Re: Minutes for the Board meeting of February 25th, 2014

2014-03-04 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Also to note that moving valuables would demand paying and handling
customs paperwork. A box with 1000 of valuables can be $200 only for
import tax, no matter the purpose.

This can be avoided with temporal internment methods but that requires
*lots* of time, legal entities established and still some money. And
it is different from country to country.

Regarding banners and stickers and such, South América is dirt cheap
for producing those. So there would be little benefit with printed
material.

Money is still the better option.

On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:51 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño  wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 10:15 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
>> wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20140225
>>
>> = Minutes for Tuesday, February 25th, 2014, 17:00 UTC =
>>
>> == Next Meeting ==
>>  * Monday, March 3rd, 2014, 16:00 UTC
>> [...]
>>   * Should we set aside funding for a South American event box?
>>* '''ACTION''': Kat to ask South American events organisers for the
>> Foundation to sponsor an event box
>>* Expected cost: USD 1000 to USD 2500
>>* https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Grants/EventsBox
>
> This can turn out very expensive and inconvenient for people there.
>
> Have in mind that South America is bigger than appears in the map. Just
> for a reference, Ecuador -that tiny country in the map- looks smaller
> than France, but it is ~70,000 square kms bigger, it doubles size UK.
>
> So, sending the event box from Lima to Santiago is equivalent in
> distance to Oslo-Lisbon, and Lima-Sao Paulo is equivalent in distance
> than Moscow-Lisbon.  That is without considering the distances to other
> places within each country.
>
> The countries are not as well connected as in Europe.  Sending an event
> box two or three times between countries could become as expensive as
> having two event boxes (courier, insurance, customs, etc.), something
> that might not be affordable by local people.
>
> --
> Germán Poo-Caamaño
> http://calcifer.org/
>
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Re: A question to the candidates

2012-05-27 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi Gil,

Perhaps this link is relevant:
http://makeplaylive.com/

I would add this questions to your thread:
Do you think a similar venture for GNOME would make sense?
How do you think this, or a similar project, can happen without
leaving us bankrupt?

Thanks! :-)

Diego

On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 4:21 AM, Gil Forcada  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> First of all thanks for running for this critical role on GNOME!
>
> My question is about hardware and contacts:
>
> The average user is not going to ever install its own operating system
> by itself, for them hardware and software come together and they die
> together, so a new version of Windows means a new laptop and so on, a
> new iPhone OS means a new iPhone hardware...
>
> So the crucial part here are ISV, contacting them, engaging with them
> and finally making them ship our great software to the end user.
>
> Is that something that you both find important and also will try to
> pursue if you are elected?
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Gil Forcada
>
> [ca] guifi.net - una xarxa lliure que no para de créixer
> [en] guifi.net - a non-stopping free network
> bloc: http://gil.badall.net
> planet: http://planet.guifi.net
>
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Re: Boston Summit: We're going to Montréal!

2011-09-07 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Just wanted to highlight:

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Ryan Lortie  wrote:
>
> As of 2009, a passport is required for those entering Canada by car.

Don't forget your passport.

:)
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Re: Reminder: AGM at the Desktop Summit, Berlin, 2011

2011-08-08 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
2011/8/8 Emmanuele Bassi :
>
> the AGM will be held on Tuesday, August 8, between 1600 and 1800 in the
> second building of the summit venue, Fritz-Reuter-Saal on Dorotheestrasse.

Follow the sound of the ceremonial vuvuzela if you can't find the way.

Diego
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Re: proposal to change GNOME's trademark guidelines

2011-07-27 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:13 PM, Karen Sandler  wrote:
>
>> This requirement is waived in all contexts where such marks are not
>> normally included, such as email, online discussion, package names,
>> non-graphical advertisements (when permitted), and academic papers.
>> We encourage the use of the symbol whenever possible, but recognize
>> that many non-commercial and informal uses will omit it.
>
> We want to make sure that people can use GNOME software and talk about it
> freely without unreasonable restrictions. The aim is to adopt this
> amendment to the policy in two weeks if there are no objections. Public
> discussion here about it would be great, and folks can contact me
> privately too if they want to.
>

Sounds reasonable to me!
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Re: Questions for candidates - board processes & significance

2011-05-30 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey Dave,

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Dave Neary  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was away last week travelling, so I'm coming late to the election
> campaign. I have almost decided who I would like to vote for, but there are
> still a few things which are important to me when considering a prospective
> board member.
>
> 1. If elected, will you seek a named position (chairman/treasurer/secretary)
> on the board? If so, why?
>

Not specially interested, but I could help with any of the three.

> 2. Board meetings are minuted, and these minutes are published regularly.
> However, the board also increasingly makes decisions on board-list with the
> Apache +1/0/-1 convention. Would you support the minuting of these votes,
> including recording any -1 votes?
>

It was suggested on another thread, sure, not a bad idea.

> 3. I think financial transparency is important. If you plan on applying for
> the treasurer position, what changes (if any) would you propose for the
> budgeting process? How often would you publish financial reports for the
> foundation? Are you happy with the level of transparency in the board's
> finances now?
>

I'm not thinking on applying for treasurer. I think Germán has done a
really good job, and I'd like to give him no chance but to stay as the
treasurer.
Transparency has been good, I believe there's not much point in
producing too many frequent reports, it's time consuming and doesn't
really give people a lot of information they don't already have from
the annual budget.

> 4. Our relationship with a number of groups has suffered this year - and one
> of the lesser known ones (but one I'm involvedd in) is the Libre Graphics
> Meeting organisers (a group of people representing a couple of dozen "free
> art" projects). Are you aware that the LGM organisers withdrew all the funds
> that the GNOME Foundation was managing for them this year, because they have
> been unhappy with the responsiveness and quality of communication with the
> foundation over the past 2 - 3 years? Do you have any thoughts on why this
> particular relationship degraded? And will you commit to handling or
> delegating answers to all time-critical queries which come to the board
> during your term?
>

I can't comment on the specifics, but if LGM has grown to a point
where we can't help them timely, or we just have been too busy with
other things... well, shouldn't they create a Foundation? ;)
We should help other groups achieve their goals whenever we can, but
our prime interest is still GNOME.

> 5. In general, as a board member communication is vital to keep people
> outside the board informed whenever there is a delay or when extra input is
> needed on something they're working on. For incumbents, are you happy with
> the level of communication & reactivity in the current board? For new
> candidates, what would you like to do to ensure that the communication &
> reactivity of the board improves in the coming term?
>

I haven't had much interaction with the Board during this period so I
couldn't tell if they are more or less responsive, but I haven't seen
or heard of any big omission from the Board this period.

From previous experience, as I proposed in my candidacy, I'd like to
make sure the Board has good internal feedback and things don't get
stalled on slow responsiveness. This is something where I believe I
can help.

> 6. Board members are ambassadors for the foundation. I think it's important
> that board members be social, and be nice. Are you nice?
>

Yes, I think I'm social and nice.
At the very least, I'm approachable and anything but intimidating :).


Diego
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Re: Question for candidates

2011-05-30 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 6:09 PM, Richard Stallman  wrote:
>    On the practical terms, as others stated, we should make sure that
>    GNOME is great software and has cool features that make people /want/
>    to use it.
>
> It's fine to do that, as much as we can.  But if we only do that, we
> are competing with Apple on its home territory.  We have no inherent
> advantage in this; Apple is has contempt for its users, but we can
> hardly claim its developers lack ability.
>
> The one area where we have an inherent advantage is in treating the
> users ethically.  Neither Apple nor Microsoft will ever match us in
> this.  Shall we not make plans to utilize this advantage and increase
> it?
>

Yes, agree, it's a factor we should highlight.

Still, I keep my point of view that users are mainly attracted by a
great experience. In that sense, what I'm proposing is to use this
awesome experience we are building as the main marketing asset to sell
to people our goals of software freedom and how it is positive to them
and developers in so many ways.

I'm sure we have the same goal (promote free software, its ideas and
products), it's just that we are trying to engage users with a
different "hook".
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Re: Questions for all board candidates

2011-05-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey Jeff

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 7:43 AM, Jeff Schroeder  wrote:
> 1.) For incumbents, have you missed any meetings? What is your % of
> missed vs attended meetings and why? For new challengers, how much
> time can you dedicate to working on the board each week? How do you
> plan on spending that time?
>

Following Germáns highly detailed report, I'll do the same:

- I joined the Board December 2008, my first meeting was December 10th

- For the half-period of December 2008 - July 2009 I missed 1 meeting
because of midterm tests, and the GUADEC meeting because I'm an idiot
and I lost my flight :)

- For the period of July 2009 - July 2010 I missed 7 meetings: 3
because of tests, 1 because of urgent family matters and 3 I was
missing

I believe Germán explains the real importance of meetings in his
email. They are important, of course, but the biggest time you should
invest in Board work is responsiveness on topics discussed on the
mailing list. Meetings are just once every two weeks, but there's
traffic on the list almost all day. Decisions usually stall there and
not in phone meetings.

> 2.) Other open source / free software projects run their meetings in
> the open via IRC (such as Fedora's FESCO I believe). Would you
> consider that, and if not, what about recording how board members vote
> on a given topic. This includes +1 / -1 / abstains and perhaps give a
> small comment on any -1 or abstain. In my opinion, as an open
> foundation, the transparency of the board is absolutely critical
> _where possible_. Leaders should always set the example for members.
>

I agree with others that recording the votes is no issue at all. But I
wouldn't make Board meetings in the open. Many issues are confidential
when they are discussed and making every meeting in the open would
make us have additional meetings anyway.
Timely minutes are great to keep the Foundation members on the loop of
what's going on, and also the eventual IRC meetings can help solve
questions and chat on some ideas.
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Re: Question for candidates

2011-05-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi Richard,

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 3:34 PM, Richard Stallman  wrote:
> I'd like to ask the candidates this question:
>
> * What do you think GNOME should do to help promote the ideals of free
> software, beyond being composed of free programs.
>

On the practical terms, as others stated, we should make sure that
GNOME is great software and has cool features that make people /want/
to use it. Our communication usually follows this method I believe,
first we always say that GNOME has done X or Y and that it has
happened because of the efforts of all the people gathered around this
Free Software project.

I think that the plan of "making it rock -> telling about its Free
Software nature" works fine, with the sidenote that we shouldn't
forget about the second step of telling people that GNOME has reached
this level of awesome thanks to it being Free Software
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Re: Two Questions for the Board Candidates

2011-05-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Lefty  wrote:
>
> Attempts to divide the community and delegitimize individuals and their 
> viewpoints are common, and becoming increasingly so in the past few years. 
> Bad feelings have driven many away from the level of involvement in the 
> community they've previously had. Do candidates see this as a problem? Do 
> they have any proposals for addressing it?
>

Reminding people of the guidelines stated in the Code of Conduct and
warning them when they might have -unwillingly- said something
flamish; that's what we can do and what we should.

> Second: Do candidates have any view as to how the disastrous attempts at 
> engagement by GNOME with the mobile space might be improved on? The "GNOME 
> Mobile and Embedded Initiative" went nowhere, and arguably handed the mobile 
> device space to Google and Android by forfeit. Since that time, there have 
> been various attempts to get community-based, mainstream open source onto 
> mobile devices, all of which have pretty much died. The sole remaining effort 
> seems to be MeeGo, and GNOME has no apparent direct involvement there.
>
> Do candidates have any thoughts on the future of GNOME with respect to the 
> mobile space? It's the fastest-growing portion of the general computing 
> device market, and the main platform choices are proprietary or as good as. 
> One of the issues raised by Canonical with respect to the GNOME 3 shell for 
> Ubuntu was that it wasn't felt to be as appropriate for tablets and the like 
> as Unity...
>

Agree that it has not worked, not being an expert on mobile topics I
can only think of some of the basic things like: having /something/
concrete to sell, a really really easy SDK, getting our stuff to
devices...
I guess these are really "obvious" things but we haven't really done
them anyway.
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Re: Candidates question: Contributor agreement

2011-05-26 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Olav Vitters  wrote:
> Given that we already have a policy on copyright assignments[1], I
> wondered what is your position regarding contributor agreements[2]?
> Should the board do something with contributor agreements and if so,
> what should be done?
>

Personally I don't like them, they are a barrier. I support our
current position on this.

That said, as Brian points, we should try to dissolve any barrier we
encounter along the way, as people like Emmanuele have been doing.
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Re: Question for the canditates

2011-05-25 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Nothing to add, so I'll save some electrons: +1 Stormy

2011/5/25 Stormy Peters :
>
>
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Andrea Veri  wrote:
>>
>> 1) As GNOME has matured the number of officially supported language
>> bindings has decreased. The quality and availability of various
>> language communities own bindings has varied wildly to say the least.
>> How would you work to improve this situation?
>>
>> 2) What are your own feelings on supporting fairly new languages and
>> standards like Go and Perl 6?
>
> I too agree that is not up to the board to decide which languages GNOME
> supports.
>
> But the board should listen to people like you that voice a concern about it
> and act. They should:
> * Help make sure the right people hear those concerns,
> * Get feedback from other people and companies as appropriate. For example,
> the board could invite you to an advisory board meeting to express your
> concerns and get their feedback. They could also reach out to other projects
> or work to get information about developer preferences in general (not just
> current GNOME developers.)
> * Facilitate the work. As Bastien stated, the Foundation can help organize
> and fund hackfests that really help accelerate work.
>
> Stormy
>>
>> Thank you all for considering my questions. Cheers, -Ali
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Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

2011-05-25 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hello Frederic :)

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 1:24 AM, Frederic Peters  wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
>
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?
>

My personal take on GNOME OS is that it certainly is ambitious, I like
the idea of expanding our user experience to a the system and not just
the desktop shell and some applications.
There'll always be some rough edges since we primarily hack on top of
Linux but I believe good will always take us to common interfaces and
APIs. It would be foolish to think we can coordinate every known
system/distributor out there on what /we/ want before we actually do
it.
Disclaimer: I've never worked on the low level parts of our stack, so
maybe I'm being naive :-).

As for the Foundation, I'll agree with what others already said:
technical matters are to be evaluated by release-team/maintainers.
However we can influence this with Hackfests or sponsoring work on a
certain area.
I'll echo Ryan that the current approach of
"let-happen-what-will-happen" can have negative consequences, I
believe the approach of Feature Proposals we are seeing can give us
better planning and more fruitful discussions.

This remined me that when we usually ask ourselves about "technical
lead" or "making things clear", I wonder if a team doing a lot of
coordination work (not decisions, working closely with RT) to get
everyone on the same channel would be a more efficient investment.
In my personal experience, sometimes hackers were missing the proper
introduction or a mediator to get things flowing. I'd like to explore
this as a solution under a more formal process than just "beer
budget".

Thanks for the question!
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Candidacy: Diego Escalante Urrelo

2011-05-22 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
With a more experienced point of view, a record of stuff done, and a
new background in communication, I'd like to join the Board again to
help.


About me:
- I'm Diego Escalante Urrelo, contributor since 2007, living in Lima,
Perú (UTC-5).
- My main involvement has been hacking on Epiphany, but I've also sent
patches to few other modules, helped in the accounts team, busquad.
- I was a Board Director from December 2008 to July 2010
- Currently I work for Igalia as an intern, hacking on Epiphany
- I've attended every GUADEC since 2007, DíaGNOME in Chile since 2008
and GUADEC Hispana since 2009
- I'm on the third year of Social Communication at university
- I blog at http://blogs.gnome.org/diegoe/ (en) and
http://diegoe.blogspot.com/ (es).


Things I did while in the Board, in the past:
- Bootstraped the Travel Committee in 2009.
- Wrote the New Board Director HowTo in 2009, a guide to help new
Board members to be productive and participative as soon as possible.
- Defined and wrote the New Hackfest request process in 2010.
- Worked with Marina to get the Women Outreach Program re-started in 2010.
- Started an internal-review process to improve the performance of the
Board in 2010. It was internal to allow directors to express
themselves openly and provide accurate feedback, which not necessarily
would be understood publicly because of the lack of context.


Things I'd like to work on for this term:
- Enhance our fund-raising: create campaigns for Friends of GNOME with
concrete goals, that is, a reason to raise funds, for example new
server(s) to improve our hosting infrastructure.

- I have a good insight of how the Board and several teams work, so
I'd like to help facilitate communication: raising issues, talking
with the right people.  I have seen several issues where the problem
has been miscommunication rather than anything else, and sometimes a
facilitator with good relationship with all parties can help to get a
better understanding of the different parties involved. I think I can
play that role very well because of my understanding of our community
as well as my social skills.

- I'd like to continue with the internal-review process from 2010, to
make sure Directors always have feedback from the team about their
performance. From my side, I'll do my best to give constant feedback
about the progress of my own work. I'll try to be as responsive as
possible, to answer the questions arised, discuss promptly the issues
that need attention, and pushing other directors to do the same.

- Move the Travel Committee to the next level: enhance the process
with a proper system for requests and managing reimbursements. Make it
faster and tidier.

- Given my "non-standard" major I believe I can contribute a different
point of view to discussions.

- Last but not least, using my previous experience I believe I can be
a productive Board member from day 1.

Thanks for reading!

Diego
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Re: GNOME Foundation Hires a System Administrator

2010-09-17 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El vie, 17-09-2010 a las 22:01 -0500, Paul Cutler escribió:
> The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the hiring of Christer
> Edwards to fill the position of system administrator.  Christer joins
> the GNOME Foundation in a part-time role and will be responsible for
> working with GNOME's volunteer sysadmin team in mantaining GNOME's
> infrastructure.  
> 

Welcome Christer!


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Re: question for candidates

2010-06-07 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi Richard,

El mar, 01-06-2010 a las 17:03 -0400, Richard Stallman escribió:
> 
> GNOME is good free software, and thus contributes at the practical
> level.  How will candidates use the user community's awareness of
> GNOME to contribute to educating the communityn about freedom?

I think we already do when we talk about GNOME, the immediate question
is always "who does it?" and then it comes the explanation about why we
love to do it, why and /how/ it's libre.

In my personal experience I enjoy explaining people why we use the
licenses we use and live as a Free Software project immediately after
they look confused at me when I say that GNOME is "libre". Most of them
don't know that software can be free as in freedom and they usually end
up with a "good things happen in the world after all" smile.

I'd just keep doing that when representing GNOME as a group or
individual.

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Re: A few questions for the candidates

2010-06-02 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
:)

El mar, 01-06-2010 a las 23:30 +0200, Vincent Untz escribió:
> 1) Why are those tasks/ideas things you cannot work on while not being
>on the board?
> 

>From experience I know that being in the Board opens a lot of small
and/or unseen opportunities to help in the topics of your interest. But
for the ideas I mention in my motivation I wouldn't really need to
be /in/ the Board, but of course that helps a lot.

> 2) What are your non-usual (ie, not code, not translations, not
>documentation, etc.) contributions as a GNOME Foundation member?
>(organizing events, pushing people to do things, finding sponsors,
>etc. are all possible answers)

I give talks sporadically and try to push new contributors into the
project, this one has turned out to be harder than I thought ;).

> 3) What is your opinion on the co-location of Akademy and GUADEC in
>2011? And if you think it was not the best choice, will you still be
>able to help it happen?

It's an interesting opportunity, but we should try to have better
integration in the conference.
I wouldn't agree to do it yearly though, I think GUADEC (separately)
serves as a way to foster a closer community.

> 4) How much free time per week do you think you will be able to allocate
>for the board? (I'm very well aware that this could be 0 for some
>weeks, and 100% of your time for other weeks; I'm just asking in
>general)
> 

I'm bad with hour numbers, but I think I can keep my fluxing 10~20h a
week. I estimate I usually do between 10 and 15 hours weekly, but that's
hard to tell. Sometimes just chatting with a friend is related to the
Board, for example when trying to get feedback on ideas.

> 5) Are you okay giving up some of your current GNOME
>responsabilities/activities to join the board? (give up a maintainer
>hat, or hack less, or participate less in a specific team) Or do you
>think it won't be necessary and why?
>(I know it's a bit related to the previous question :-))

I gave up some hats time ago already ;). Currently I only do sporadic
promotion (talks, mini booths) that doesn't take much time and code for
Igalia, mainly Epiphany, Epiphany Extensions and some WebKitGTK+.

Luckily none of this tasks would break the stack if I stop for a day or
two to focus full time on Board work or something, so I feel it's all
cool on this topic :).

> 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if
>elected? If yes, which role and why?

Not at first thought at least.

> 7) What do you think of the current GNOME Foundation budget? Had you
>read it at least once before reading this mail?
>(it's okay if you didn't look at it before, btw)

We have a much better financial situation, we should look forward to
improve it even further! We could try to promote hackfests a bit more
perhaps, maybe suggesting some of them to the teams and not just waiting
passively.

> 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about?
>(I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-))

I'd like to finish defining roles for companies acting as donors
(happening on marketing list), the so called "FoG for companies". I
think with that in place we could reach a lot more companies that could
donate yearly and sum up a considerable amount.

For a specific topic, I'm wondering about some kind of "mosaic", like a
one-time big gnome-mosaic with pictures of our donors for that campaign.
I think more visual things like these could be attractive for casual
donors. That said, our thematic campaigns have worked nicely.

> 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an
>advisory board meeting there)

Yes, I only have to apply for my visa, which will happen next week
probably.

> 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression?

The old about:epiphany:
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a
plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I've always assumed this is French, although it's not strictly an
expression but a quote.

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Re: Question for the candidates : money !

2010-06-01 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi,

El mar, 01-06-2010 a las 15:11 -0500, Brian Cameron escribió:
> 
> > Do you plan to work on this business model ? Do you have any proposals ?
> 
> - The board is currently working to develop a program to allow
>companies and organizations to donate money.  This program would
>be directed at organizations that are not currently advisory board
>members.  This could be something like a "Friends of GNOME" program
>for organizations instead of individuals.  This could, for example,
>provide a link exchange, advertising, mention as a sponsor of an
>event, or other forms of recognition as an incentive to donate money.

Brian refers to this email in marketing list:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2010-June/msg1.html

Basically we want to define new roles that can be taken by smaller
companies or organizations so they can donate and get visibility for it.
Likely there are a lot of companies that would like to associate to
GNOME if they had a clear chance. Comments welcome in marketing-list!


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Candidacy: Diego Escalante Urrelo

2010-05-23 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Name:Diego Escalante Urrelo
Email:   die...@gnome.org
Nick:diegoe
Blog:http://blogs.gnome.org/diegoe/
Affiliation: Igalia S.L.

Summary
I'm Diego, 22, from good old Lima - Perú. I've been involved
since 2006, I've contributed with code, bug triaging, accounts
administration, promotion with/at events, organization, Board, etc.

I love GNOME and our community, it's awesome :).

Motivation for this period
I think I've gathered important experience from my time on the
Board; I contribute more, and better, as time passes.

For this period I'm interested in new opportunities for GNOME to get
more funding, supporting new hackfests, keeping a close relationship
with our worldwide community and improving our marketing.

I look forward to also keep doing a good job following up with
topics, assuming more roles and transfering experience to new Board
members.

What I did this period in the Board
* Worked on the GNOME Women Outreach Program[0] with Marina and
Stormy, should launch soon (you are welcome to help!)

* Launched Foundation IRC meetings.

* Defined the work flow for hackfests and put together the New
Hackfest howto[1]

* Started an internal+periodical 360° review process for the
Board with Stormy.

* In general I have tried to follow discussed issues closely,
giving timely feedback and also trying to get opinions from people
outside the Board (when possible).

* Outside the Board I try to be involved in discussions on
mailing lists, lately in the marketing list. I've even tried to 
control some flames. I've also helped Stormy and Ruben
maintaining the twitter/identi.ca/fb accounts.

Thanks for reading and considering me!

0 - http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram
1 - http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/New

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Re: Changes in Membership Committee

2010-03-22 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey!

El lun, 22-03-2010 a las 23:18 -0300, Bruno Boaventura escribió:
> Hello!
> 
> It was a pleasure for me hold the chairman position of Membership
> Committee in the last two years.
> Recently we had a meeting to resolve some issues. One of these things
> were to elect another chairman to the committee.
> I'm in the committee yet, but the chairman now is Andrea Veri.


Thanks again for leading Bruno. I hope this doesn't mean you are going
away! We have a pending icecream deathmatch.

Go go go membership committee!

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Re: New foundation member introduction - This time: Nils-Christoph Fiedler, Low German translator

2010-03-12 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey Nils,

El vie, 12-03-2010 a las 15:02 +0100, Nils-Christoph Fiedler escribió:
> Hi there!

> Low German is spoken by about 10.000.000 people worldwide and for a few
> years now accepted as an official minority's language by the European
> Charta and the Federal Republic of Germany.
> My ambition in starting to translate GNOME into Low German was and is,
> to spread the language and also make GNOME competitive with KDE within
> the struggle for suitable desktops to teach young pupils from northern
> Germany the Low German language. 

What a task! Thanks for joining GNOME, surely you'll meet the goal :).

Welcome!

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Re: Non-Free JavaScript

2010-03-07 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El dom, 07-03-2010 a las 21:43 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo escribió:
> Hi all,
> 
> this sounds like an interesting topic to discuss over some drinks ;) but
> right now we are trying to aim the discussion at a GNOME overall
> roadmap/strategy.
> 

Just to clarify: this doesn't mean we can't discuss about a broad
spectrum of topics, I just meant that in the interest of both
threads/topics it would be better to delay the discussion of the last
one a couple of days so attention is not diluted and hence ideas lost.
Sorry if it sounded hard.

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Re: Non-Free JavaScript

2010-03-07 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi all,

this sounds like an interesting topic to discuss over some drinks ;) but
right now we are trying to aim the discussion at a GNOME overall
roadmap/strategy.

So please stay in topic, if you want to discuss something not directly
related to the current topic with the whole community you can try at a
later time so that the discussions don't get mixed up and ideas are
lost. It will be better for the current discussion and for the
discussion you are planning!

Diego

El dom, 07-03-2010 a las 15:11 -0500, Liam R E Quin escribió:
> On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 05:29 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > Javascript programs are not necessarily bad, but if browsers
> > temporarily install them silently without checking whether they are
> > free, that systematically leads users to run nonfree software without
> > knowing it.
> 
> That raises an interesting point - there's no standard way to mark a
> licence on a fragment of JavaScript, neither included in an HTML or
> XML document nor if downloaded separately, at least as far as I can
> tell.
> 
> Is that something we (W3C) should take up?
> 
> Liam
> 


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Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

2010-03-02 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El mié, 03-03-2010 a las 02:36 +0100, Philip Van Hoof escribió:
> On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 18:19 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote:
> > People are not interested in having this argument and you are causing
> > people to unsubscribe to the Foundation List and to quit
> > participating.
> 
> That's their action. And you can't control that.
> 
> (what's your point?)
> 

Her point Philip is that you seem to keep picking fights in this list
and hijacking threads for that purpose.

If you check this thread you'll see that it all started with an email
exchange between Iván Frade, Richard Stallman and me. We discussed a way
to enhance experience, Richard reminded us that we shouldn't be careless
about adding support for propietary platforms because of the potential
misinterpretation:

I am only saying that if we develop software specifically to
work with Facebook, we should take care to prevent it from
conveying the message "Use Facebook!"

And in a later email:

The line between "working with facebook" and "specifically
encouraging use of facebook" is a subtle one.

I never saw Richard's aggressive questions about our morality as GNOME
programmers, I only saw a suggestion and a reminder.

However, you chose to kept arguing about how Richard had "insulted
[y]our morality and that of all GNOME programmers". I'm a GNOME
programmer, and the people that have expressed his "deep disagreement"
with your attitude are also GNOME programmers.

> > If people don't respond, assume they are not interested in that topic.
> 
> Sure.
> 
> > I will not be replying to this thread publicly any more. 
> 
> Although your reply is fair, I did ask these three questions:
> 
>   1) > Why didn't the GNOME Foundation take a stance on that?
> 

We can't produce statements for every disagreement in Foundation list.
Specially if it seems to be a personal quest.
This is not the first time, please stop trying to drag this list and the
Foundation itself into a quest to outvoice others.

>   2) > Wasn't that formulation starting an argument with me?
> 

No, it wasn't.

>   3) > And how wasn't it? If it wasn't.
> 

We pay Stormy for advancing GNOME, this thread /was/ about a big GNOME
roadmap for the years to come. However you hijacked it, it is no longer
about GNOME's future, it's now about discussing things with you, all
about you.

Stormy is acting on the Foundation's interest by saving us valuable
money by not wasting it in discussions like this.

I, on the other hand, am donating time to try to make things clear with
you.

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Re: Stormy's Update: Weeks of February 15th and 22nd

2010-03-01 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El lun, 01-03-2010 a las 21:54 +0100, Vincent Untz escribió:
> Le lundi 01 mars 2010, à 11:02 -0800, Luis Villa a écrit :
> > 2010/3/1 Stormy Peters :
> > > GNOME Foundation IRC meeting.
> > 
> > How did this go?
> 
> I guess I spoke way too much ;-) The discussion was mostly about how to
> prepare a roadmap for GNOME, and how to communicate it.
> 
> There's an IRC log and maybe even minutes, but, hrm, it's not readable
> for me:
>   http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20100227
> 

Yeah I kind of broke the ACL :-). Only Javier Jardón can *read* and
write it. Any admin around? #lalala

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Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

2010-02-27 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El dom, 28-02-2010 a las 00:30 +, Alberto Ruiz escribió:
> I'm going to call for an end of thread,
> 
> If people want to sort out what their personal points of view on what
> GNOME should be, I would suggest them to follow up that discussion in
> private and not in this list anymore.
> 

+1. Disagreeing and discussing is fun and educational, but let's please
keep *on topic* about how to make GNOME the best desktop thanks to a
fantastic strategy and roadmap.

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Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

2010-02-27 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey Philip,

El dom, 28-02-2010 a las 00:49 +0100, Philip Van Hoof escribió:
> On Fri, 2010-02-26 at 21:32 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > If people are going to use Facebook, they should access it with free 
> > software.
> > And it is useful for GNOME to do a good job of that.
> 
> Richard,
> 
> I wish you and the FSF would focus more on user rights and licensing of
> (meta)data coming from websites like Facebook, and that you'd focus less
> on demeaning insinuations to GNOME programmers that they know not about
> ethics.
> 

I don't think Richard meant any of this. Being the one he replied to, I
think he's reply was perfectly well behaved and his intentions the best
of all to remind us that we should always try to promote Free Software. 

And I think we all agree that our precise personal beliefs might be
different but that as a whole we all enjoy Free Software and its
consequences in society and technology. So it doesn't sound out of place
to remind us about it.

IMHO talking about Facebook and who should demand them to free info is a
bit out of place here. Please let's not diverge the thread into that or
into a battle about how much we should promote Free Software or non Free
alternatives.

I think the topic is clear for all of us: Free Software rocks and we are
trying to lure people who don't use it yet into using it so they can
enjoy the same freedoms we do. Let's keep changing the world :-).

Friendly and lovingly calling for the end of this branch of the thread,

Diego

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Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

2010-02-26 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey Richard,

El vie, 26-02-2010 a las 21:32 -0500, Richard Stallman escribió:
> If people are going to use Facebook, they should access it with free software.
> And it is useful for GNOME to do a good job of that.
> 
> At the same time, using Facebook is a harmful practice.  It gives a
> misleading impression of privacy, it has close ties with the CIA and
> probably lets the CIA look at everything people upload.  (See
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook.)  It uses
> Flash format for video, which is harmful to free software.  Some of
> its services are SaaS, which takes away control of your computing
> just as proprietary software does.
> 

Sure I agree with you, that's why I personally try to use Facebook as
tangentially as possible. But I would lie if I said I don't use it at
all or refrain from sharing comments or setting a profile picture there.

> (Can anyone tell me what what an "empathy account" does and what an
> f-spot export configuration does?)
> 

Empathy is an instant messaging client, Facebook now allows access to
its chat network via XMPP. I meant that on filling your info Empathy
would configure an account for you so you can chat with your friends in
Facebook using a free software client, Empathy, instead of the web based
chat they have.
F-spot manages photos and allows you to upload photos to Flickr,
Facebook, Gallery2 installations, etc.

The practical implication or goal with my example was that after filling
your Facebook id in this wizard or assistant you would have your
Facebook chat account in Empathy and the capability of uploading a photo
to Facebook via f-spot.

The "generalised" goal of this example would be that you fill logins
once and only once, we in the background do smart stuff an reuse the
filled info correctly to make your experience more "woah, that's smart!"
instead of "damn! filling my login again? I already did in $other_app!".

> It is also important to give equally good support to other systems
> people can use for telling each other about events; for instance,
> social networking sites of the free software community, and
> peer-to-peer methods.  This way, GNOME won't favor Facebook over those
> other methods.
> 

I'm sure most of us agree to that. Don't worry ;).

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Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

2010-02-25 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El jue, 25-02-2010 a las 22:29 +0200, Ivan Frade escribió:
> Hi,
> 
>  The big idea behind GNOME3 can be to offer a completely new User
> Experience. GNOME2 did well with the usual Menus/panel/folders
> approach, it brought stability, performance and we built the basic
> blocks of a Desktop. Now comes the time to use those blocks to revamp
> how the user interact with its computer. In some way, it should do on
> the Desktop what maemo5 did on a mobile device: use the things we
> already know in a new way and it doesn't look like the usual boring
> computer.
> 

I agree with Frade, for example among my university friends facebook is
quite important, it's how you interact with a lot of people you don't
see daily and some times the way to find out about meetings, parties,
etc. Why can't we provide an easy way for people to integrate all this
info to the local apps?
A small example that I believe is doable right now:
 - you login to GNOME for the first time
 - you are asked for personal info
 - you are asked also for your facebook id (example)
 - the fb id gets processed into an empathy account and a f-spot export
configuration (or whatever wants to consume it)
 - the panel/clock show fb events you are attending, evolution reminds
you of them also

I'm sure my univ mates would appreciate a desktop that eases their FB
experience. Notice how we would improve that without buzz-y words and
without smoking crack.

My Peruvian Nuevo Sol (PEN) for the discussion.

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Re: New member introduction

2010-02-12 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El vie, 12-02-2010 a las 07:55 -0500, Joanmarie Diggs escribió:
> 
> I'm thrilled to be a Foundation member, and really appreciate the
> "welcome" messages I've received from those of you I already know. I
> look forward to getting to know the rest of you.
> 

And we appreciate your contributions to GNOME :-). Thanks Joanmarie, and
welcome!

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Re: GNOME Q4 2009 Quarterly report

2010-02-03 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi!

Just wanted to say three things:

 1. Thank you to everyone that has contributed to GNOME in Q4, as
hackers, testers, evangelists, friends of gnome! You make it possible,
thanks!

 2. Thanks to the teams for providing this really good feedback

 3. I seem unable to open links in the PDF file. Is it me, my evince, or
the file itself? Anyone has a clue?

Great work, thanks again! :-)

El mié, 03-02-2010 a las 10:49 -0700, Stormy Peters escribió:
> The GNOME Foundation would like to present the Q4 2009 Quarterly
> report[1] (HTML version[2]). Q4 is normally a quiet quarter — but not
> for GNOME! During Q4 we had our annual GNOME Asia, GNOME Forum Brazil
> and Boston Summit events as well as a record four hackfests! The
> Marketing, Zeitgeist, Video and WebKitGTK+ teams all made good
> progress on their goals during their hackfests. Next quarter we'll
> continue the good work with hackfests planned in areas like usability
> and accessibility. GNOME will also be represented at a number of
> events like FOSDEM, SCALE, FOSS 2010 Workshop, Open Mobility, Libre
> Planet and more! In addition to events, teams like the System
> Administration team have made a lot of progress — they've installed
> Piwik, Plone, Splinter, and CiviCRM to improve GNOME's infrastructure.
> This quarter's update also includes an update from the GNOME Board of
> Directors. Read on[1] to hear all of the fabulous work that was done
> on GNOME in Q4 2009! 
> 
> If you'd like to receive the report via email in the future, please
> email me with the subject "Subscribe to GNOME Quarterly Report via
> email".
> 
> Best,
> 
> Stormy
> 
> [1] http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-report-2009-Q3.pdf
> [2] http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-report-2009-Q3.html
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Re: Foundation IRC meeting, January 30th

2010-01-30 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El sáb, 30-01-2010 a las 12:53 -0500, Og Maciel escribió:
> 
> Co-located Hackfests
> 
> It was brought up by zana and seconded by others that a co-located
> hackfest prior to a possible co-located bigger event such as GUADEC
> would make more sense, as we could get people from different
> communities discussing and collaborating on similar issues, sharing
> their pains/knowledge and trying to pool together processes and ideas
> for dealing with them. Then, a co-located GUADEC could schedule
> co-located sessions where these teams would present their findings,
> etc, etc.
> 

Big +1, it would make a lot of sense. With the current proposal for
co-location we have overlapping activities: catching up with GNOME pals
and sharing time with new people from KDE. I feel catching up with old
pals steals most of the time.
I think this idea is great :-)

Any idea for one?

> I am planning to write up a proposal for a co-located localization
> hackfest where we could gather a few representatives from different
> communities (think KDE, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE, etc) to discuss about the
> types of issues their respective projects are facing, how they've
> solved it, what is there to be improved, etc. The objective is to shed
> a light on what some of the common issues are and share general
> knowledge that will hopefully improve their own processes.

Great! check http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/New and feel free to give
feedback on the suggested recipe :-)

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Foundation IRC meeting, January 30th

2010-01-21 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey everyone,

looking forward for feedback and discussion of general issues, the Board
would like to invite all GNOME Foundation members to a general purpose
IRC meeting:

When: Saturday, January 30th, 16:00 UTC
Where: irc.gnome.org, #foundation

We understand that this time might not suit everybody, but we tried to
select something that would work for most people. Feel free to suggest
other times for future meetings.

There's no specific goal or agenda for this meeting. Feedback,
questions, comments, suggestions and general discussion of Foundation
topics is welcomed.

You can propose agenda items here:
http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic/MeetingAgenda

See you there!

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New hackfest proposal step-by-step guide

2010-01-16 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hello everyone!

in the last year we have seen a really positive trend towards organizing
Hackfests to speed up the coordination, development and improvement of
various projects.
You can see a list of all this Hackfests in:
http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests

If you have been wondering what do you have to do to prepare a proposal
for a Hackfest, the Board is glad to announce the New Hackfest proposal
step-by-step guide:

http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/New

We hope this will help everyone interested in hosting a Hackfest to get
organized and have a clear view of what they need to do.

Happy hacking!

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Re: New GNOME Foundation Members

2010-01-15 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El vie, 15-01-2010 a las 06:50 -0300, Bruno Boaventura escribió:
> Hello everybody!
> 
> I was quite busy due to my daughter. And now, she is almost three
> months older, so... I'm back. Really. :-)
> 

Congrats Bruno, thanks for keep working on this despite your (highly
likely) 3 hours of sleep per day :-)

> The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee is proud to present the new
> members:
> 
> - Adam Janos Reviczky
> - Benjamin Konrath
> - David Schlesinger
> - Frank Solensky
> - James Vasile
> - Jeff Schroeder
> - Ke Wang
> - Marc-Andre Lureau
> - Thibault Saunier
> 

Welcome and thanks for your work helping GNOME! :-)

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Change of affiliation

2010-01-08 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi,

starting on Monday my affiliation will change from none to Igalia. I'll
be doing an internship for the following 2 or 3 months working on
WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany :-).

Have a nice day!

Diego

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Re: Expenses Report of Beijing GNOME Users Group from 2008 - 2009

2010-01-06 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
El mar, 05-01-2010 a las 16:51 +0800, Emily Chen escribió:
> Hi all, 
> 
> This is the yearly expense report of Beijing GNOME Users Group in 2008
> and 2009. 
> 

Looks like you are doing great, congratulations to the Beijing GNOME
User Group!

2010 will surely be equal or even better ;-)

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IRC Foundation meeting?

2009-09-13 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey everyone,

lately there has been an idea floating around about having an IRC
meeting with the membership of the Foundation, something like the AGM
but obviously smaller and text-only :-). Other groups have similar
activities once in a while, the goal being sharing a more open
space to discuss ideas and get feedback from the whole community.

The Board would like to know if there's interest for such a meeting. The
agenda would be composed of proposed items.
A proposed time for this would be September 24th at 17 UTC.

If you are interested in this, please let us know replying to this
email. We can set the agenda in a wiki page later.

Diego

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Re: New GNOME Foundation Members

2009-08-24 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Sun, 2009-08-23 at 19:22 -0300, Bruno Boaventura wrote:
> Hello everybody!
> 
> The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee is proud to present the new members:
> 
> - Carl James Collier
> - Halton Huo
> - Javier Jardón Cabezas
> - Milo Casagrande
> - Tim Horton
> - Will Thompson
> 

Welcome guys!
Thanks for contributing to GNOME :-).

Keep rocking!

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Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections Spring 2009 - Preliminary results

2009-06-26 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 10:58 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Stormy Peters wrote:
> > I too think the election committee should just decide.
> > 
> > (From board discussions, I'm pretty confident they wanted to do it 
> > however Maemo does it, but at this point I think the election committee 
> > should decide.)
> 
> I'd replace "decide" with "clarify" here - it's clear there was an 
> intention, and now we're in something of a niche situation, where we 
> just need a clarification from the committee what method they intended 
> to use - then we just count with that.
> 

I disagree, afaik we just directly re-used the code received from
maemo.org through you (iirc). Which in your March elections used this
same system:
 http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-community/2009-March/002139.html

Indeed you had a discussion after the results, although I haven't
checked if you later did some change regarding the results.

IMVHO what happened was that we just thought "preferential voting" and
not went into the details, at the Board level and highly likely at the
MC level. I wouldn't say there was specific blame or ill intention in
any of the people involved (you, mc, board).

Let's stick to the process and wait for the MC to come up with a
judgement over the challenge. Meanwhile we can keep discussing ideas for
enhancing the election system/process/method.

greetings

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Re: I don't have my token

2009-06-20 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Sat, 2009-06-20 at 20:12 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> I don't have my token to vote for the foundation elections :(
> 

Ping the membership committee!
  http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/membership-committee

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Re: Questions for the candidates

2009-05-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey,

On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 18:17 +0100, Susana Pereira wrote:
> 
> Questions
> -
> 
>  1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things
> from your previous stint at the Board which you would  like to see
> carried forward into this term ?
> 

I would like to keep seeing more participation, enabling current
contributors to get more involved, such is the case of the refresh in
the membership committee and the new travel committee. Also, keeping
good communication with a broader public (yes, I'm thinking Latin
America here).

>  2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would
> you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like
> to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ?
> 
>  3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most
> difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that?
> 

Trying to get more involved with the Board without losing focus in
stuff, I constantly try to sit down and think about what I'm currently
doing in my life in general to be aware of how much free time and focus
I have to offer for new tasks or current ones.

>  4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at
> non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected
> in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good
> board member? What single change do you want to affect during your
> term?
> 

I've been working with local groups, had a chance to resurrect a local
lug in 2006 and until 2008 were I stopped actively coordinating activies
there, and of course my Board work for the last 6 months.
I think I'll be a good member because I have the time needed (based on
my experience so far), I trust my communication skills and feel that now
that I had the last 6 months as 'training' I can do a great job from day
1.
A concrete thing to affect could be enabling more people to get more
involved with the Foundation or with the Project itself.

>  5. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy
> where you think you can contribute as a change agent ?
> 

I don't feel like I'm a specialized agent and hence could revolutionize
a concrete area, but I have interest for this period (like I said in my
Candidacy mail) in marketing, fundraising, working with committees (and
enabling new contribution oportunities) and trying to get out a second
GNOME LA Tour.

>  6. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation
> feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would
> you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members.

I think we can try to make our communication channels more evident, so
people can feel more confident to approach the Foundation to try to get
sponsorship (in money or just institutional backup) for activities.

Like Germán said, local groups around here usually feel a lot distant
from the most visible people in our community, language barrier and
other stuff usually discourages them to try to get closer. Although we
all know most of us are quite friendly, this is something we just find
out after having been together for a certain time.

>  7. Do you have any plans on how can the board help bring the GNOME
> platform and desktop in the top of opensource desktop and mobile
> application development?
> 

Helping define our set of offers for such markets would be a key factor
for that. Also, trying to get our software to run and being more
hackable in more platforms (yes, I mean Windows) will inevitably get us
more developers and spotlight than just being limited to unix systems.
This has been key to Python, Django, etc and I think we should start
thinking on that also.

>  8. Do you think the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME projects get
> enough representation at events? If not, how would you fix that?
> 

I don't know too many big conferences, but where I have been to
(EncuentroLinux in Chile, Latinoware in Brasil) there has been a good
number of people working as a local GNOME group.
I think this is linked somewhat with the previous question, I can
imagine local GNOME groups being more agressive in their promotion of
the project if they could offer something to Windows developers or
users. For example promoting Evince as a good PDF reader for Windows or
gEdit.

>  9. What, in your view, are the top 5 requirements (from a strategic
> perspective) for the GNOME communities world-wide ?
> 

I'm reading this as communities (hence user groups or promotion groups
not development of/or business), I think most of us could agree that we
could use more of:
 1. defining our offer of products more precisely (software, solutions);
 2. having more 'instant deliverables' for users and developers, for
example downloading a .exe of Evince or a .exe of the complete PyGTK
bundle to show your Windows friend how cool and good our software is;
 3. promoting get-together local e

Re: What do you think of the foundation?

2009-05-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 18:25 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> So - this is perhaps not the best time to start this discussion, but 
> then again maybe it's absolutely the best time. This is a call to 
> foundation members who are happy, unhappy or disaffected to say what 
> they think the foundation should be doing that it isn't, shouldn't be 
> doing that it is, and generally what you've been unhappy & happy with 
> over the past number of years.
> 

Indeed, and perhaps we could try doing this again next year, but a
couple of weeks earlier than election time so the attention span doesn't
get divided with this and questions for the candidates thread.

> Me first!
> 
> I think that the foundation should be more involved in conflict 
> resolution and policing the tone of the community. I have talked to too 
> many people who don't read pgo, or have turned off individual blogs, 
> don't use IRC any more, or avoid certain mailing lists, because they are 
> unhappy with the tone & content of discussions & posts. If someone is 
> behaving in a way which is negatively affecting a significant portion of 
> the GNOME community, the board should be the place to go where you can 
> complain, and have your complaint publicly recorded (in the minutes of a 
> board meeting, for example) with anonymity, investigated and evaluated, 
> and if necessary, have the guilty party censured and/or punished. 
> Currently, this social policing role has been completely ignored by the 
> foundation and its leaders.
> 

I agree with others' opinions so far, our community is usually auto
regulated, I think we are old enough to behave properly in public and to
coexist, we shouldn't create a 'you better behave or...' feeling.
And you can always complain to the Board if you are facing a problem
that you feel affects the whole project like an unauthorized use of the
trademark by a chocolate bar company (we could sue them for chocolate!)
or someone saying that the code you hacked for Epiphany is stolen from
them, that's the kind of stuff social-wise that Board should take care
of imo.

> I think that the foundation should be more frugal, and I expect the 
> board to transmit the frugal values to the membership. I was a supporter 
> of being much firmer in asking people to pay part of their travel when 
> being funded by the foundation, or to seek other funding elsewhere (from 
> conference organisers, for example). I don't think that being funded by 
> the foundation should be a due or a reward, foundation funds are an enabler.
> 

I don't think people feel it's a due. From my personal experience, when
I was first sponsored for GUADEC in Birmingham I felt embraced and
supported since I had no remote chance to pay for my trip not even a 5%.
I actually had a hard time getting money for the visa and surviving in
Birmingham, my food was mostly tesco bought bread and ham together with
a bunch of other good guys. I felt I was being encouraged to keep doing
what I was doing (contributing) and to get even more involved now that I
had the chance to know the people in real life. My feelings weren't
"it's a due" or "i'm being rewarded for that single big patch", instead
it was a more motivating thing, a way to enable me to achieve bigger
goals inside the project. I would set a difference between reward/due
and encouraging or motivating, the first one is the end of a process and
the second one is the trigger of something else.

The Travel Committee form has a field for "how much do you think you
could pay?", also they have focused in getting confirmations out quickly
to save in airfares getting expensive with time. I don't think that we
waste money funding travel. Obviously common sense must be (and so far
has been) used.
It's investing in attaching new contributors to the project, and if you
ask me it's worth the money.

> I want to see seven board members actively communicating, and I want to 
> see the board be more reactive when a board member is inactive for long 
> periods. There is no procedure for temporarily replacing an inactive 
> board member, or if there is, it's never been activated.
> 

I agree that we need better communication, the minutes are part of that
and indeed we could have done better. Let's keep this in mind for this
coming period everyone.

> The KDE eV solution to this is to make the foundation members list 
> members-only (private archives) - should we consider doing the same 
> thing, if that would allow more board business to be conducted on this list?
> 

In my opinion, we should try to do better with those little things
related to communication like the minutes and commenting to others what
is happening. Like the notice of action idea. I think this is the right
solution for this perceived problem.

Thanks for the thread!

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Candidacy: Diego Escalante Urrelo

2009-05-22 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Name: Diego Escalante Urrelo
Mail: diegoe a-inside-a-circle gnome tiny-ink-spot org
Nick: diegoe (how creative!)
Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/diegoe/
- http://diegoe.blogspot.com/ (if you are learning Spanish)
Affiliation: SMB Training till end of May (not GNOME related), then,
none.

Summary:

I'm Diego, 21, from Lima - Perú. Some of you know me as a pesky bug
triager, others as an even peskier (is that even a word?) patch
submitter and others as a pesky almost spam mail source.
I've been doing GNOME related stuff since 2006 although I really got
more involved only in 2007, since then I've done code work for Epiphany
and other modules, mostly fixes or small features (I did woohoo bar for
Ephy! -firefox stole my idea, I swear). I'm deeply in love with GNOME as
a project and community :-).
Since December 2008 I've been serving in the Board replacing Jeff.

Why Board?

I feel that my last months in the Board have let me understand how it
works, I'm sure I have done a good job and that I can do it even better
for the following period.

What did I do for this half period in the Board?

Of course, the following wasn't made by me alone (those other six guys
at the Board rock hard) but I feel this is were I was more involved:
- Helped gather the annual user group reports and hand pick from the
flood of pictures all around the web to go with such reports
- Worked closely with Stormy to bootstrap the travel committee
- Worked with Bruno to get the membership committee refreshed
- Preparing a quickstart guide for new Board members (that you all new
board members will receive)
- Received feedback from various members about their areas of interest
in GNOME and problems they had (luckily most of those got solved
quickly)

Why running again?

Because I feel that I can do a better job now that I understand how
Board works and because I have big enthusiasm for the stuff that we will
see in the following months, I want to keep helping closely.
Some stuff I would like to try to focus on now would be marketing in the
3.0 context, fundraising, keep working with the committees and a second
edition of the GNOME LA Tour ;-).

Thanks for reading,

Diego

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Re: GNOME Store

2009-05-01 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 4/30/09, Sriram Ramkrishna  wrote:
> Can we get a magnetic car gnome foot?  I would totally pay for one of those
> and a "best of sri" rupert quotes t-shirt.  Although you probably dont' want
> to put a GNOME foot logo wtih that. :)
>

I would buy 10.
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Re: Supporting GTK+

2009-04-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 4/29/09, 明覺  wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 14:24 +0200, Dave Neary wrote:
>  > Hi Minjue,
>  >
>  > 明覺 wrote:
>  > >> http://www.gnome.org/friends/
>  > > thanks, i got it, it seems i need to get a little familiar with some
>  > > gnome/gtk developers.
>  >
>  > No, there is no requirement to do that. A monthly donation is of course
>  > welcome. If however your income may be irregular, you might consider
>  > manually donating the amount of your choosing to "frie...@gnome.org" on
>  > Paypal month by month.
>
> thanks, i will choose the monthly way. only by paypal? any other way?
>

You can contact fundrais...@gnome.org for donating through bank transfers.

Thanks :-)!
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Re: New GNOME Foundation Members

2009-04-09 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On Thu, 2009-04-09 at 11:39 +0200, Stéphane Raimbault wrote:
> 2009/4/9 Bruno Boaventura :
> > Hello everybody!
> >
> > The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee is pleased to present the new 
> > members:
> >
> > - Andrew Stormont
> > - Jonny Lamb
> > - Li Yuan
> > - Martin Picek
> 
> Welcome, guys!
> Has previously said, is it possible to have a short introduction on
> each new member?

Yes, let us know about you guys, so we can make you do our work, I mean,
to know you better! :-)

Welcome and thanks for contributing!

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Re: The Travel Committee is ready!

2009-04-08 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 4/8/09, Jason D. Clinton  wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Diego Escalante Urrelo  
> wrote:
>  >  http://live.gnome.org/Travel (carefully!)
>
>
> Could you add information to this page about the agreed upon
>  reimbursement rates? There was a discussion about this in February and
>  it seemed that there was some argument as to whether it should be 70%.
>  Or case-by-case. Or something else.
>

No limit was set, and evaluation will be case by case. But we want to
invite everyone to keep in mind that every euro saved (i.e. choosing
cheaper options) is an euro that enables someone else to be sponsored.
So while possible please choose the cheapest options and if *really*
possible[0] offer to pay a part of your ticket.

greetings :)

0 - really possible means that doing it won't make you starve at
GUADEC nor limit you to bread and water (we need you alive :-))
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The Travel Committee is ready!

2009-04-07 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Dear happy Foundation members:

We are happy to announce that the Travel Committee is ready!

This new team will be in charge of processing requests for travel
and/or accommodation sponsorship for conferences and other activities
related to our beloved project.

The Travel Committee is composed by: Rosanna Yuen, Emily Chen, Chema
Casanova, Sir Ross Burton and Germán Póo-Caamaño.

Some things you should know:
* Any information you send the TC will be private
* Asking for sponsorship *does not* guarantee you will get sponsored
* Always choose the most economical option when possible
* A good application with good information will be processed faster

In order to know how the Travel Committee will work and how you can
ask for sponsorship, please read the wiki page:
  http://live.gnome.org/Travel (carefully!)

Yes, the Travel Committee is ready to receive applications for GUADEC
travel. :o)

Applications will be received until April 27, 2009, 19:00 UTC;
answers will be given before May 11 19:00 UTC. You can start sending
your applications now!

Remember that travel requests from GNOME Foundation members have preference.
If you are not yet a member this is a great time to join!
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Re: Support GTK+

2009-03-16 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi!

On 3/16/09, 呉永  wrote:
> Hi,
>  First,Thank you for replying me , I want to zoom in a window just like when
> we use IE browser,sometime we can't  see the web page clearly,
>  so we will use [Ctrl]+[mouse wheel] keys to zoom the page in, in that
>  case we can see the web page clearly!   please tell me how to do that
>  in gtk

Your question belongs to gtk-apps-devel list, subscribe to it and
please resend it there, where people doing work in GTK+ apps
(commercial and free apps) can give you a hint:
  http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list


Good luck
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Re: GNOME Travel Committee & Travel Policy: A proposal for consideration and feedback

2009-02-19 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 2/18/09, Bruno Boaventura  wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Alberto Ruiz  wrote:
>  > Note that I'm not against a generalized co-pay policy, I'm just
>  > concerned about making it a rule set to stone that would have an
>  > impact on our ability to foster future contributors.
>
>
> That's my position too. Co-pay policy is great, however, what we have
>  to think about students is: they have other costs with food and
>  transport (depending the place, can be > 200 EUR for a week).
>

Summarising all the discussion a bit:
  - a travel committee is suggested to take out the huge work of
processing sponsorship applications from the GUADEC committee
  - a more formal process would be installed: a form to be filled,
deadlines to get a reply, etc;
  - conditions and obligations by both parties will be clearer (we
won't cover your new shin pads for the FreeFA cup, you must present
clear tickets)

Regarding the % or 200€ thing:
  - we can agree that the people that *should* get a 100% coverage is
people that deserve it or really need it
  - we can't leave out people asking for 100% just because they are
not crucial people in GNOME; it would kill the involvement of new
people

We could remove the fixed/default %-200€ policy and of course leave
the travel committee with the faculty to ask people if they could be
able to afford an ammount of the trip if they see it as a reasonable
thing to ask. Just like it is done now.

I -personally- expect the real improvements and savings to be in the
enhanced speed of the process (hence earlier bookings of tickets),
having all the tickets bought with enough anticipation should save us
a considerable ammount already.
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Re: New Friends of GNOME program launched!

2009-01-16 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 1/16/09, Dave Neary  wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>  Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
>  >> fwiw I prefer men's S shirts rather than shirts that are
>  >>  sized for women, because the sizing on the women's shirts is
>  >>  so unpredictable, In some I'm size M, L, and I actually have
>  >>  one from a LinuxWorld that I needed an XL for it to fit.
>  >
>  > Perhaps we could add the sizing info on the page (in inches and 
> centimeters).
>
>
> I don't think there's a need. I don't believe that the t-shirt is a
>  determinant in donating or not.
>
>  At the numbers we're talking about, I imagine that repeat donors will
>  receive an e-mail asking them what size t-shirt they'd like when the
>  time comes - handle t-shirt size issues then. Automating this too early
>  would be counter-productive premature optimisation.
>

In such case can we confirm that when the t-shirt is sent this will be
asked again? Because it would be bad to have to resend t-shirts or
people with t-shirts that fit badly, hence unhappy donors.

While it's not a determinant fact, we should try to keep the donors as
happy as we can, and if putting sizes in the page saves a sad face in
someone, then it's worth it.
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Re: New Friends of GNOME program launched!

2009-01-16 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 1/16/09, Máirín Duffy  wrote:
> Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:
>  > I wonder if the t-shirts are only for men or women.  The webpage doesn't
>  > say anything, but I tend to think they are for men.  However, are we
>  > expecting the supporters comes from one gender only?
>
>
> fwiw I prefer men's S shirts rather than shirts that are
>  sized for women, because the sizing on the women's shirts is
>  so unpredictable, In some I'm size M, L, and I actually have
>  one from a LinuxWorld that I needed an XL for it to fit.
>

Perhaps we could add the sizing info on the page (in inches and centimeters).
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Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

2009-01-05 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 1/5/09, Johannes Schmid  wrote:
>
> 6. Check all the documentation stuff on live.gnome.org that needs to be
>  updated. That is really important because not everybody is familiar with
>  git. There should also be a short introduction to git somewhere on the
>  wiki. And some announcements should probably be made...
>

And perhaps explain the benefits and cool stuff, if we are moving to
!svn, we should take advantage of the new cool stuff introduced...
that's where something like Federico's proposal to use gitorious fit.
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Re: Changes to the GNOME board

2008-12-16 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Thank you all! I'll do my best :-)

On 12/15/08, Bruno Boaventura  wrote:
>
> Great news!!! Congratulations Diego! Now we can go with our plans from
>  Latin America Complot!
>

Of course Bruno, but don't let the others know ;)
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Involucrate+GNOME, Lima: videos, pics, report

2008-07-30 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey everyone,

as some of you know, we had a GNOME event in Lima - Perú last March.
Thanks to the Foundation we were able to invite Germán Poo, Fernando
San Martín, Pedro Villavicencio and Manuel Cerón.
The results were quite positive for us, there was a really nice
feeling through the event, people got the chance to casually chat with
the speakers and just get to know them and their work.

Most of the material[0] is in Spanish, but we published a translated
version of the report we crafted[1].
You can find more about the involucrate.org project in our website[2],
it's always a good time to practice your Spanish!, but if you are a
more visual kind of person, there are some pictures[3] in flickr[4]
and videos[5].

The thanks go to the Foundation for their support, to our local
sponsors, Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega for the venue, COSOLIG
lug and Ubuntu-pe lug for their help and to all the volunteers.
And of course, thanks to the volunteers (although they hardly read
this list): Martín Araya, Antonio Cantos, Michael Garrido, GNUUPC,
Diana Katherine Horqque, Enrique Huaman, Liliana Ponce, Lily Poves,
Percy Triveño, Clotilde Urrelo Pezo, Nicolás Valcárcel, Carlos
Wertheman.

greetings!

Diego

0 - http://www.involucrate.org/material/2008-03/
1 - http://www.involucrate.org/docs/involucrate+gnome-en.pdf
2 - http://www.involucrate.org/
3 - http://flickr.com/photos/tags/involucrate
4 - http://flickr.com/photos/cosolig
5 - http://eventosenvideo.com/videos/Involucrate_GNOME_2008
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Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals

2008-07-03 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 7/3/08, Lennart Poettering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 03.07.08 20:54, Quim Gil ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
>
>  > On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Lennart Poettering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
> wrote:
>  > > Are there even any direct flights to Tampere, except from HEL?
>  >
>  > Ryanair in Tampere operates to Frankfurt, London, Bremen, Dublin,
>  > Milan and to Riga.
>  >
>  > Blue 1 operates to Stockholm and Copenhagen.
>
>
> Still no comparison to charter trips.
>
>
>  > Food, at http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/akademy+guadec-2009-bids/finland/
>  > there is a list of restaurants with many options starting from meals
>  > at 5€. Remember that Tampere is a city full of (public) university
>  > students, including Erasmus from all Europe. 5€ is a competitive price
>  > in the Spanish Summer, specially in the coast.
>  >
>  > Coping with parties every night is a problem for the economy of many.
>  > This was raised in previous editions and should be taken into account
>  > next year, no matter where. 3 sponsored social events with drinks
>  > reasonably covered + a couple of nights covered by a visit to the
>  > supermarket + a couple of nights actually sleeping well and drinking
>  > very healty water... Sounds like a plan?
>
>
> I somehow doubt that this works out. It didn't in Birmingham: some
>  people went out all the time because they had no problems affording it
>  in Birmingham -- Some people had to focus more on living from
>  Tesco. Claiming that this was a good solution is, uh, not really
>  understandable to me.
>

I don't think it's trivial either. The point of GUADEC is to socialize
and get to known each other. We can't pretend to have everyone always
together, but we should try to give everyone the chance to attend more
places than Tesco.

Not to make it a reason to always choose the cheapest place nor to
rule out more expensive places, but let's try to keep it accesible to
more people.
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Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals

2008-07-03 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey,

On 7/3/08, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>  Hi Lennart,
>
>
>  Lennart Poettering wrote:
>  > Here are my three reasons to prefer Gran Canaria:
>  >
>
> > 1. The money...
>
> > 3. Let's face it, finnish food and beer just sucks. In Spain at least
>  > the food is very good.
>
>
> These two are equally well fulfilled in A Coruna.
>
>
>  > 2. The conference tourist that I am would prefer to go to the Canary
>  > Islands, it's way more interesting from a tourtistic pov than
>  > the other two suggestions.
>
>
> This seems like the only argument specific to Gran Canaria, and doesn't
>  seem to me like a very good reason.
>
>  In fact, it's *exactly* the reason that I cited when arguing *against*
>  Gran Canaria. Since it's a tourist destination, I think convincing
>  sponsors will be more difficult (bear in mind that on your money
>  arguments, cheap flights mean we can bring more people for free/cheap).
>

Yes, but after all, almost by definition we are on the same boat as
tourism. I mean, we go to exotic locations to get together, have
beers, chat about our projects, try to get some stuff done... your
worry is valid, since if we use the bad words we might end up sounding
like a bunch of guys trying to get free trips. Let's just be careful.
For example, Istanbul is touristic, but it still got sponsors. In my
opinion the real core of GUADEC for anyone financially interested is
to get the hackers together to get stuff done or maybe to recruit some
of them. The location doesn't matter that much. Maybe some of the guys
pushing the decision to sponsor might get sent to GUADEC, so it might
play for us.

Of course, I might be wrong, I'm still green in this field :).
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Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2009

2008-04-22 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey

On 4/22/08, Behdad Esfahbod <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-22 at 14:38 -0400, Adam Schreiber wrote:
>  >
>
> > I too would appreciate another North/Central/South America based
>  > conference if GUADEC can't be moved across the pond occasionally.
>  > However, I suspect that because the GNOME summit is held in Boston
>  > every year we will have to make due.
>
>
> Boston Summit can move around.  Just come up with proposals for Boston
>  Summit 2009 before this year's Summit.  Send to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>

It just hit me, if Boston Summit is usually around October and there's
the LA tour planned for October, why not merge both ideas?
We can have BS (ok, never use that acronym) in -say- Lima, and then
some of the hackers can take a plane to -say- Santiago, some guys from
Europe could also come and be in the Summit instead of just watching
via IRC.

Of course this involves having the usual attendees pay an extra fee
for the trip, it's still something reasonable to pay under 1000 usd to
get a weekend in South America.
Also there's a language barrier, but I wouldn't consider it an actual
problem, given that people in the Summit is gonna interact mainly
between them.

What do you think?
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Re: "Ga-nome" or "NOME"

2008-02-13 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 2/13/08, Thomas Thurman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 11:26:28AM +0530, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
>  > Some of the common pronunciations are: Gee-nome (where Gee rhymes with
>  > see) or Guh-nome (where Guh rhymes a bit with duh :P).
>
>
> PLEASE don't pronounce it Gee-nome. I have had important mail get lost
>  because it's been sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED], since genome is a dictionary
>  word. Mail sent to that domain appears not even to bounce anyway.
>

Haha.
I have been introduced before talks as "Diego Escalante from the
GENOME project!" (genome in spanish is genoma, which leaves no doubt
about it being something genetic) so once or twice I have been
apointed as a genetic researcher talking about free software (yes,
"wtf!"). There's a chinese fungus named ganoderma, once I was
presented as coming from ganom, if I'm ever presented as coming from
ganom-derma I'll let everyone know that the "foot" has fungus.

Cough, ok, let's move on, we have a desktop to release!.

:)
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Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates

2007-12-01 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 12/1/07, Philip Van Hoof <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> > On 12/1/07, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as
> > John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism.
>
> Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from
> now on:
>

No, you are misinterpretaing my words, it's quite different to talk
about choosing GPL over $something-else and choosing place-X over
place-Y.
On the current context, choosing to endorse place-X's training courses
would imply that we are helping them make profit. Choosing GPL or
supporting ODF is a totally different matter.

> o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license
>implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU.
>
> o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned
>favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell!
>
> Please feel the sarcasm.
>
> If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned
> favouritism, we might as well just stop at all.
>
>
> > The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of
> > free problems from stuff like this.
>
> Name one that any one of our technology decisions doesn't have,
>
> My project creates opinions from people who prefer MAPI over IMAP, web
> clients over normal E-mail, XMPP over SMTP, ...
>

Different matter, I don't think Tinymail could be a source of the same
type of problems I'm thinking of.
To clarify, I'm thinking more about the social implicances of such
decision, lots of people would think we are discriminating some and
favouring others, among other things.
The quality of what we endorse also worries me a lot, we can try
really hard to watch over the quality of the courses or training but
it's impossible to guarantee 100% quality, hence we would end with
people having "papers" that have our sign saying "yes, this guy knows
how to hack GNOME stuff" and they don't necessarily would even know
how to apt-get something.

> Lot's of free problems.
>
> Realism!
>
> > I imagine fountains of FUD on
> > every corner.
>
> That's unavoidable for "anything" we do.

Nope, I don't think nobody has raised any kind of FUD about a lot of
things we do. As an example, let's take Boston Summit: nobody accuses
us of favouring Boston because it's just a hacker meeting, no one is
making money with it directly.
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Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates

2007-12-01 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 12/1/07, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> > I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X
> > is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope.
>
> But the foundation could publish a syllabus and some sample exams, and
> then licence training institutes and companies to offer the training
> (with quality control of the training course) - in the way LPI does.
>

Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as
John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. I
totally agree with him about being against partnering with an entity
over another.
The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of
free problems from stuff like this. I imagine fountains of FUD on
every corner.

I really don't like the idea.

> In fact, this would be a decent follow-on from the idea that Andy Oram
> proposed (don't have the link right now) about having quizzes at the
> bottom of documentation pages to ensure that the material is
> understandable and that the lessons to be learned are absorbed by the
> reader - both to help the reader validate their learning, and to get
> live feedback on documentation quality to identify areas in need of
> improvement.
>

This sounds like a nice idea, like a GNOMEpardy :). I think it could
take a good ammount of work to ellaborate those questions however.
Consider that we would also have to create and maintain some
infrastructure for this.
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Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]

2007-11-30 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey

On 11/30/07, Elijah Newren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
(...)
>
> What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future?
>

I can only think of asking for question much sooner or proposing some
topics under which to fill questions. But honestly, I don't know if
anything could guarantee people participating more *before* this
period.
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Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates

2007-11-30 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey

On 11/30/07, Bastian, Waldo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the
> title:
> > >"GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam"
> > >
> >
> > If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they
> > are violating the trademark guidelines :).
> > But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a
> > certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend
> > to mean nothing with time due to people taking them "just to pass the
> > test". I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for
> > contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to
> > the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely
> > rock.
>
> Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars,
> more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who
> knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective
> here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop
> solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies
> face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology.
> Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I
> don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe
> it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its
> training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct.
>

Interesting, I feel that anyway certifications tend to get worth
nothing when people start taking them "just to pass them", but still I
see your point of letting people not in GNOME but users of GNOME's
technology to prove they know that stuff.
Certification implemented as training could be a different matter, as
long as the real "juice" of the thing is the training.

I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X
is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope.


thanks for your comment,


Diego
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Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates

2007-11-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey,

On 11/30/07, Philip Van Hoof <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> The questions:
>
> o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if
>elected vote to spend this money on important projects?
>
>Being mostly interested in mobile targets and GNOME Mobile, I could
>certainly come up with some projects that might both increase
>deployment of our GNOME technologies on mobile devices and increase
>the amount of contributors.
>
>Both reasons are, I think, part of the reason why our Foundation
>exists.
>

Yes, it's important to support initiatives and innovation, the
Foundation is there to bust the stuff that gets on the way of the
hackers as it has already been said.

> - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for
>   for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our
>   components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target)
>
> - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta)
>
> - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+
>
> - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+
>
> - Improve the existing Win32 target of Gtk+
>
> - Employ a maintainer and/or additional developers for Gtk+'s
>   development
>

This are nice ideas, or more precisely a good list of things we could
improve in GNOME as a project. I think that putting money in the way
I'm understanding you propose would be too similar to the failed
bounties project, Luis has a nice post about that iirc.

> - Pay people to travel to schools and universities to educate
>   students about GNOME (serious educating, not just doing cheap
>   presentations)
>

This is already done if I understand correctly, if school X want you
to go there and teach them about how cool GNOME is, you can ask for
funding for the trip.

> - ... (for making these decisions we need people who'll make real
>   and hard decisions)
>
> o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title:
>"GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam"
>

If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they
are violating the trademark guidelines :).
But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a
certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend
to mean nothing with time due to people taking them "just to pass the
test". I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for
contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to
the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely
rock.

> o. How are you planning to help the GNOME community overcome the fact
>that we have relatively few technical leadership?
>

I don't know if we should consider that a bad thing... having lot of
different minds thinking their own way but keeping the communication
to integrate their different ideas is the way it's working now, at
least that's what I see.

>- By waiting for the integration our softwares to turn into
>  something that looks a lot like that O.S. called CHA-OS?
>

Haha :).

>- By letting companies like Nokia, Novell, ... set our goals?
>  I think this is what's happening right now. Might be fine imo.
>

I don't think they have set a direction, I don't feel like "working
for Nokia/Novell/someone's goals" or something like that. I feel I'm
helping GNOME.

The fact that there is a good number of hackers employed by Red Hat,
Novell, Nokia, etc can't be avoided, that's something we will always
see.
We can't avoid people getting hired by companies to work on features
or stuff the companies are interested in. The only way would be to
hire all GNOME hackers and monopolize them :).

I don't see this as a problem, I think part of the way hackers see
life is that they do what they really want to do no matter what. If
they hack boring projects during the day, then they will hack until
midnight whatever they feel deserves their time.

>  Note that, however, our users sometimes get confused by this:
>
>o. People thinking that Miguel De Icaza, Novell and GNOME are one
>   entity. (I love your work Miguel, don't get me wrong. A lot of
>   GNOME people do)
>

I agree with this one, I hear this daily...
We can only keep clearing people's doubts about this issues. There
will always be people ready to smash GNOME or any other project for
whatever reason they find.

>o. Too late announcing of GNOME developers joining the OOXML
>   discussions (I think it's great that we are among the people
>   defining this, don't get me wrong. But our "technical
>   leadership", the one that we lack, should have made our
>   position clear to the audience (our users) before getting
>   Slashdotted by the religious ones in the land of freesoftware.
>

I don't think it was a responsibility of "technical leadership", I
think it has already been said that the delay was just a 

Re: GNOME dependent on Mono

2007-11-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 11/29/07, BJörn Lindqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Nov 29, 2007 3:13 PM, Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 29, 2007 8:31 AM, BJörn Lindqvist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Nov 29, 2007 1:33 PM, Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > > I'll second this. The fact:fiction ratio of boycottnovell is just
> > > > incredibly, incredibly bad.
> > >
> > > RMS message read "If part of it is not accurate, I hope someone will
> > > explain." Do you care to sort out what is fact and what is fiction?
> >
> > Jeff has ably debunked this particular fiction already in the thread,
> > and more generally ably debunked the FUD that Novell somehow controls
> > the Foundation. As to the rest, I have better things to do with my
> > life than to debunk the rest of boycottnovell post-by-post.
>
> No. The boycottnovell site and the OP alluded to that there would be
> moral, philosophical and or legal problems with GNOME depending on
> Mono and or C#. Is that fact or is it fiction?
>

I once hurt my finger installing beagle, but that was because of
excesive computer use. The installation just triggered my problem.
We should buy boycottgnome.org before boycottnovell decides to expand
the franchise :).

(of course, just kidding)


Diego
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Re: Question to candidates: what about next ODF?

2007-11-28 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey,

On 11/28/07, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> One question to candidates:
>
> Wil you promote the Foundation's participation on the reviewing
> of ODF?
>

Why won't we?. It's on the interest of or community to promote free
standards, free software and if we can help by reviewing it and
helping to make it better and more bullet proof, then let's just do
it! :).

> I'm sure it won't be for lack of a sponsor, but I think it is much more
> important to the Free Software world to have a true Open Standard for
> office documents, regardless of MS OOXML's outcome, and I hope the
> Foundation will help make sure the users of GNOME can use the next
> version of ODF with GNOME based Free Software.
>

The OOXML issue is already explained, someone volunteered for helping
nuking MS's standard so we can get as much info as we can and make the
problems of their stuff more evident.
Jody's participation is -in my very humble opinion- anything but bad.
He's probably made MS people throw one or two chairs through the
window with his questions.

I think Luis has replied you very clearly. No one's paying no one and
Jody's participation is totally voluntary, if someone would stand up
and want to help with ODF, I don't see a reason to oppose to the board
helping them to participate.

We all love free software as much as you, we wouldn't do anything to harm it.


Greetings!

Diego
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Re: two questions for candidates

2007-11-26 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey,

On 11/26/07, Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1. Would you change anything in the GNOME Foundation statement about
> OOXML?
>

Mmmm, I would have included a line in all-caps saying "GNOME
Foundation doesn't like OOXML, we have someone in the committee
because standard or not Ms is gonna push it everywhere, so we are
taking the chance to ask questions and raise concern on all the
problems we can find." :).

I think the statement was fine, a bit longer than what the regular
netizen would read however, so my new line would only be to avoid lazy
netizens spreading FUD.

As Jeff says on another thread, statement or not, the people "hating"
us for being there is not going to ever be happy. So I'd print that
line only to make it clearer for the ocassional bystander.

> 2. How do you think the GNOME Foundation should support the Free
> Software Movement in general?

By keeping the high quality of GNOME and supporting the grow of our
great community (note that it's on hackers hands to do it, but on
Foundation's to encourage it).
I always like to talk about GNOME when people asks or wonders about
free software being "too hippie" or "non serious". My personal view is
that GNOME is a great argument for confirming that free software can
be more serious and efficient than any other privative alternative
(think about our release cycle).

I think the Foundation is already helping free software by supporting
GNOME and promoting it, it also does a great job being a proxy to all
the companies interested in the project.
Nuking the brick walls for GNOME also nuke them for other projects.

see ya!
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Re: Questions to the candidates

2007-11-22 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hello :)

On 11/22/07, Anne Østergaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Questions to the candidates:
>
> Will you apply for the position as new Executive Director for GNOME?
>

No, I don't think so.

> Will you apply for any paid position within GNOME while serving as board
> member?
>

No, if I'm elected that's because other members are willing to trust
me to be on the Board for a given period of time and I think I should
respect that and complete this time as long as it's possible (life
always have surprises).

> Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls?
>

I will try to, the goal is to be there at 100% of the calls. I think
my timezone helps (GMT-5) and also that I have flexibility with my
free time.

> Can you accept competing official ISO standards?
>

It's better to have just one, but if by some reason there's more than
one, well we either reject one and leave part of our users out or we
use both and give users freedom to choose. Similar to what others said
in the first question-pack thread.

> What is your position towards official standards that do not meet the
> gennerally accepted definition of a free and open standard. Such as
> Microsoft OOXML?
>

I don't like them :). I'm really mad when I receive documents in
"freedom unfriendly" formats and when I open them they are all mutant
and horrible, it's a shame to have this impossed over people that is
not aware of the problem. So the answer would be no, I don't like this
kind of stuff at all.

Feel free to ask for clarification if I didn't understood any of your
questions correctly.


Diego
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Re: A question to candidates

2007-11-22 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hi,

On 11/22/07, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I did send these to the membership committee, but voting's nearly open,
> and I think they're important, so I guess I'll just ask...
>
> The foundation's role is essentially to facilitate the enthusiasm of the
> GNOME project, as Andrew Cowie blogged earlier [1]. This consists of two
> major elements - managing/improving the finances that the foundation
> has, and identifying areas where those finances can help remove
> roadblocks or encourage productive contribution.
>

I agree with Andrew's post. The Linux Australia idea sounds quite cool
to me: facilitate the enthusiasm.
I see the Board exactly as that, the group of people in charge of
deploying the Foundation resources to facilitate initiatives, events,
meetings, etc.

> After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances
> are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2].
>
> What do you see as the best way to spend this money? In terms of hiring,
> do you prefer hiring a sysadmin, or an executive director? What other
> priorities do you have for expenditure this year, outside of our usual
> cost centers (GUADEC + salaries + travel sponsorship)?
>

If it's really critical to have more manpower for doing sysadmin
tasks, that should be the priority I think, after all we are supposed
to give good and enough infrastructure for the projects.
Besides usual things like GUADEC, I would like to see some money
passed to local groups for marketing things and events. In particular
for my dear side of the world (Latin America) where stuff is mega
cheap to do. I would support expending money on supporting initiatives
that can produce new users and developers in places where we don't
have much of them.

> A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points
> of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points?
>

Improvement, mmm, as I mentioned earlier I would like to continue
making the Board work more transparent so people know not only the
outcome but the process, this would be positive to prospective
candidates I think.

Another thing I feel I could help with is in communication with
people, as I said on earlier emails I think my age and personality
makes people see me as someone quite accesible and open, this -I
think- would help me be a good entry point for people trying to
communicate but still a bit shy to do it by other means like mailing
the entire Board, of course the idea would be to destroy that shyness
and make quite clear that the Board is happy to receive comments and
ideas no matter how silly they can sound.

greetings


Diego
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Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!

2007-11-19 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 11/19/07, Bruno Boaventura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> With the final list of candidates announced, it's time to submit
> questions about the GNOME Foundation and GNOME Project to this years
> prospective Board of Directors.
>
> The list, a summary of each candidate's statement and a link to each
> candidate's candidacy can be found at:
>
> http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2007/candidates.html
>
> Here we'll go:
>
> [1] How much impact would being a member of the GNOME Foundation Board
> have on your current contributions to GNOME ?
>

It won't have a big impact, right now my main activity is minor bug
fixing and a good bunch of bug triaging.
As I said on my candidacy statement, I'm planning on devoting a bigger
part of my GNOME time to Board activities, but given that my GNOME
work is anyway not really time consuming or absorving I don't think my
usual GNOME contributions will be hurt, I'm not a rockstar and I'm not
planning on becoming one for the next 18 months.

> [2] Online Desktop and Services are being talked about as the next
> large step in GNOME - what is your vision for Online Desktop and
> Services and how would you measure them ?
>

I think OD is really a cool project, I have heard lots of opinions
saying it's great and others saying it's just an Active Desktop copy
(hah!). There are other not directly related projects that make me
dream of great innovation in the short term, for example Telepathy and
"tubes". Having that kind of integration between communication and
collaboration is going to make us rock.

OD is a great opportunity to innovate freely and go a step further,
the vision behind it is quite realistic for our time: "stuff is
happening online, let's integrate with it". After all, one of our
killer features is being an integrated desktop :).

I'm sure OnlineDesktop will produce some interesting new ideas and
applications. Talking about the role of the Foundation with this
project, I'd say that it's important to support this and other
initiatives with the resources they need -as long as it's realistic
and reasonable-.

> [3] What are the SMART goals that you desire to set for yourself
> should you be elected to the Board ?
>

- Support initiatives in Latin America for getting people involved as
users and developers. Concretely, I would like to "deploy" 2 or 3 of
our rockstars next year to a LA-tour, as seen on marketing-list[0] and
later gugmasters[1] the idea has had a positive response. I would like
to serve as a direct link to this initiative and hopefully other
similar ones.

- Help on showing the Board as a more transparent group, it's not that
today it's not transparent, but I would like to make it as crystal
clear as possible so people does know what happens in the Board and
how the work is done (of course, as long as it doesn't disrupt the
privacy of the matters discussed, common sense implied).
I think this can have a positive impact on the number of people
approaching with ideas and initiatives, also at the end of the term I
would like to see a good number of candidates given that the doubt
about what would it take to be on the board would be then a lot
smaller, if not gone.

- Putting attention to details, I confess I'm a perfectionist and I'm
not planning on stop being one on the next 18 months :).

- I would also be glad to be a channel for people to communicate with
the Board, I feel that given my age and friendly attitude people won't
feel inhibited from talking to me.

> [4] If you are a candidate for the first time, what are the areas that
> you think you can do better ?
>

I think that my context is quite different to other people already
working on the Board, not that it's better but it's just different.

I'm quite young (20), I'm peruvian, and silly as this sounds I think
that gives me a totally different set of ideas and ways of thinking
that can complement perfectly with the other members of the Board.

Some of the things I see room for improvement are the ones on question (3).

As for skills to offer, I feel that my work over the last year and a
half with my local LUG organizing conferences and workshops have given
me a good knowledge of how to work with people and have made me immune
to the boredom of administrative tasks. I also enjoy doing public
relations and marketing.

> [5] Do you think it is important to mentor and coach potential leaders
> in the GNOME community ? If yes, what do you think the role of the
> Board be in this task ? If no, what are your thoughts on this ?
>

This is really important, I think one of the key factors to the
success of a group is producing new leaders and developing their
leadership.
Leadership is not limited only to being on top of a committee or being
a Board member, leadership should be present on every single aspect of
an organization through its people. We should think of everyone as
possible leaders and encourage them to not be afraid of taking the
first step into something.
Leadership is one of the factors of 

Candidacy: Diego Escalante Urrelo

2007-11-15 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Name: Diego Escalante Urrelo
Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Affl: None

Misc.
Nick: dieguito
Blog: http://diegoe.blogspot.com (in Spanish)
GNOME-Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/diegoe

Summary
---

I'm running for the Board because I want to help GNOME in areas where
I haven't yet helped, but I feel capable of doing it.
I'm totally devoted to GNOME as a project and as a group, I've met
wonderful friends thanks to GNOME and learned lots of incredible
things. I'm confident that my skills and experience working with
people and doing administrative tasks will be useful to the Board.


Who am I?
-----

I'm Diego Escalante Urrelo, I'm peruvian[0] and I'm 20 years old. I've
been using GNU/Linux since I was 14. I'm a GNOME user since 2.2 days
(I confess I hated 1.4 :)) and a GNOME contributor since 2.14 days.
Probably we exchanged one or two friendly words (or maybe kicks if you
played the soccer match) in GUADEC last July.
In GNOME I've worked on Epiphany, the Accounts team and Busquad.
Locally I'm an active member of DebianPerú[1], a LUG right now devoted
into getting people involved into Free Software projects.

0 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peru
1 - http://www.debianperu.org

Why am I running?
-

I feel that right now I can help GNOME more being on the Board doing
administrative tasks than hacking, I'm not a rockstar hacker and I'm
not planning on becoming one the next year and a half.
My experience working as a coordinator for DebianPerú has taught me a
lot about working with people, public relations and administrative
stuff.
I see myself as a motivated, creative, energic and (sometimes)
perfectionist person,
I'm sure this skills can be useful to the Board.

Why should you vote for me?
--

Because give how much I love GNOME you can trust I won't do anything
to harm the project that has given me so much.
I also enjoy administrative tasks more than hacking tasks, so I plan
on targetting my GNOME time to Board work if I'm elected.
I feel I'm seen as friendly and open by people, so I hope to be a good
way for people to contact the Board.

Will I focus on something?
-

Of course, besides wanting to help make GNOME rock even harder I've
some points I want to work on if I get elected:
  * promoting and supporting more people getting into GNOME in Latin America
  * transparency of the Board
  * putting attention into details

Some more thoughts
--

  * I want to help in the Board because I feel that as a hacker I'm
far less productive than as an administrative guy.

  * I confess that I'll help the Latin American Mafia to take over GNOME.

  * I'm full of energy and enthusiasm (and well, some cookies right now)

  * Thanks for reading this


Diego
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Re: clarification and apology [was Re: board]

2007-11-08 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 11/8/07, Quim Gil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Nov 8, 2007 7:44 PM, Luis Villa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > apologies for the impression I may have
> > created about the current board.
>
> No problem, Luis. I don't think the board members got bad feelings for
> your constructive and rather justified criticism.
>
> Man, we love you!
>

Yes! GNOME Friend with benefits!

wait a second...
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Re: About the coming election

2007-11-06 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hey Anne :)

On 11/6/07, Anne Østergaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> About the coming election of new board members.
>
> It is time for reflection on whether you would like to run for election,
> for the next GNOME Board of Directors, for the next period of eighteen
> months.
>
> In my view, it is important to have a variety of skills represented on
> the board.
>

Totally agree, I remember we had the chance to chat in GUADEC about
how a different point of view is very important for any group,
sometimes "the outsider look" opens your eyes. The outsider being
either a people from outside or a people from inside but with a
different set of ideas or way of thinking.

> I do not personally believe in a "strong man" dominated board, but
> rather in a group of dedicated team players who always has the best
> interests of the GNOME Foundation, as well as the GNOME community at
> heart.
>
> I think that a well run organization, with a welcoming and helpful
> attitude towards new comers and beginners who would like to contribute
> to the project, would reflect in more cool, user friendly applications
> which will make us all happy.
>
> It would also be a good thing to have as global a representation on the
> board as possible. For the variety of cultures and the inspiration.
>
> We would welcome candidates from all over the globe. (It would be nice
> to see candidates from India and the US for example. As these countries
> are not represented at the moment. The GNOME Foundation is a US based
> legal entity, which means that we act under US legislation.)
>

Aha, don't worry, the evil latino plan to take over the board is in
process (what do you think Lucas is doing there? muahaha!! >:D)
(that's a joke, laugh now)

> In case you are not able to put in the time it takes being a board
> member yourself, you could try to mail a friend you would like to see as
> a board member and convince him/her to become a candidate.
>

While reading this, I remembered this mail by Federico:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2006-November/msg00014.html

It cleared a lot of my doubts with regards to being on the board. I
recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about the board (no matter
they run or not for it).

> We have had two votes on internal, organizational issues apart from the
> yearly elections. They have worked fine.
> So we might consider asking The GNOME Foundation Members to vote on
> important, fundamental issues where it is difficult to deduct what the
> opinion of the majority is from the debate.
>
> This idea might also make it even more important to you to be or become
> a GNOME Foundation Member.
>
> I am writing this on behalf of myself, and it reflects my personal
> experience, and views on being a board member for the past two years.
>

And it's nice to hear about the people who has already being through
the experience, I would encourage other board members to comment about
their experience on the board, the good and bad of it.


greetings!


Diego
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Re: Thank you everyone for a wonderful GUADEC 2007

2007-07-25 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 7/25/07, Claudio Saavedra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 16:36 +0200, Anne Østergaard wrote:
> >
> > It is also a pleasure for me to inform you all that next years GUADEC
> > 2008 will take place in Istanbul, Turkey.
>
> Congratulations Barış and everyone behind this proposal!
>
Yes!.
Can't wait to see you all guys again!! :)
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Re: [guadec-list] Sponsorship letter

2007-06-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 6/29/07, Behdad Esfahbod <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-29 at 13:56 -0500, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > (sorry if someone gets duplicates of this)
> >
> > Fighting the consulates, I realized that it would be a good idea to
> > have a letter from the foundation where it's acknowledged that I'm
> > being sponsored to attende GUADEC and GUADEC-ES. You know, to make
> > things "look official".
>
> I prefer to have these things handled by GUADEC organizers, not the
> Board.  The standard GUADEC invitation letter looks quite official to
> me, and has got me (and others) visas already.
>
> What kind of problems are you having with the consulate?
>
Yep I know, it's quite good. What I mean with this one is to show that
the top-level organization (the foundation) knows about all this and
to explain that my trip is both to Spain and UK.
Right now I have the standard UK invitation letter (guadec letter) and
that's fine, but it only mentions my trip to UK, it doesn't detail
that I'm dropping by Spain a few days.

It's just to summarize things. Under the asumption that if it doesn't
harm then it clarifies things for the embassy.

>
> behdad
>
> > So I crafted a letter about this, with the hope that someone wants to
> > give me a hand and fill in the blanks, insert a png with his/her
> > signature and mail it back to me.
> > Obviously to make it official it has to be a Board Member the one signing 
> > it.
> >
> > I hope someone can give me a hand!
> >
> > Diego
> >
> > 
> > To whom it may concern (is this english?)
> >
> > On behalf of The GNOME Foundation, I would like to confirm that Mr.
> > Diego Escalante Urrelo is being sponsored to attend GUADEC 2007: The
> > GNOME Conference 15th - 21st  July, 2007, Birmingham, United Kingdom,
> > the 8th annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference and
> > GUADEC-ES 2007: The GNOME Hispanic Users and Developers Conference
> > 12th - 13th July, 2007.
> >
> > Mr. Diego Escalante Urrelo holds a passport numbered 3923409.
> >
> > His flight to Spain and United Kingdom, his accommodation and other
> > expenses during 11th-24th July 2007 are covered by the GUADEC
> > committee in 1 Great Colmore Street Birmingham, B15 2AP, UK. Which is
> > a $relationship with the foundation.
> >
> > He is being sponsored because of his contributions to the GNOME
> > project which include software development, software translation and
> > authoring software documentation. He has also helped promote GNOME in
> > events, media and local community groups.
> > We would like him to attend GUADEC so that he can share his
> > experiences and learn about the latest developments in the GNOME
> > project.
> >
> > GNOME Foundation (gnome.org) is a non-profit, non-government
> > organization based in Boston, USA, with a worldwide membership. The
> > GNOME User and Developer European Conferences (GUADEC and GUADEC-ES)
> > www.guadec.org - www.guadec.es are annual gatherings of GNOME
> > developers, enthusiasts and individual, business, education and
> > government users worldwide.
> >
> > Yours sincerely,
> > SCANED SIGNATURE
> >
> >
> > someone
> > ___
> > guadec-list mailing list
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/guadec-list
> --
> behdad
> http://behdad.org/
>
> "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
>  Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
> -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
>
>
>
>
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Sponsorship letter

2007-06-29 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hello everyone,

(sorry if someone gets duplicates of this)

Fighting the consulates, I realized that it would be a good idea to
have a letter from the foundation where it's acknowledged that I'm
being sponsored to attende GUADEC and GUADEC-ES. You know, to make
things "look official".

So I crafted a letter about this, with the hope that someone wants to
give me a hand and fill in the blanks, insert a png with his/her
signature and mail it back to me.
Obviously to make it official it has to be a Board Member the one signing it.

I hope someone can give me a hand!

Diego


To whom it may concern (is this english?)

On behalf of The GNOME Foundation, I would like to confirm that Mr.
Diego Escalante Urrelo is being sponsored to attend GUADEC 2007: The
GNOME Conference 15th - 21st  July, 2007, Birmingham, United Kingdom,
the 8th annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference and
GUADEC-ES 2007: The GNOME Hispanic Users and Developers Conference
12th - 13th July, 2007.

Mr. Diego Escalante Urrelo holds a passport numbered 3923409.

His flight to Spain and United Kingdom, his accommodation and other
expenses during 11th-24th July 2007 are covered by the GUADEC
committee in 1 Great Colmore Street Birmingham, B15 2AP, UK. Which is
a $relationship with the foundation.

He is being sponsored because of his contributions to the GNOME
project which include software development, software translation and
authoring software documentation. He has also helped promote GNOME in
events, media and local community groups.
We would like him to attend GUADEC so that he can share his
experiences and learn about the latest developments in the GNOME
project.

GNOME Foundation (gnome.org) is a non-profit, non-government
organization based in Boston, USA, with a worldwide membership. The
GNOME User and Developer European Conferences (GUADEC and GUADEC-ES)
www.guadec.org - www.guadec.es are annual gatherings of GNOME
developers, enthusiasts and individual, business, education and
government users worldwide.

Yours sincerely,
SCANED SIGNATURE


someone
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Hiring a part-time sysadmin?

2007-06-23 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 6/23/07, Bruno Boaventura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 12:05 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> > 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 simple stuff, but that's why it's important. It could make a
> > noticeable everyday difference to how we grow and work together.
> >
>
> I'd like to help, but I need some training to do these things.
>
I say exactly the same.


> --
> brunobol
> -
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://live.gnome.org/BrunoBoaventura
> http://blogs.gnome.org/portal/brunbol
>
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Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07

2007-06-14 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
On 6/14/07, Bruno Boaventura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 23:24 +0300, Lucas Rocha wrote:
> > There's a *big* difference between willing to increase collaboration
> > between GNOME and KDE and merging their main conferences in one. I
> > think this merge would bring really bad effects on our community.
> >
> > - Our conference would lose GNOMEsh identity. This is a subtle but
> > essential aspect of GUADEC: it's where/when we meet the GNOME
> > community. We cannot lose that.
> >
> > - Not everyone in GNOME community is interested in KDE. I understand
> > that we, as a free desktop project, should be interested in KDE but we
> > can't expect/enforce everyone in GNOME to think like this. Because we
> > have similar goals than KDE, this does not mean we should meet at the
> > same time and place in a generic/big free desktop conference. There
> > are better places and times for putting both projects together and the
> > really interested people will be there for sure.
> >
> > - If we're having problems on organizing our conference, let's try to
> > solve them in the best possible way in our own boundaries. IMO,
> > merging with KDE will bring more problems than solving from the
> > communities point of view. Specially on defining the agenda.
>
> Yes, Lucas... I have the same point of view about this question and I
> guess many others have too.
>
Me too.


> Cheers!
>
> brunobol
>
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Foundation financial info

2007-06-07 Thread Diego Escalante Urrelo
Hello list,

Thanks $deity, I got sponsored for attending GUADEC this year. Being
peruvian, I have to deal with visas to go to UK and Spain (this is
because of the route I'm taking).

One of the requisites for getting the visa is to proof that if I'm not
paying the trip myself then someone else is doing it. This person
-among other things- should provide a financial report of -at least-
the last 3 months (bank accounts, cards, pay checks, etc).
I was suggested to check the IRS and use the info they show/provide
for this  but I couldn't find anything (being a non-USA resident I
might have missed where to look).

So, I'd like a word of help/orientation about who should I talk to get
this information. Time is a problem, so I need to get this info as
soon as possible.

Thanks everyone.

Diego Escalante
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