó Caamaño wrote: If there was no written report/account from the Foundation, why should you expect that local groups had written them? I'm not sure what you mean - you're part of the foundation, as I am. Probably if you would asked for written reports, you could get more than one prepared on time. The contact list is on the wiki: http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups We need to know what user groups are doing before we can ask for anything. I would love to see a more vibrant circulation of information between user groups, and up to the foundation board. That's why I created the guglasters mailing list. That's why I went hunting for most of the information in the UserGroups wiki page, and advertised it. That's why I've been encouraging people to add themselves to the map on GnomeWorldWide. I gave a presentation at FOSDEM about developing GNOME through our user groups. The core point I made is that there is some infrastructure which needs to be top-down, but most of the work will have to be bottom-up. It will come from the community - in the same way that the GNOME project doesn't make any software, GNOME project members do. We do need to provide the skeleton for collaboration. Of the elements I envisage as being the basic tools, most are in place - we have the wiki pages, we have the gugmasters mailing list? I started a shared calendar for GNOME events - I am still waiting for the first request from anyone to add events there or help manage it, and it's going to be stale quick unless people start adding information to it. The only obvious building block that's still missing (but which is on someone's TODO list on the sysadmin list) is the creation of a CRM to manage community, user group, press and business contacts. For info, that calendar is here: ICS: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/mdnrfqhbsjn37b6sgad089qmak%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics HTTP: http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mdnrfqhbsjn37b6sgad089qmak%40group.calendar.google.com That mailing list is here: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gugmasters-list The wiki pages are here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups The LiveCD images and VMWare images which Ken van Dine made, and which allow user groups to easily show off and give away the latest versions of GNOME, are available here: http://torrent.gnome.org/ Thanks to OSU OSL for hosting and bandwidth, Michael Burns for installing the machine on short notice, Intel for the server housing the site, and Olav Vitters for getting the machine set up. To be clear, I don't want to criticize your report, which is a very good point of start (even if it a was a big mail message :-). But the clarification of Rodrigo's concerns didn't make sense to me. So, in the future, we as a local groups, have the task to write reports in order to get included or referenced by the Foundation; in both english and native language. Yes, please. What happened for this (and what I imagine will happen for future editions) is that I mailed the board suggesting that we do an annual report, then made a list of 7 or 8 topics I thought merited a mention in there - among those were the year in review article, an article on GUADEC and the Summit, WSOP, the various things we've done for GNOME user groups and the various events we knew of (we talk about the event box, the GNOME developer meetings, and the increased budget for user groups this year), the advisory board and the embedded initiative. I also had the GNOME platform overview and the hire of Rosanna Yuen on the list. Through the process, I got some feedback that we should add some other articles - distributions that came out with GNOME on them, for example, and the www.gnome.org revamp got added in after the first draft of articles. Perhaps in future years this process will be more open, this year, constraints of time and resources meant that it worked best with one person pulling together the material, and working with a smallish group of people. I admit, I was hoping for a different reaction to this announcement. So far I have had 4 replies, all critical of some aspect of the report. Doesn't anyone think it's cool that we finally got something like this (and all of the other user group stuff) done? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Could GNOME Foundation qualify for a MATC award?
Hi, Vincent Untz wrote: Le jeudi 15 mars 2007, à 10:06, David Bolter a écrit : This is just a heads up in case it matters: http://matc.mellon.org/ Interesting. Do you think you could work on a nomination for the GNOME Foundation? Last year all the Mellon awards went to university research projects or RD labs. I don't mean to put a dampener on things, but I think the best chance for a realistic report is to find a projects which uses GNOME in their research and is clearly focussed on the Mellon touchstones (education, sciences), and partner with them. Sorry for being a little defeatist... Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: an open-audit voting system for GNOME elections
Hi Ben, Ben Adida wrote: Currently, I am developing this using HTML+Javascript with *some* calls into the JVM for crypto. I may be able to eventually do these in pure Javascript, especially if there's a strong need, though I am hoping that's not necessary... BigNum in Javascript is going to be quite slow. That said, if this continues to be an issue (if Java isn't released under the GPL quickly enough), then definitely keep me posted. I imagine that if you test that this works with a Free JVM such as Kaffe that there won't be any issue. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Call for invitations to be the host of GUADEC 2008
Hi, Sergey Udaltsov wrote: I think excluding NA would be reasonable as well - there are so many OSS conferences on the other side of the pond, please leave something to good old Europe:) To me the best free software conferences around aren't in the US - FOSDEM, aKademy, LSM, GUADEC, OLS, LCA, FOSS.IN, CeBIT, LinuxTag... Perhaps the biggest free software business conferences are in the US (your LinuxWorlds and OSCons of the world), but all the best community conferences happen outside the US. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Special GNOME event in California next week
Hi, Dan Winship wrote: Or, if the GNOME Foundation is going to start behaving like Apple, how about we set up a gnomerumors web site and forum, where people can post rumors anonymously and try to figure out what the Board is up to before the official announcements? While the board (and many other people) are fully aware of what's happening next week, and are very excited about it (at least, I am), this is a community initiative, and not a board initiative. Jeff's the community member who's been driving the effort, but many people are involved, and most of them are not on the board. This is underlining something I've said a lot over the past couple of years - the foundation is not the board, and nothing is preventing a community member from starting an initiative on their own, and deciding when to spring the fruit of their efforts on everyone. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: no financial statements for recent years on Foundation website
Hi Alexander, Alexander van Loon wrote: Please take a look at this page on the GNOME Foundation website: http://foundation.gnome.org/finance/ . Why are there no financial statements for 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 available? I'm going to be working to fix that over the coming weeks. The short answer is that because of the changes in the foundation at the end of 2005, we have some catching up to do. I believe I have 2004-2005 accounts around here somewhere - it may just be a matter of getting them on the site. I seem to recall they were published on foundation-list at the time. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Bugdet 2007 for the GNOME Foundation
Hi all, Much later than I expected (but that's another story), here is the budget which I've prepared for the year 2007, which outlines where we're expecting money to come from, what our targets are in that department, and where we're planning on spending it. Let me be clear - this is not accounts - this is a wishlist. Some items on this budget are already out-dated (so I need to update it) - we have a much better idea of how much GUADEC is going to cost and will be bringing in in sponsorship, we know that we didn't hire a foundation director of business development in March, so that line item can be reduced, we're changing banks and will thus have much lower bank charges for the rest of the year, and we now know exactly how many SoC projects we have this year. Overall, this is aout right, though - the foundation wants to contribute in a few areas this year in particular - accessibility, community development, independent software developers and outreach and promotion. This comes down to three major wishes: - We have set aside budgets for a small number of mini-meetings for teams working together. If you have a small team, and want to get together for 2 or 3 days and would like to subsidise travel, then we have some money for that. I have explicitly listed Accessibility, the mobile initiative and an ISD miniconf (this might focus on the platform, on documentation, or on some other subject). Those are ideas, and we welcome proposals outside of those. - User groups are front center in the budget. We will fund requests for travel funds (but we will not be splashing out - if you're in Brazil, and you want to invite someone from Europe, we'll probably ask you if there isn't someone in the US or South America who would be cheaper), we will fund requests for marketing materials and printing (but again, this isn't a gift fund, and requests for print runs of t-shirts which will be given away will probably be refused unless there's some good justification - we're more open to advances to get the printing done, followed by sales to recoup costs), we encourage event organisation and participation, and will fund requests for travel to attend conferences. As I said, this is a work in progress, and our first goal is to manage the foundation's finances in a sane manner and make sure that we're in good shape next year and the years after. This is the first time that we've made a budget for the financial year as far as I can tell. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME budget 2007 v3.ods Description: application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Lutèce d'Or GNOME
Hi Vincent, Vincent Untz wrote: Categories that can be of interest for us: + The best Community action Might I suggest WSOP? + The best promotion of a Free Software solution + The best Free Software development + The best Free Software innovation + Lutèce d'Or of the personality of the year (if we have someone who wants to apply :-)) It's hard to see specific GNOME-related things we could apply for here. What do you suggest? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07
Hi, Lucas Rocha wrote: 4) GNOME and KDE Conference There has been some discussion about a possible merge of GNOME and KDE conferences. This has been discussed at the advisory board level, along with the KDE e.v. members list. If there is considerable opposition from both sides, then it isn't worth exploring further. Jeff mentioned that it's likely to come up at DAM4. ACTION: Jeff to follow up about a possible GNOME and KDE conference merge at DAM4. Does this mean that your're proposing a new merged KDE/GNOME conference? Or is this a matter of scheduling GUADEC and aKademy at the same time and place? Or is this a GUADEC replacement with this merged conference? This is not clear in the minutes. The proposal itself is not clear, but the major points which people brought up with us are: - Getting sponsorship funds for both akademy and GUADEC is tough, since both conferences have a very similar profile to companies: Queue conversation with marketing budget guy: * Marketing: So what's this aKademy conference you want to sponsor? * Linux desktop guy: Well, the Linux desktop is important to us, and we want to show our support for it by helping the project gather people together for a conference. * Marketing: Didn't we do that last month? * Linux Desktop guy: That was the GNOME project, for GUADEC. * Marketing guy: Aren't they the Linux desktop guys? * Linux Desktop guy: Well, yes, but... * Marketing guy: Don't let the door hit you on te way out. - Increased opportunity for cross-pollination innovation if everyone is in the same place at the same time - Encourage movement away from the GNOME/KDE enclaves - Create a single place where we can gather people outside GNOME KDE (OOo, Mozilla, Eclipse) to talk about common issues - Getting hackerrs to several conferences during the Summer is hard DDC was supposed to be most of these things, but getting everyone concerned to DDC was difficult, since all the GNOME people go to GUADEC and all the KDE people go to aKademy, and getting a critical mass of volunteers to go to 2 or 3 conferences during a Summer is a tough sell. Several possibilities for co-operation exist: - Co-location: conferences take part in different parts of the same campus; we meet up for lunch at night, but have our own conferences. Have a couple of days X-desktop sessions at the end (or at the beginning). - Merge conferences - create a Super DDC which has a KDE stream a GNOME stream, but only one identity and one organising committee. There are others. There are of course problems that need to be managed - conflicting requirements around keynotes, travel sponsorship, make-up of the organising committee, and so on. But I think there are substantial benefits too, and the topic merits discussion. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07
Hi, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote: Another option that could be considered is back-to-back co-location. You get a lot of the same advantages in terms of cheaper financials, yet since they will be run sequentially at the same location you don't get the collisions and 'noise' of sharing one venue at the same time. And interested GNOME hackers could that way easy attend aKademy by extending their stay a little and the same for KDE hackers the other way around. I'm not poo-pooing the idea completely, but let me ask the question: do you think many people will be able to take 2 consecutive weeks to go to two conferences? I know I wouldn't (the boss would probably think I was nuts, and the wife would kill me). I'm wondering if there are a lot of volunteers in the same situation as me. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Hiring a part-time sysadmin?
Hi Murray, Selon Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ... Meanwhile, our sysadmins seem overworked, causing understandable delays for simple requests. Now seems like a good time to pay someone so that requests for new accounts, mailing lists, bugzilla products, etc, get done almost immediately. It's a nice idea, based on a false assumption, I'm afraid. The Board's finances seem to be OK right now, and I know that advisory board members have generally been ready to contribute for specific things that help the project. Our finances are balanced. That means we have roughly the same aount coming in as we have going out - except for some savings that we've made over the last year by not having any full-time employee (these are one-off savings, as soon as we hire someone we'll be balanced again, but with a slightly bigger bank account balance). So I don't think we have the money to hire a part-time sysadmin, and I think we'd have difficulty finding one (to work part-time). It's certainly something worth thinking about, but the answer will likely be we can't (yet) afford it. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary Lyon, France ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Resigning from the board
Hi all, As some of you have noticed, I'm not at GUADEC this year. The reason is a happy one - Anne is going to be giving birth sometime over the next couple of weeks (I'll keep ye posted). The combination of the arrival of a third child, and a change in role at work over the past few weeks, have meant that I've reevaluated the committment I can make to the board of the foundation. In all honesty, I can't guarantee that I will be able to do justice to my position as board member for the second half of the year, a period when the board is usually more effective than during the first part. So I prefer to leave my place to someone with more energy ideas, and to leave the board at a time when I am still relatively happy with how I've done. I hereby resign my seat on the board. I have had a great two and a half years on the board, and I'd like to thank everyone with whom I've served - Owen Taylor, Luis Villa, Jody Goldberg, Daniel Veillard, Jonathan Blandford, Federico Mena-Quintero, Tim Ney, Miguel de Icaza, Murray Cumming, Christian Schaller, Jeff Waugh, Anne Oestergaard, Vincent Untz, Quim Gil, Glynn Foster, Behdad Esfahbod. Thanks also to everyone who has voted for me through the last 3 elections. I'd like to wish all the best to the board for the rest of the year, and good luck to the person who replaces me. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation and Source Code Copyright
Hi Thomas, Thomas Wood wrote: During discussions about copyright at GUADEC several people mentioned that developers were not encouraged to assign copyright to the GNOME Foundation. From my point of view, not encouraged isn't the way I see things. Certainly no-one has done so so far, and since the mission of the foundation is more organisational than technical, the usefulness cound be questioned, but I think it's reasonable for the foundation to defend the copyrights of its members, and if certain members wis to assign their copyright, I wouldn't see any problem with that. A couple of developers, including myself, have been working on a new capplet for the control center. Since we had been working on it as a group we decided it would be fairest to assign copyright to the foundation rather than any particular individual. Are we to understand that this is not to be advised and if so why? I'm certainly not a definitive source on the issue - Luis would be a better person to comment on the consequences of such a copyright assignment - but I don't think that you are to understand that. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Shift election cycle back six months
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: So here's the proposal: I'd like to suggest we shift the election cycle back six months, landing the process in May and June [1]. More controversially, I reckon the best way to achieve this without a lot of pain would be to extend the current Board's term by six months. Fully support this - I have no problem with the current board holding on for another 6 months. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minor change to Board practice
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: We'd like the officers of the GNOME Foundation to reflect the current state and practice of the Board, and recommend this as best practice for future Boards, so here is what we're going to do: 1. Request a letter of resignation from Miguel (as that is the only way for the office of President to become vacant) 2. Appoint the Chairman (Quim) and Vice-Chairman (Anne) as President and Vice-President 3. Recommend that future Boards appoint the President and Vice-President from elected directors annually (instead of Chairman and Vice-Chairman) I think there's value in having a figurehead president divorced from the day-to-day running of things - a symbolic figure who is a patron of the foundation (like, say, the Irish president who doesn't run the country, or the Queen in Australia). There is an advantage too - you get to choose your president from outside of the community, and have it be someone with major weight in higher orbits - a Jonathan Schwarz or Michael Tiemann (or, indeed, Miguel de Icaza, in spite of him still being firmly in the community). If you're doing away with the symbolic president, then it probably makes sense to throw in a second procedural change, and have that person elected to the position, rather than nominated from within the board. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: Shift election cycle back six months
Hi Quim, Quim Gil wrote: 1. Make sure that from a legal point of view we can have board mandate not coinciding with budget terms. If legally we can't do it the rest is pointless. Since the foundation's accounting year is from October to September (or September to August, not 100% sure) this is already the case. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 23rd Auguest 2007
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Dave Neary I think it's a mistake not to have someone in Boston involved early in the planning process. This problem would not have been solved by having someone in Boston involved early in the planning process. It's just rotten luck. I didn't say it would have been. That's not the point. Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 23rd Auguest 2007
Hi, Glynn Foster wrote: 2) Boston Summit In the process of confirming the venue. There is a minor development where 2 groups are saying different things about the venue - one saying that it's free, and the other (conferencing services) saying it is not free. There's no current summit planning team on the ground, but Jeff expects that to happen once the core summit details are worked out. I think it's a mistake not to have someone in Boston involved early in the planning process. I asked someone last month if they'd be willing to be involved, and they said yes. Has the board been in contact with them? Cheers, Dave. PS. Congratulations to Rosanna Jonathan! -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
Hi, David Bolter wrote: I like this idea. I guess if we trust someone to commit code we should trust them not to abuse the planet... errr at least not planet-gnome anyways. 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. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak I would suggest opening pgo as a free-for-all for those with commit access Just so everyone knows: That is *extremely* unlikely to happen. There has been significant support for the editorial stewardship of Planet GNOME for ages now. When I last considered making it a free-for-all, there was a *LOT* of pushback. Despite the occasional maintenance issues that has not changed. I have a suggestion. A second person with full editorial control, alongside Jeff, and some published guidelines on the criteria so that people know whether their blogs have a good chance of getting accepted onto the planet or not. A dose of common sense, and a realisation that there are grey areas where subjective judgements are going to be made, no matter what is proposed, will allow us to get past this issue quickly, rather than spending countless more hours bikeshedding it. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
Hi, Julien PUYDT wrote: Tristan Van Berkom a écrit : I think its important to note here that giving someone access to blog on planet gnome is like publicly aknowlaging that they are indeed a part of the gnome community - people who contribute to the project need to feel like they are part of the project. Agreed. And there are people who provide code (and good code), but can't get svn access, which means they're effectively denied entering the community. Planet GNOME - is it a resource for its readers, or its writers? All aggregation sites go through a process, like mailing lists, where as the number of participants goes up, the relevance and quality goes down. Look at O'Reilly's Radar, when there was only Tim, and no when there are 14 or 15 people posting. I think the sweet spot there was about 4 or 5 writers - for me, the radar's gone to the wrong side of the quality/quantity equation. The planet's got 245 authors now. There are 48 posts since yesterday morning. At what point do we recognise that editorial control is necessary for the planet to remain a useful resource? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Can we improve things?
Hi, Tristan Van Berkom wrote: For my part, if I had anything else to argue it would be that p.g.o. should be handled by a formal team whos members could be subject to change from time to time (as I suggested before, possibly a marketing team or web team) - as opposed to add someone else to jeff, which might speed up the process for planet syndication but still risk leaving applicants in the dark (and applicants in the dark are the ones I believe might feel unwelcome, if only because of the non-democratic nature of the process ;-)). Too much process! The problems are undocumented approval guidelines, and a single point of failure (Jeff) for planet maintenance. Jeff's fixing the first one, and a formal team is not an ideal solution to the second. Keep it simple. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Preliminary results for Membership Vote Regarding Change to Bylaws
Hi, Žygimantas Beručka wrote: The results are: yes (125 votes) no (22 votes) Even though I've voted yes, the voting activity level is depressing I must say. How many members the Foundation has currently? Voting in referenda is generally not very high, and there was 0 debate on this issue on the list (I did see some grumbling on IRC, but nothing concrete), so it's hardly an initiative that's going to mobilise the troops. I'm hopeful that there'll be more animation around the elections this year. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Preliminary results for Membership Vote Regarding Change to Bylaws
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Dave Neary Voting in referenda is generally not very high, and there was 0 debate on this issue on the list (I did see some grumbling on IRC, but nothing concrete), so it's hardly an initiative that's going to mobilise the troops. There was buttloads of discussion around the initial plan, which partly led to the revised implementation (mostly about extending the current board's term, and we had legal advice suggesting the bylaws change). Based on the length and breadth of the earlier threads, I don't think there was any lack of discussion. :-) Right - because of the initial discussion, the referendum proposal had addressed many initial concerns, and thus didn't provoke lots of debate. Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Suggestion for coming elections
Hi, Quim Gil wrote: What happens when you get less than 7 people with votes? I don't understand - you mean if there are fewer than 7 candidates? Constitutional crisis, I suppose... everyone's elected, and they invite specific people to fill up the board maybe? That's unrelated to my suggestion, though. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Suggestion for coming elections
Hi, Quim Gil wrote: What happens when you get less than 7 people with votes? Excuse me, I think I misunderstood. You mean, suppose we have 10 candidates, 150 voters, and the distribution of votes is: Candidate 1: 120 Candidate 2: 107 Candidate 3: 64 Candidate 4: 63 Candidate 5: 52 Candidate 6: 44 Candidate 7:0 Candidate 8:0 Candidate 9:0 Candidate 10: 0 Aside from the fact that it's extremely unlikely (everyone at least votes for themselves, don't they?), would you really want a candidate who got 0 votes from the membership joining the board? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: no financial statements for recent years on Foundation website
Hi, Claudio Saavedra wrote: El lun, 23-04-2007 a las 10:08 +0200, Dave Neary escribió: Alexander van Loon wrote: Please take a look at this page on the GNOME Foundation website: http://foundation.gnome.org/finance/ . Why are there no financial statements for 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 available? I'm going to be working to fix that over the coming weeks. The short answer is that because of the changes in the foundation at the end of 2005, we have some catching up to do. I believe I have 2004-2005 accounts around here somewhere - it may just be a matter of getting them on the site. I seem to recall they were published on foundation-list at the time. Pinging about this. I was looking for the financial statements but had no luck finding them. When I left the board, we had more or less gotten the accounts for the financial year 2004-05 and 2005-06 sorted. The 2004-05 accounts were never published in their entirity. The 2006-07 accounts should be considerably easier, thanks to Rosanna maintaining GNUCash accounts for the past 18 months. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
Hi Bjorn, BJörn Lindqvist wrote: On 10/31/07, Jody Goldberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It is uncomfortable acting as a representative of the foundation in a role that many members do not agree should exist. My private preferences should not negatively impact the foundation, or go against the will of the majority of members. A representative should be representative of the people he or she is representing. Can you be representative if your personal opinion is diametrically opposite to the one you are representing? I mean, you are doing a really great technical job improving OOXML while most in the community really want the standardization process to fail. Are you seriously suggesting that it's in the best interests of our users, of GNUmeric users and Abiword users, not to be able to open OOXML files? I disagree with your statement that most in the community want the standardisation process to fail - I would suggest that most want the standardisation effort to be sincere. I believe I understand Microsoft's motivation for standardisation - get around all those pesky governments public bodies insisting on open standards for information exchange. If that is the motivation, then I also want the ECMA to decline the standard. This may be our last chance for years to get comprehensive documentation of the file format out of MS. If ECMA standardisation does not go through, then Microsoft have nothing to gain by publishing more more information about its formats. Cheers, Dave. PS. On a point of information (as we used to say in the debating society), Jody no longer works for Novell. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: A related issue: I think we've pretty much shown that the seven person Board thing is a bit of a failure. Even if you're not elected or didn't run, we could appoint you to the Board for this function. :-) We ought to consider adding a couple of people to the Board. What we've shown is not having a full-time director has been a mistake, and I would urge the next board to invest financially in the hiring of someone. The way we've been doing it (searching personal networks + low-key announcements on blogs mailing lists) isn't going to get it done. A headhunter/agency who will place ads, screen candidates and get us a qualified person in 3 to 6 months is a worthwhile investment. I agree that expecting a 7 person volunteer board to take care of the administration and day to day running of the foundation is asking too much. I also believe that doing so of a 9 person volunteer board would be asking too much. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OOXML [was Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07]
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: Things change -- what was taken for granted while you were on the Board may not be the case now. Way to make a guy feel like his opinion is worth something Jeff. Would you mind educating me on what's changed, please? Perhaps as a foundation member who put a lot of time over two terms into the hiring process I might have something to offer the decision making process? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Executive director [was: Re: OOXML]
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: I explained it in that email. If something wasn't clear or you need further explanation, let me know what it is. In particular: Jeff wrote: It has actually been a very helpful learning experience -- understanding what the purpose of that role should be, by grokking the gaps. It's less obvious what that role ought to be now that we're so far away from the Executive Director assumption. The gaps I've seen are things like actively managing a budget, managing our relationships with commercial partners (the advisory board, community donors and more), ensuring continuity year-to-year in event organisation, and managing relationships at an administrative level (accountant, lawyer, bank, payroll...). Do you see different gaps? Rosanna has taken up some of the slack - the day-to-day handling of the accounts, sending gifts to donors, getting it done when we need things sent somewhere/printed/received, and also managing some of those administrative relationships (bank, accountant, payroll), but her role is clearly administrative, and is not pro-active - she has no decision-making authority on spending the budget, does not cultivate relationships with regional groups or company representatives, and doesn't look at the Big Picture for GNOME or for the GNOME Foundation. All of those tasks are firmly in the Executive director mould. I agree that we're hoping for someone who can go beyond the bare minimum, and who can help grow the community by searching for opportunities to bring money into the foundation to allow us to better fulfill our role of supporting the community and the project, but is that really so far from the role of an ED? Isn't that what Mitchell Baker did for MoFo? Or Mike Milinkovitch for Eclipse? Defining the role and hiring someone for it has been and will continue to be a very tricky task. We have to be very comfortable choosing between large target and small target goals. Just hiring for an Executive Director role would put us firmly in the small target zone, which is probably not the right thing to do. I don't even think it's necessary. So I'm wondering if our insistence that our needs are so far from an executive director isn't in some sense becoming a millstopne preventing us from seeking hiring someone who could do a wonderful job for us, who would be a thousand times better than having no-one, and who would allow the board to assume the role which a board typically has, one of oversight. When we first found ourselves in the situation where we wouldn't have an executive director, we exchanged emails with someone in another software non-profit. He gave us this advice, which I think has become a fulfilled prophecy: [We] stopped hiring an executive director partly because we found we had trouble attracting competent executive directors, and partly because poor management by these directors and the board reduced our funds to the point where having an executive director would strain the organization. We, too, hired a very competent managing director and assumed the volunteer board members would pick up the executive part. As a result: * Projects, local chapters, and other good initiatives got dropped, even though we detected a few years later that there would have been big payoffs for continuing them. When the initial volunteers got burned out, neither they nor anyone else took responsibility for finding replacements. * Crucial opportunities for external success (doing publicity at the right moment, finding allies) were missed. This is because individual volunteers might be doing excellent work on a project, but no one was looking at the big picture and asking, How do we capitalize on this. * Important projects (including those for which we hired consultants) went off in the wrong direction early in their history and ended up failing or being severely compromised. This is because the direction of such projects depended on board members who came and went, and were sometimes unprepared to take the directing role. * In general, the organization suffered from being led by board members who were sophisticated technically and politically, but lacked skills at organizing, finance, fund-raising, and other executive-director tasks. This sounds, 2 years on, like exactly the situation we find ourselves in now. Perhaps it is time to revisit the assumption that our organisation is so radically different from others that we don't need/want an executive director? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: clarification and apology [was Re: board]
Hi, Luis Villa wrote: Since March of this year, I've been trying to help out on a variety of miscellaneous Foundation-related legal projects- some important, some not so much. All of these projects, for various reasons, stalled. When I came back up to speed, I tried to revive them, but got blocked on the two new legal-lists- in each case, I asked for status or for more information, and got little information, or worse, complete silence. As most of you know this is incredibly demotivating for a volunteer. ... Very few board members were on the lists, and the board expected the board's delegates to serve as a conduit for this type of information. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons, this did not happen, so the board as a whole was unaware of my unanswered pings, and did not deserve some of the negative energy I channeled in their direction. It seems appropriate that the board delegate to these lists explain themselves in the light of your mail. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: bounties?
Johannes Schmid wrote: Do you remeber those people from GUADEC with Telepathy T-Shirt. There was something on it like: I spend my whole free time hacking on Telepathy and all I got was this T-Shirt. That was at least funny! And original to boot! :) Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidacy Announcement for the 2007 GNOME Board Election: George Kraft
Hi, George Kraft wrote: On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 02:49 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: No director represents their affiliation -- they're elected to represent the GNOME Foundation membership after all -- but it must be documented (least of all because of the maximum representation rule). Should I repost to foundation-list and election with the correction, or is this discussion thread good enough? I imagine that a correction to elections@ is good enough. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
