Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Marina Zhurakhinskaya
On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 11:56 PM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: Name: Marina Zhurakhinskaya Emails: mari...@redhat.com and marina...@gmail.com Affiliations: Community Engagement Lead at Red Hat, Advisor and Director at the Ada Initiative Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/marina Dear Foundation, I'm running for a second term on the board to lend my organizing skills and my interest in reaching out to people to the Foundation and ensure its growth. We have an amazing community and high quality technology. My interests as a board member are to enable face-to-face work, development in the areas of interest to donors and advisory board members, and better external visibility of GNOME. Most recently, I've been helping organize sponsorship materials and process for GNOME.Asia and GUADEC, and contacting prospective sponsors. What have you learned the past year as a Director? How does a Board position help you become more effective in your contributions? Thanks! -- -mvh Oliver Propst ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: Affiliation: Software Freedom Conservancy. I'm also pro bono General Counsel of QuestionCopyright.Org, and an advisor of The Ada Initiative and sometimes help other orgs (like the FSF) on legal and other free software related matters. As promised when I left the position of Executive Director, I'd like to throw my hat in the ring for the Board of Directors. I think I can help bring continuity to the board (Stormy was incredibly helpful on the board when I started as ED). Also, as a lawyer I sometimes have an additionally useful perspective. I'm still doing volunteer work for GNOME both as pro bono counsel and as a volunteer on nonlegal matters for GNOME. I've been helping with fundraising, collecting on outstanding invoices and generally wherever I can. You are a very busy person with many responsibilities, if you get elected to the Board do you feel confident that you can spend the necessary time on Board work? Thanks! -- -mvh Oliver Propst ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 23:08 +0200, oliverp wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 11:19 -0700, Jim Nelson wrote: Hello everyone, My questions for the candidates is: Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) Good question, thanks for asking. I think the first priority for the Board must be to focus on stabilizing the current sensitization. make sure invoices are paid for the OPW etc. Then I think much work can be done together with the community in both areas you mention (corporate sponsorship and personal donations). Long term, more methods can be considered. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote: I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a Foundation, even with an ED, we have lim limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most effectively. I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative founders which has informed some of my views on it. http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started a discussion [1] about how the Foundation can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added the post it to the wiki). I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team want to collaborate closely with the Board in this. 1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html 2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Upcoming deadline - candidates please answer the question from the foundation
We're five days away from voting opening. While some candidates have been very active in answering questions from the foundation, other are falling behind. I will be unable to vote for you if I have no idea where you're standing. In addition to that, board-list is a high traffic list so keeping up with these questions is a good test drive for candidates :) Thank you for taking the time! - Andreas ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Dave On 2014-05-19 16:14, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: On 05/19/2014 04:31 AM, David King wrote: Right now (taking into account the poor financial situation that the Foundation is facing), I think that a candidate for the executive director position would be someone who has experience of raising funds for not-for-profit organisations. For GNOME, the board does not exert strong control over the project, but tries to steer it in the right direction by ensuring that funding is directed appropriately, making the executive director role particularly challenging. My follow-on question, then: raising money for what? Initially, I think that much of the money raised by an executive director would go towards financially supporting the executive director role. If the Foundation's revenues continue to drop (as has been the case over the last few years), an executive director role would become untenable without increased funding from sponsors. Once the executive director role is securely funded, I think that there would be more time to spend growing the Foundation, which is the more traditional role of the executive director. If there is an abundance of funding available, the board should work with the executive director and the Foundation to use the money effectively to further the Foundation's goals, such as by funding hackfests, outreach (possibly with a particular emphasis on local outreach, as this has come up as part of other discussions) and sponsoring contributions (such as with the accessibility and privacy campaigns). I do not think that technical proficiency is an essential quality for an executive director, if by that you mean ability to code. I meant understanding of the technology, ability to explain it, and ability to be articulate about what the GNOME project needs to do to stay relevant. In that case, I think technical proficiency is of critical importance, as fundraising would be extremely difficult without an ability to explain on a technical and social level about the importance of sponsors' (and potential sponsors') support of GNOME. This is what I meant when I mentioned that an executive director would need to understand GNOME's position in the Free Software and wider communities in order to raise funds effectively, so thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate what is truly needed vs wanted. Once we figure out how much money we need to be spending, we can evaluate our current funds, where they are coming from and how to raise more. Donating to GNOME as an individual is not as easy as it could, indeed should, be. We don't currently have a specific 'campaign' going on, and as a result, a cursory glance at the website reveals no obvious way to donate to GNOME's general fund (as far as I can tell the only way to do so is to find the tiny 'Support GNOME' link at the very bottom of the page). Additionally, I still don't understand why the only way to donate to GNOME is through PayPal. Why don't we allow people to donate via google or amazon? Why not accept bitcoins? Why not encourage people to support GNOME via AmazonSmile and similar programs? These are just the first handful of ideas for alternative, and largely untapped funding options that occur to me at first glance. I'm sure there are myriad other funding options which we have not investigated fully, and which do not include asking for corporate sponsorship. Finally, I believe the board needs to be far more transparent than it has been of late as to its activities finances. The board in the past has been resistant to allowing non-board members to 'sit in' on meetings - even as a means for Engagement team members to take notes and report minutes. As I understand it, the board represents and works on behalf of the membership and their meetings ought to be public. Emily Gonyer I have been a long time user of GNOME since the 1.x days, and an active contributor for the last 2+ years, primarily in Marketing/Engagement with limited development and design contributions. I actively promote free software whenever and wherever I can, and feel strongly that it is only through free software that we will be able to keep the freedoms that we all cherish both online and off. Those freedoms are being actively obstructed and eroded by corporations and governments around the world. As a member of the board of directors I will actively work against these forces, in order to ensure a free and open internet for everyone. Good luck to all! -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-annou...@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Michael On 2014-05-19 18:48, Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 16:55 +0100, David King wrote: I have a follow-up question (for David and incumbents): why do you want (or not want) to hire a new executive director? What responsibilities do you think the executive director role should entail? Can the foundation afford to wait to hire a new executive director? I partially answered this in my responses to Dave Neary: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2014-May/msg00030.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2014-May/msg00069.html In short, the executive director needs to bring in enough money to fund the position, grow the revenues of the Foundation to keep its financial situation secure, and to grow the Foundation as a whole. Much of the process for this will be administrative, such as helping the administrative assistant with accounting and other necessary work. Part of the role will be evangelizing for GNOME at conferences and to existing and future sponsors. Some of the role would be acting as a figurehead, answering questions about GNOME and making sure that GNOME is presented well in the press. Stormy Peters wrote a very useful blog post about what she saw as the role of the executive director when she was in that position: http://stormyscorner.com/2009/01/what-do-i-do-as-executive-director-of-gnome.html I think that is broadly true of the executive director role, just that the proportions differ depending on the needs of the Foundation at the time. I'm asking because most of Karen's work was not highly-visible. I'm aware that she worked on recruiting new advisory board members and spoke at conferences, both of which seem important. But I'm sure there must be more to the job that I am unaware of, to justify the significant expense. I think that, in future, the Foundation cannot afford an executive director who is more costly to employ than the income gained from advisory board revenues. I think that Emily Gonyer's proposal to scale back corporate sponsorship would make it more difficult to continue to employ an executive director in the traditional role. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
In my previous email responding to Kat, I touched on this very subject. First and foremost we need to determine two things: 1) How much money we are currently spending on what, and what is truly needed. 2) How much money is currently coming in, and from where - this should be broken down into categories - individual donations, and at least the top 5-10 corporate donors ought to be listed along with how much they have been and are giving. Then we should move on to determining how we can raise donations from individuals and small businesses. Donors should not have to search the website to figure out how to do so - a small, but prominent link to 'Contribute to GNOME!' would not be out of place on the site. Currently it takes at least 3 clicks to arrive at a site where you can donate - and your only choice for doing so is via paypal. Why don't we accept other payment options? Is it just that nobody has bothered to set it up? If that is the case, we should be asking for help doing so. At the very least, we should accept payments from google, facebook and amazon, and we should at least consider accepting bitcoins as well. Finally, there are other funding options available online - a quick search reveals numerous websites with ideas on how to more effectively raise funds. Utilizing every tool available to us to raise money from individuals should be our first priority. Only after we have fully explored these options should we go back to asking for yet more corporate money. Emily Gonyer On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:28 AM, oliverp oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote: I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a Foundation, even with an ED, we have lim limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most effectively. I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative founders which has informed some of my views on it. http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started a discussion [1] about how the Foundation can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added the post it to the wiki). I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team want to collaborate closely with the Board in this. 1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html 2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Emily Chen emilychen...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I would like to ask below questions to future board: 1. For GNOME big event, call for sponsor is really important, what is your plan to call for more sponsors for conference like GUADEC and GNOME.Asia ? I think it is of utmost importance that big events have numerous sponsors, both large and small. Local businesses ought to be encouraged to support events. I'm not sure what sorts of local business organizations exist in Europe and Asia but something similar to the Chambers of Commerce here in the USA likely do, and would be useful as primary contact points to reach out to for donations. 2. What is the top 3 goals for GNOME Foundation in the next year, in your opinion ? I think that it will be extremely important in the next year to reach out to related projects. Since the advent of GNOME 3 we have seen a severe fracturing in the ecosystem, which is not benefiting anyone. Reaching out to related projects (Unity, Cinnamon, Mate, ElementaryOS, XFCE, etc) and asking them to participate in GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, the Boston Summit is vitally important. GNOME is about more than just the shell and recognizing that everyone who uses GNOME technologies is, or should be welcomed into the project. 3. How to raise and increase the fund for GNOME Foundation ? I've touched on this elsewhere, so I'll be brief: We need to increase individual and small-business donations. There are many ways to do so which we have left untapped including Facebook Google Wallet donations, encouraging the use of AmazonSmile and similar programs, etc. 4. How many hours you work in GNOME Board related work each week? N/A Thanks! Emily Chen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On 19 May 2014 18:55, Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 19 May 2014, Max wrote: Hi everyone, Hey Max! My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Two OPW interns have been working for several months to provide a valid event management system for all the major GNOME events. The software is currently based on OSEM (the Open Source Event Manager [1]) and a test-bed is privately available on one of our testing machines at OSUOSL. Part of the upcoming GUADEC organizers have been granted access to the istance, if you are missing access to it please let me know. We should definitely find out what has gone wrong with it and why it has not been declared ready for production yet. I will make sure to follow-up on this as one of my goals for the next term if elected. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? While OPW has had a great success in India (thanks to english being widely spoken there) it did not have the same success on other Asia regions probably because of the language barrier. What we can probably do is localizing the content of the OPW flyer so that more women can be aware of the Outreach Program for Women and apply for it. (I will make sure to discuss about this with Marina if elected and propose the idea to the relevant localization team) That would hit another language barrier though which mainly relates to the fact none of the current mentors are Chinese speakers. Max, did you try interacting with any local university already? if yes, is there anyone (both english and chinese speaker) who might be willing to mentor a chinese-speaking student during one of the next OPW rounds? -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) How do we get these member / resource together? I'm not sure whether adding a country field on the foundation database would be enough to achieve the proposed goal given someone might just decide to not specify that information at all (for protecting the privacy for example), additionally there is no real need for the Membership Committee (and the Foundation generally) to know where a contributor is based. But that's not all the Committee is very busy lately and increasing the information to manage for each single member would not be ideal. (I'm also sure the country field would become inconsistent within a few months from it being introduced for the simple fact someone might just forget to send an update to the committee specifying he just moved to a new country) What we can probably do is populating the apply form some more including more information about how new or existing members can reach their localized communities. (by suggesting the new member to subscribe to gnome-cc-l...@gnome.org (Country Code) for example or if missing to ask the creation of a new list in case that specific community is growing in number) -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? -- Anything you plan with Asia. I've not been following very closely what the current situation for GNOME.Asia is but Dave and Kat's emails clearly state the Foundation is totally oriented on improving the current situation for the next term and they will be personally there at the upcoming event to instruct participants on the multiple ways to be engaged to the GNOME project as contributors. Max, how much the events that were organized and sponsored by the GNOME Foundation did benefit the Asia region as a whole? how many new contributors joined your ranks? what do you think could help you improve the organization of the GNOME.Asia event? There were no funding requests to the current board for organisation of events in Asia, with the exception of GNOME.Asia. There was one request for attendance to a non-GNOME conference, where a talk about GNOME was given. During the past GUADEC we discussed the creation of an additional planet to aggregate all the chinese-speaking feeds to help non-english-speaking contributors to be aware of what's going on behind the scenes of events like GNOME.Asia but generally any other initiative happening in that area (the Planet GNOME rules currently disallow localized content to be posted and while that keeps the planet polished from mixed content to be published it also restricts non-english-speakers to read it), do you think such addition would still make sense? if yes, do you have a list of feeds to aggregate there already? is a planet really needed or would a news feed on the
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
Hi Jim On 2014-05-19 11:19, Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org wrote: Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) I think that corporate donations are an effective way to raise funds for the Foundation, as they traditionally have dwarfed personal donations. While personal donations are secondary in terms of absolute value, the sheer number of individual donors is an indication of the high level of support from a wide range of people. Perhaps there is room for a middle ground, where interested parties (individuals or companies) could contribute to specific goals, and interested maintainers or contributors could pick up tasks and work on improving GNOME based on the goal ideas. To me, this is somewhere between the current fundraising campaigns, such as those for accessibility and privacy, and the idea of bug bounties. I think that the idea might have too much overhead, but it could work well at getting both new contributors and donors involved in the project. I am sure that there are lots of potential problems with it, but I hope the idea can spark some discussion. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On 20 May 2014 01:55, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Max sakana...@gmail.com To: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2014 9:18:33 PM Subject: Question for candidates Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? The GNOME.Asia team is doing a fantastic job organizing the conference and it will undoubtedly boost the interest in GNOME. It would be great to have meetups of people working on GNOME and free software in Beijing throughout the year, so that more people who learned about GNOME at the conference are interested in travelling to the next year's location. Local meetups are a great idea and have proven to be popular when organised, even if only for GNOME Beers around releases. As the question is about plans for the future, how are you planning to help this happen? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) I created a new activities to track page for the board and added it there. We will find out what is going on with it and encourage development. There are many issues that the board tracks and works on, why do you think that the board should take over the tracking of this rather than let those who created it (OPW interns and mentors) and those who would benefit from it (GUADEC and GNOME.Asia organisers) keep track? Given that the board rarely interferes in development, how do you propose to encourage further work on this project? Other idea? -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? We should continue to provide materials and encouragement for past OPW and GSoC participants to run introduction to free software / GNOME / GSoC / OPW sessions and host meetups in their cities throughout the year, so that we have more applicants from Asia applying for these programs who have experience contributing to free software. There are materials available for OpenHatch Open Source Comes to Campus and GNOME Newcomers Workshop, which can be used for such events. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? Of 39 interns GNOME has this summer, 14 are from India, 1 from China, and 1 from Philippines. As I mentioned above, we need to encourage these people and other community members to promote the internship programs and help people become contributors before they apply. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) There is https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide , which we can encourage people to fill out. There are also translators, whose information you can get from Git or on https://l10n.gnome.org/teams/. Also there are localization and regional mailing lists. How do we get these member / resource together? I think you already do a lot of this by organizing GNOME.Asia! Perhaps you can have a BoF at the conference to figure out what are the resources you want to put together and what are the activities you want to see happen. -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? The GNOME Foundation sponsored Sindhu to go to FOSSASIA this year, where she ran contributing to GNOME workshop, did a talk about documentation, and participated in a panel about women in IT. We should have more people proposing talks and going to FOSSASIA next year. We should also have people proposing talks and going to LinuxCon Japan. Identifying and participating in any other free software conferences in Asia would be great. -- Anything you plan with Asia. Thanks for all the great questions! I'm excited about growing our presence in Asia and I'm sure we will succeed. Marina GNOME.Asia team member Max Huang ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate what is truly needed vs wanted. Once we figure out how much money we need to be spending, we can evaluate our current funds, where they are coming from and how to raise more. This information is publicly available for up to the end of 2013 at https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/FinancialSummary . What conclusions have you drawn from it? Donating to GNOME as an individual is not as easy as it could, indeed should, be. We don't currently have a specific 'campaign' going on, and as a result, a cursory glance at the website reveals no obvious way to donate to GNOME's general fund (as far as I can tell the only way to do so is to find the tiny 'Support GNOME' link at the very bottom of the page). Additionally, I still don't understand why the only way to donate to GNOME is through PayPal. Why don't we allow people to donate via google or amazon? Why not accept bitcoins? Why not encourage people to support GNOME via AmazonSmile and similar programs? There is a big link in the
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Oliver Propst
On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 13:19 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: Hi Oliver, On 15 May 2014 20:51, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Oliver Propst Email: oliver.pro...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear foundation members I want to announce my candidacy for the GNOME Board of Directors. I have been contributing as part of the Engagement Team since 2010, recently I have been involved with the GUADEC 2015 Gothenburg bid and the Annual Report. I think that free software never have more important then now and if we as a community can get together and do the necessary work the greatest future of GNOME lay ahead of us. I have two years of experience of being on the non-for profit FSCONS board (FSCONS, the free software conference in Gothenburg that Karen keynoted last year). More info about me (including occupation) can be found here [1]. In the upcoming year I like to continue explore growth/collaborations opportunities for the foundation and investigate the benefits of a possible WC3 membership [2]. In early 2013, the board briefly investigated W3C membership, Interesting, any notes about this? The cost of a W3C membership is 7,900 USD and there is extensive information available on their website at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership . What benefits do you feel that joining the W3C will bring to GNOME and how would you approach sustainable raising the funding for the membership fees? While I have not done any extensive investigation about benefits, I have some thoughts about this. If more free software entities where to join WC3, proponents of a open unrestricted and Web would have a stronger voice thus be able to making a lager impact and ultimately shaping the future of the Web in a free software friendly direction (for those who wants to have more info about WC3 and its work I recommend this video [1]). Right now to my knowledge Mozilla are only the free software foundation that are a W3C member[2], as the events of the past week have showed fighting for a Open Web in that environment is hard [3], They have to carry a very heavy load. Its also brings up a point that we as a free software project are used to tell a story from a outside perspective when there is value of to join others and collaborate across organizational boundaries (something are very used to do within the project and on the technical side ). Also as you (and others) may know GNOME are maintaining its own WebKit implementation and browser [4] [5], I'm sure contributors to those efforts could provide valuable inputs to WC3 and learn much from other members. I understand of course a that a membership fee should never threaten the financial situation of the foundation. With that said I hope that the Foundation will have larger revenue in the future, thus be able to pay the membership fee or find other founding opportunities. 1 http://www.w3.org/2011/11/w3c_video.html 2 http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List 3https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/ 4 http://webkitgtk.org/ 5 https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On 2014-05-20 09:30, Emily Gonyer wrote: In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? When people serve on the board of directors they have a duty of care and a duty of loyalty to the organization. We have asked that board members use their personal email addresses for communication, for example. Still conflicts do come up and in those cases the board members recuse themselves from any decision making for the organization. I think the board has been nicely conservative about this, at least in the time I was Executive Director (even in one case having a board member not present for any of the conversation about an issue their company had an interest in). Also, not every board member who is employed at an advisory board member is paid to work on GNOME. You're right that the needs of the project must come first for board members when they are acting in that capacity, which is why we have disclosure of affiliation and treat conflicts carefully (and can't in any case have more than two people from any particular employer). I do think it would be unfair if we excluded candidates who happen to be employed at our adboard members. That all said, it is nice that we have such a diverse set of candidates this time! karen On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On 20 May 2014 14:30, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? Thank you for your reply. I would like to point out that there has been outreach to the projects which were forked from GNOME, but with poor results. I encourage you to address the issues that you see regardless of whether you join the board or not. There are also precautions in place to ensure that no single corporate entity employs a majority (over 40%) of board members. At the moment, this means that a maximum of 2 out of 7 board members can share an employer. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate what is truly needed vs wanted. Once we figure out how much money we need to be spending, we can evaluate our current funds, where they are coming from and how to raise more. This information is publicly available for up to the end of 2013 at https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/FinancialSummary . What conclusions have you drawn from it? Donating to GNOME as an individual is not as easy as it could, indeed should, be. We don't
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
- Original Message - From: Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) zeesha...@gnome.org To: Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com Cc: foundation-announce foundation-annou...@gnome.org, Foundation-List foundation-list@gnome.org, electi...@gnome.org Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 9:17:26 AM Subject: Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler Hi Karen, On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: Affiliation: Software Freedom Conservancy. I'm also pro bono General Counsel of QuestionCopyright.Org, and an advisor of The Ada Initiative and sometimes help other orgs (like the FSF) on legal and other free software related matters. As promised when I left the position of Executive Director, I'd like to throw my hat in the ring for the Board of Directors. I think I can help bring continuity to the board (Stormy was incredibly helpful on the board when I started as ED). Also, as a lawyer I sometimes have an additionally useful perspective. I'm still doing volunteer work for GNOME both as pro bono counsel and as a volunteer on nonlegal matters for GNOME. I've been helping with fundraising, collecting on outstanding invoices and generally wherever I can. You are a very busy person with many responsibilities, if you get elected to the Board do you feel confident that you can spend the necessary time on Board work? While I think you do a lot for Free Software and your passion and work inspires many, I'm afraid I do share Oliver's concern here. It's not just the time commitment we are looking for in the board members, but also experience. Karen has a tremendous amount of experience in free software non-profit space. In the last two months, she has been very generous with her time as a volunteer for GNOME. Thanks, Marina -- Regards, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) Befriend GNOME: http://www.gnome.org/friends/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Oliver Propst
On 2014-05-20 09:48, Oliver Propst wrote: On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 13:19 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: Hi Oliver, On 15 May 2014 20:51, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Oliver Propst Email: oliver.pro...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear foundation members I want to announce my candidacy for the GNOME Board of Directors. I have been contributing as part of the Engagement Team since 2010, recently I have been involved with the GUADEC 2015 Gothenburg bid and the Annual Report. I think that free software never have more important then now and if we as a community can get together and do the necessary work the greatest future of GNOME lay ahead of us. I have two years of experience of being on the non-for profit FSCONS board (FSCONS, the free software conference in Gothenburg that Karen keynoted last year). More info about me (including occupation) can be found here [1]. In the upcoming year I like to continue explore growth/collaborations opportunities for the foundation and investigate the benefits of a possible WC3 membership [2]. In early 2013, the board briefly investigated W3C membership, Interesting, any notes about this? The cost of a W3C membership is 7,900 USD and there is extensive information available on their website at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership . Actually, I was able to get most of the way towards the discounted fee for the fist years of WC3 membership when I was Executive Director, but we just didn't have the bandwidth to participate in it. If the new board thinks it's valuable, I can help pick up that conversation (whether I am on the board or not of course). karen What benefits do you feel that joining the W3C will bring to GNOME and how would you approach sustainable raising the funding for the membership fees? While I have not done any extensive investigation about benefits, I have some thoughts about this. If more free software entities where to join WC3, proponents of a open unrestricted and Web would have a stronger voice thus be able to making a lager impact and ultimately shaping the future of the Web in a free software friendly direction (for those who wants to have more info about WC3 and its work I recommend this video [1]). Right now to my knowledge Mozilla are only the free software foundation that are a W3C member[2], as the events of the past week have showed fighting for a Open Web in that environment is hard [3], They have to carry a very heavy load. Its also brings up a point that we as a free software project are used to tell a story from a outside perspective when there is value of to join others and collaborate across organizational boundaries (something are very used to do within the project and on the technical side ). Also as you (and others) may know GNOME are maintaining its own WebKit implementation and browser [4] [5], I'm sure contributors to those efforts could provide valuable inputs to WC3 and learn much from other members. I understand of course a that a membership fee should never threaten the financial situation of the foundation. With that said I hope that the Foundation will have larger revenue in the future, thus be able to pay the membership fee or find other founding opportunities. 1 http://www.w3.org/2011/11/w3c_video.html 2 http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List 3https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/ 4 http://webkitgtk.org/ 5 https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Oliver Propst
On 20 May 2014 14:48, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 13:19 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: Hi Oliver, On 15 May 2014 20:51, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Oliver Propst Email: oliver.pro...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear foundation members I want to announce my candidacy for the GNOME Board of Directors. I have been contributing as part of the Engagement Team since 2010, recently I have been involved with the GUADEC 2015 Gothenburg bid and the Annual Report. I think that free software never have more important then now and if we as a community can get together and do the necessary work the greatest future of GNOME lay ahead of us. I have two years of experience of being on the non-for profit FSCONS board (FSCONS, the free software conference in Gothenburg that Karen keynoted last year). More info about me (including occupation) can be found here [1]. In the upcoming year I like to continue explore growth/collaborations opportunities for the foundation and investigate the benefits of a possible WC3 membership [2]. In early 2013, the board briefly investigated W3C membership, Interesting, any notes about this? The cost of a W3C membership is 7,900 USD and there is extensive information available on their website at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/membership . What benefits do you feel that joining the W3C will bring to GNOME and how would you approach sustainable raising the funding for the membership fees? While I have not done any extensive investigation about benefits, I have some thoughts about this. If more free software entities where to join WC3, proponents of a open unrestricted and Web would have a stronger voice thus be able to making a lager impact and ultimately shaping the future of the Web in a free software friendly direction (for those who wants to have more info about WC3 and its work I recommend this video [1]). Right now to my knowledge Mozilla are only the free software foundation that are a W3C member[2], as the events of the past week have showed fighting for a Open Web in that environment is hard [3], They have to carry a very heavy load. Its also brings up a point that we as a free software project are used to tell a story from a outside perspective when there is value of to join others and collaborate across organizational boundaries (something are very used to do within the project and on the technical side ). Also as you (and others) may know GNOME are maintaining its own WebKit implementation and browser [4] [5], I'm sure contributors to those efforts could provide valuable inputs to WC3 and learn much from other members. Have you checked whether those contributors are interested, or have the time for this? I understand of course a that a membership fee should never threaten the financial situation of the foundation. With that said I hope that the Foundation will have larger revenue in the future, thus be able to pay the membership fee or find other founding opportunities. 1 http://www.w3.org/2011/11/w3c_video.html 2 http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List 3https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of-serving-users/ 4 http://webkitgtk.org/ 5 https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On 2014-05-20 09:49, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: On 20 May 2014 14:30, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? Thank you for your reply. I would like to point out that there has been outreach to the projects which were forked from GNOME, but with poor results. I encourage you to address the issues that you see regardless of whether you join the board or not. I agree with what Kat says here and it's true for all candidates and everyone asking questions and reading this too: you don't need to be a board member to effectuate change in GNOME! In my last email I should have pointed out that that we did reach out to those projects. While there were some poor results for some things as Kat says, I think the cross desktop events and efforts that have been going on have been really positive. karen There are also precautions in place to ensure that no single corporate entity employs a majority (over 40%) of board members. At the moment, this means that a maximum of 2 out of 7 board members can share an employer. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
On 2014-05-20 09:17, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote: Hi Karen, On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: Affiliation: Software Freedom Conservancy. I'm also pro bono General Counsel of QuestionCopyright.Org, and an advisor of The Ada Initiative and sometimes help other orgs (like the FSF) on legal and other free software related matters. As promised when I left the position of Executive Director, I'd like to throw my hat in the ring for the Board of Directors. I think I can help bring continuity to the board (Stormy was incredibly helpful on the board when I started as ED). Also, as a lawyer I sometimes have an additionally useful perspective. I'm still doing volunteer work for GNOME both as pro bono counsel and as a volunteer on nonlegal matters for GNOME. I've been helping with fundraising, collecting on outstanding invoices and generally wherever I can. You are a very busy person with many responsibilities, if you get elected to the Board do you feel confident that you can spend the necessary time on Board work? While I think you do a lot for Free Software and your passion and work inspires many, I'm afraid I do share Oliver's concern here. I am extremely busy. I was just reading through all of the emails to board candidates this morning, as the time I've had in the last few days for GNOME I've spent volunteering on time sensitive things that I think must be done. This includes following up on outstanding invoices and also tracking a GNOME trademark matter. I also reviewed and commented on the contract for the GUADEC local organization (there may have been other things that I'm forgetting). And this is all in the last week, and not counting recording the voice over for the cool documentation video that Bastian is putting together :) I have to say: being on the GNOME board takes a lot of time. It's not a small commitment that the candidates are offering to make! Most boards meet quarterly at most, so meeting every other week is really a lot. However, I think it's worth the time expenditure. I just recorded an oggcast on this topic (what it means to serve on a board of directors and whether you should want to do it), which unfortunately won't come out until next week. If elected, I'll probably use my time for GNOME by participating in the meetings and working on things like I've been doing as a volunteer mentioned above and am less likely than some other candidates to engage in lengthy discussions on mailing lists, but I think that's ok provided that some of the other board members focus on that important role (I will chime in on discussion, it just might not be right away or in great detail). karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: About possible participation in Rest the Net campaign
I agree whole heartidly that this is a valuable and good use of GNOME time and resources. As a free software project ostensibly committed to freedom, privacy and security, it behooves us to participate. Emily Gonyer On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 6:39 AM, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, its great to see the all the activities around the upcoming Board election, I hope we still are able to focus on day-today things. There is right now a campaign, Reset the Net [1] about remind people about government surveillance and the the importance of privacy on June 5 [2], one year after the NSA/Snowden revelations. Some participants include: Demand progress, Freepress.net, Free Software Foundation, Open Technology Institute, Reddit and Duck Duck Go. With our commitment to privacy and recently improved tools in this area (the new privacy setting panel and new privacy features in Web for exemple) [3] I think its makes sense for GNOME to participate. This would include: Display a banner on GNOME.org, 5 June with link to https://www.resetthenet.org/ Promote our participation on the campaign website Promote our our participation and our work in this area in our own channels (gnome.org och twitter). On the last Engagement Team Meeting [4] we agreed that this something interesting. What do you foundation members think? If there is no serious concerns I plan to ask the Board for approval. 1 https://www.resetthenet.org/ 2http://resetthenet.tumblr.com/?t=dXNlcmlkPTU0MzA3MDcxLGVtYWlsaWQ9NzU1MQ== 3 https://www.resetthenet.org/#add-yourself 4 https://etherpad.gnome.org/p/etm-2014-05-08 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation budget (was: Re: Question for candidates)
On 20 May 2014 14:21, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Hi, Apologies in advance for a question that will take us away from the main thread topic... On 05/20/2014 06:15 AM, David King wrote: Initially, I think that much of the money raised by an executive director would go towards financially supporting the executive director role. If the Foundation's revenues continue to drop (as has been the case over the last few years), an executive director role would become untenable without increased funding from sponsors. I have not been paying close attention in the past 3-4 years, but when I was, we had: * Added new members to the advisory board * Increased advisory board membership to $10,000 for small companies and $20,000 for large companies The executive director was, at the time I was on the board, the only salary outgoing, but advisory board revenues should be $140,000 unless I'm mistaken from my reading of the advisory board page - which ad board members have we lost? HP, Nokia, Motorola, Oracle from the looks of it... am I missing anyone? The revenues from advisory board fees since 2006 are as follows (I do not have access to any financial information before that time): 2006: USD 69000 (USD 5000 for smaller companies, USD 1 for larger companies and some in between) 2007: USD 105000 (same as above) 2008: USD 11 (same as above) 2009: USD 132000 (same as above, although a number of companies paid more) 2010: USD 18 (the USD 1/2 pricing structure was introduced) 2011: USD 135000 2012: USD 12 2013: USD 12 2014: USD 13 All figures from 2006-2013 are what the Foundation actually received in the bank account. All of the figures are against the years in which they were incurred, not necessarily paid, so there may be differences from the annual reports. 2014 figures are what the Foundation has invoiced and is expecting to receive by the end of the year. Rosanna has been in the Foundation payroll since 2006 as an employee. The theory at the time I was on the board was that ad board revenues paid for employees with a little margin for error, and we fundraised for everything else. Has that principlegone by the wayside? Unfortunately, yes. I'm not sure whether this was a concious decision or just tended in that direction as the boards changed, but I am hoping to reverse this trend in the future. I think this is possible as any new employee can be hired on new terms. Also, at the time we had started to build up some cash reserves after a few years when we really did not have a lot of room to manoeuver - have we depleted those? I did not notice any budgets proposed that were in deficit, but I was not paying very close attention. At the moment, yes, but that is because we are still waiting on invoices to be paid. The Foundation is waiting for $38 in unpaid invoices, many of which I am expecting to see paid in the upcoming month. Around 75% of those are related to the OPW, and most of the rest to advisory board fees for 2013. Once those invoices are paid, the Foundation will have reserves of around $15. Ideally, the Foundation should hold reserves of $35 if it never pays out OPW costs before the associated sponsorship is received (which is what the board has currently voted for). Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
Hi Marina On 2014-05-20 11:17, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: In my view, having immediate feedback and ideas from someone with lots of experience during the board meetings is very valuable, and can't be substituted with occasional consulting. The board and the Foundation benefit from a diversity of skills and experiences of the board members. As both Karen and I mentioned, she has been dedicating her time volunteering on critical matters. Being on the board provides the best view into what these matters are, which she is able to help us with. I think the composition of the board and the skills and time commitments people can offer need to be considered together to create the best balance. Indeed, and there is no reason that the immediate feedback cannot be gained from Karen as an adviser if she is invited to board meetings. I do not think that a board composed of some members who are able to devote time to taking on many action items and some who are not able to take on many is a good balance, and certainly not the best balance. Karen, how much time would you have available to dedicate to board matters above and beyond your existing volunteering commitments? You mentioned elsewhere that you have been spending 5 hours per week on your volunteering efforts for GNOME. Would you be able to dedicate time above that to board duties, or would your board duties negatively impact your existing efforts? -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
Hi Karen, On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: I am extremely busy. I was just reading through all of the emails to board candidates this morning, as the time I've had in the last few days for GNOME I've spent volunteering on time sensitive things that I think must be done. This includes following up on outstanding invoices and also tracking a GNOME trademark matter. I also reviewed and commented on the contract for the GUADEC local organization (there may have been other things that I'm forgetting). And this is all in the last week, and not counting recording the voice over for the cool documentation video that Bastian is putting together :) I have to say: being on the GNOME board takes a lot of time. It's not a small commitment that the candidates are offering to make! Most boards meet quarterly at most, so meeting every other week is really a lot. However, I think it's worth the time expenditure. I just recorded an oggcast on this topic (what it means to serve on a board of directors and whether you should want to do it), which unfortunately won't come out until next week. If elected, I'll probably use my time for GNOME by participating in the meetings and working on things like I've been doing as a volunteer mentioned above and am less likely than some other candidates to engage in lengthy discussions on mailing lists, but I think that's ok provided that some of the other board members focus on that important role (I will chime in on discussion, it just might not be right away or in great detail). It seems, from the other responses, that the other candidates plan to spend 5 - 10 hours per week on board-related duties. How many hours per week do you plan to spend? Thanks, Meg ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
On 2014-05-20 11:30, David King wrote: Hi Marina On 2014-05-20 11:17, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: In my view, having immediate feedback and ideas from someone with lots of experience during the board meetings is very valuable, and can't be substituted with occasional consulting. The board and the Foundation benefit from a diversity of skills and experiences of the board members. As both Karen and I mentioned, she has been dedicating her time volunteering on critical matters. Being on the board provides the best view into what these matters are, which she is able to help us with. I think the composition of the board and the skills and time commitments people can offer need to be considered together to create the best balance. Indeed, and there is no reason that the immediate feedback cannot be gained from Karen as an adviser if she is invited to board meetings. I do not think that a board composed of some members who are able to devote time to taking on many action items and some who are not able to take on many is a good balance, and certainly not the best balance. Karen, how much time would you have available to dedicate to board matters above and beyond your existing volunteering commitments? You mentioned elsewhere that you have been spending 5 hours per week on your volunteering efforts for GNOME. Would you be able to dedicate time above that to board duties, or would your board duties negatively impact your existing efforts? I'm not sure Dave, it's a tough question. To be honest, if I'm not a board member I probably won't regularly join the board meetings. For reference, I was not invited to board meetings when I was just pro bono counsel to GNOME (from my SFLC days) and I'm unaware of any pro bono counsel being regularly invited to the meetings. While it's possible to join it's not really part of that role. I try to give the maximum amount of time I have free to GNOME (much to the annoyance of my family, it's actually some weeks been much more than 5 hours since I left as ED but I wanted to give a more conservative view of my time commitments). The volunteer work that I've been doing is in part driven by the momentum I've had as ED and being a part of the board meetings in the past. I would expect that to diminish if I'm not on the board. On helping to collect invoices and asking for sponsorship (I've done both for GNOME even in the last 2 weeks), it will be much easier if I am a board member, as I'd have the authority to represent the org. As I said in an earlier email, being on the board is a lot of work - I want to make myself available to serve, but am happy to leave it to others if the membership so chooses. I think I'd be an asset to the Foundation in this position which is why I've chosen to run. It's also hard for everyone to make promises about availability going forward. I've seen a lot of people promise to do a lot during the elections period and then fail to step up over the course of the term. I've avoided other boards in the past (I've been asked to serve on a lot of them) but I am making an exception this time as GNOME is special :) The current board has been really great, and very active. I've been glad to work with them. If elected, I will indeed have to readjust my priorities and overall commitments. And it might mean that I miss a marketing meeting in favor of a board meeting if I am very busy that week. I think that's probably true for every board member though. karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
On 2014-05-20 11:42, meg ford wrote: Hi Karen, On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: I am extremely busy. I was just reading through all of the emails to board candidates this morning, as the time I've had in the last few days for GNOME I've spent volunteering on time sensitive things that I think must be done. This includes following up on outstanding invoices and also tracking a GNOME trademark matter. I also reviewed and commented on the contract for the GUADEC local organization (there may have been other things that I'm forgetting). And this is all in the last week, and not counting recording the voice over for the cool documentation video that Bastian is putting together :) I have to say: being on the GNOME board takes a lot of time. It's not a small commitment that the candidates are offering to make! Most boards meet quarterly at most, so meeting every other week is really a lot. However, I think it's worth the time expenditure. I just recorded an oggcast on this topic (what it means to serve on a board of directors and whether you should want to do it), which unfortunately won't come out until next week. If elected, I'll probably use my time for GNOME by participating in the meetings and working on things like I've been doing as a volunteer mentioned above and am less likely than some other candidates to engage in lengthy discussions on mailing lists, but I think that's ok provided that some of the other board members focus on that important role (I will chime in on discussion, it just might not be right away or in great detail). It seems, from the other responses, that the other candidates plan to spend 5 - 10 hours per week on board-related duties. How many hours per week do you plan to spend? I just wrote about this in greater detail but didn't want to leave a direct email to me unanswered. The short answer is 5 or more, possibly more like 2 (hopefully) when traveling or very busy :) karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
Hi Karen On 2014-05-20 12:27, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: On 2014-05-20 11:30, David King wrote: Indeed, and there is no reason that the immediate feedback cannot be gained from Karen as an adviser if she is invited to board meetings. I do not think that a board composed of some members who are able to devote time to taking on many action items and some who are not able to take on many is a good balance, and certainly not the best balance. Karen, how much time would you have available to dedicate to board matters above and beyond your existing volunteering commitments? You mentioned elsewhere that you have been spending 5 hours per week on your volunteering efforts for GNOME. Would you be able to dedicate time above that to board duties, or would your board duties negatively impact your existing efforts? I'm not sure Dave, it's a tough question. To be honest, if I'm not a board member I probably won't regularly join the board meetings. For reference, I was not invited to board meetings when I was just pro bono counsel to GNOME (from my SFLC days) and I'm unaware of any pro bono counsel being regularly invited to the meetings. While it's possible to join it's not really part of that role. I try to give the maximum amount of time I have free to GNOME (much to the annoyance of my family, it's actually some weeks been much more than 5 hours since I left as ED but I wanted to give a more conservative view of my time commitments). The volunteer work that I've been doing is in part driven by the momentum I've had as ED and being a part of the board meetings in the past. I would expect that to diminish if I'm not on the board. On helping to collect invoices and asking for sponsorship (I've done both for GNOME even in the last 2 weeks), it will be much easier if I am a board member, as I'd have the authority to represent the org. As I said in an earlier email, being on the board is a lot of work - I want to make myself available to serve, but am happy to leave it to others if the membership so chooses. I think I'd be an asset to the Foundation in this position which is why I've chosen to run. It's also hard for everyone to make promises about availability going forward. I've seen a lot of people promise to do a lot during the elections period and then fail to step up over the course of the term. I've avoided other boards in the past (I've been asked to serve on a lot of them) but I am making an exception this time as GNOME is special :) The current board has been really great, and very active. I've been glad to work with them. If elected, I will indeed have to readjust my priorities and overall commitments. And it might mean that I miss a marketing meeting in favor of a board meeting if I am very busy that week. I think that's probably true for every board member though. Thank you very much for the detailed response. I do not feel that my concerns have been completely addressed, but I think that everyone reading will be able to clearly understand your position. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Oliver Propst
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 14:48, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: Also as you (and others) may know GNOME are maintaining its own WebKit implementation and browser [4] [5], I'm sure contributors to those efforts could provide valuable inputs to WC3 and learn much from other members. Have you checked whether those contributors are interested, or have the time for this? As I have stated I intend to to do a investigation,I have not done any so far. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Oliver Propst
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 15:00, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: Actually, I was able to get most of the way towards the discounted fee for the fist years of WC3 membership when I was Executive Director, but we just didn't have the bandwidth to participate in it. If the new board thinks it's valuable, I can help pick up that conversation (whether I am on the board or not of course). Great, thanks for the info! foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- -mvh Oliver Propst ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
question for candidates
Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? -- Andy Tai, a...@atai.org Year 2010 民國99年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On 20 May 2014 00:58, Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 11:18 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: one of the options that I want the board to investigate is to tie in the executive director's wage and travel budget with adboard fees in such a way that the executive director will only be compensated up to a maximum of what the Foundation receives in adboard fees. This would free up some of the donations to be spent on sponsoring the Foundation members to attend events and do outreach. I understand the value of performance-based bonuses, but this sounds like it would create the possibility that a new company joins the adboard and its fee goes entirely to the executive director. Not necessarily: for example it would be possible to assign a specified portion to a bonus, some portion to travel and possibly some portion to other spending. My point is that the total compensation for an executive director must not exceed the income from the advisory board. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: About possible participation in Rest the Net campaign
On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 12:39 +0200, Oliver Propst wrote: This would include: Display a banner on GNOME.org, 5 June with link to https://www.resetthenet.org/ Promote our participation on the campaign website Promote our our participation and our work in this area in our own channels (gnome.org och twitter). On the last Engagement Team Meeting [4] we agreed that this something interesting. What do you foundation members think? If there is no serious concerns I plan to ask the Board for approval. I support joining this campaign, but their website says: Pledge to add SSL, HSTS PFS protection this year; it matters! Then, on June 5th, run the splash screen to promote free software for end-to-end encryption. Already rocking SSL HSTS? Consider approaches to end-to-end crypto. Currently gnome.org does not even use HTTPS by default, let alone HSTS or PFS. If we are planning to endorse this campaign, I think we should also implement their recommendations. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Tobias Mueller
2014-05-20 1:32 GMT+02:00 Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 15:28 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: As the board minutes show from a few weeks ago, the board has been in touch with some advisory board members to find out if they could donate some person time towards the upgrade. Since then, the sysadmin team has also been in touch with someone who may be able to port the only customisation that we really need. What resources would you steer towards the goal? Is this customization the Splinter patch review system? Splinter is currently being actively maintained upstream so bringing in the latest Bugzilla release will also bring a newer Splinter. The major customization that still needs porting and is currently being looked at is related to the attachments statuses (it being the attachment status you can set on the Create New Attachment page) which is custom to the GNOME Bugzilla istance. The changes there are huge and spread over several files as you can see by diffing the 3.4 upstream branch against the bugzilla.gnome.org branch hosted on LP. (the header at [1] has the instructions for generating the diff) We are in contact with someone who might be able to help on this matter, let's hope we'll finally be able to make some progress on this matter. As of today the only service that needs some polishing is our Bugzilla installation, sadly a lot of customizations and changes were added to stock BZ and we ended up having a lot of customizations and extensions without anyone properly maintaining them. We are currently evaluating whether we should just drop some of the old / useless extensions and bring our BZ installation as close to the stock installation as possible to prevent any delay when a newer release will be out. We don't want this situation to happen ever again. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler
On 20 May 2014 19:35, Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me wrote: On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 6:51 AM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: It's not just the time commitment we are looking for in the board members, but also experience. Karen has a tremendous amount of experience in free software non-profit space. In the last two months, she has been very generous with her time as a volunteer for GNOME. Time commitment is an elusive beast. I put about 5 hours as director, but put a lot more for engagement and QA. Other times I might spend more. It depends. Having Karen on the board will create a sense of continuity. Karen's experience in both being in ED and continuing to be an ED for another foundation will be benificial, on the ground experience. Sometimes you don't actually know WHEN to ask for an opinion.. I know that we've been bitten by our own experience from time to time. I don't think we should be putting too much stock on the question how much time do you have as a director? II expect somone who is a professional will be able to gauge how much time they have and are willing to do it. If you are going to apply for a position on the board, I expect that you've done the research and is able to commit to the time to be a director. Let's not ponder on whether someone has the time, let's focus on whether they are an asset on the board. As a current board member, I think that being able to put in the time goes a long way towards making one an asset to the board. There have been too many silences at meetings when action items came up for the taking. I find the lack of response from some board members when contracts need reviewing also rather disappointing. The Foundation board is unusual in that the board members do take an active role in the running of the Foundation, and I do not see this as changing in the near future, unless the Foundation takes on multiple new employees. If I am voted onto the board for the next year, I do not want to be volunteering other board members to take on action items, as I have had to do on occasion this year. Therefore, this is a very relevant question for me, and one that I expect every candidate who would take their duty seriously to answer. I am glad that so many of the candidates did take the time to respond to this question. Going by the current responses, I honestly think that some of the candidates are underestimating the time that board duties take and that they may not be flexible enough to put in the hours in times of need (such as the current financial situation). sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Andy Tai a...@gnu.org wrote: Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? They are (or ought to be) just as involved in the development of GTK+ as the developers of GNOME Shell are, and their opinions, wants, needs etc ought to be valued. The GNOME project is not (or at least, should not) be exclusively about GNOME Shell, but include anyone and everyone who uses GNOME technologies. The sever fracturing of the community which has taken place over the last 3-4 years is not healthy for our community, nor for theirs. Everyone who is using GTK+ ought to be included in ongoing discussions as to its development. They should be invited to GUADEC and encouraged to submit talks, and become foundation members. As a member of the board, I will do my best to engage with them and encourage them to do so, while also doing my best to ensure that their voices, thoughts, concerns, etc are heard, understood and thought of in any and all changes going forwards. Emily Gonyer -- Andy Tai, a...@atai.org Year 2010 民國99年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
2014-05-18 18:58 GMT+02:00 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Hi everyone, Hey Dave! For me, the defining thing the next board will do is hire a successor to Karen Sandler as executive director of the foundation. So my question to all of you is: what are the main characteristics you will be looking for in the next executive director? when looking for a profile, there are a number of dials to twiddle: * Technical proficiency reputation in the community, including free software cultural alignment * Strategy experience - the ability to formulate and communicate a direction for GNOME * Administrative and organizational experience * Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem * Communication/marketing/evangelism experience * Cost Of these, which do you feel are the most important for GNOME right now, and why? Are there other criteria which you think are important that I didn't list? Hiring a new ED has never been so important to the GNOME Foundation than it is now for the reason that many have outlined already, it being the current financial status of the Foundation. So while the Strategy experience would be a nice to have in the new ED (but easily delegable to the Board of Directors), I feel we should aim at other skills (like Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem and Communication/marketing/evangelism experience) that might be of help to the current financial situatiation. The next ED should have great communication skills, it should help the GNOME Foundation gathering some more attention from corporate sponsors by explaining them why they should invest their money on the GNOME Project. Looking for corporate sponsors won't be easy especially during the current terribly bad economic situation. Investing your money as a company into a free software project requires you to either have strong ideals on the FOSS movement or some other sort of interest. (i.e you are developing a customized GNOME release to be of use in your company and you want to give back to the project either directly by being an Advisory Board member or indirectly by forwarding patches upstream, the latter would not be of help increasing the Foundation's finances though or you just want some publicity for your products by showing up your logo on the various organized events etc.) Another good point you introduced is related to the stipend the next ED should earn yearly. It's clear the invested resources on this matter won't be as high as they have been in the past. Said that I'm wondering how high is our percentage to find someone capable of such position (and with such responsibilities) without promising a relatively high stipend? also is it still true that higher you pay someone higher their skills and productivity should (and will) then be? What I would aim for is someone with great communication / marketing skills for attracting new advisory board members but most of all a strong passion and dedication for the free software movement, with these feelings being stronger than the desire to earn an high stipend. (at least until the Foundation finances are back on track again) -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
2014-05-20 14:37 GMT+02:00 Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com: Hi Andrea, On 19 May 2014 18:55, Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 19 May 2014, Max wrote: My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Two OPW interns have been working for several months to provide a valid event management system for all the major GNOME events. The software is currently based on OSEM (the Open Source Event Manager [1]) and a test-bed is privately available on one of our testing machines at OSUOSL. Part of the upcoming GUADEC organizers have been granted access to the istance, if you are missing access to it please let me know. We should definitely find out what has gone wrong with it and why it has not been declared ready for production yet. I will make sure to follow-up on this as one of my goals for the next term if elected. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? While OPW has had a great success in India (thanks to english being widely spoken there) it did not have the same success on other Asia regions probably because of the language barrier. What we can probably do is localizing the content of the OPW flyer so that more women can be aware of the Outreach Program for Women and apply for it. (I will make sure to discuss about this with Marina if elected and propose the idea to the relevant localization team) Both of the above seem to be something which can be done now and does not require you to be on the board. Why do you say that you would need to be elected to the board to do these? I'm sure anyone out there would be able to achieve a lot of what the current Board does without being part of the Board themselves. The Board of Directors is primarily a team, a team of people that take care of particular areas within the GNOME Project. When their particular action items have been fulfilled they report back their findings / results to the next meeting. Decisions are taken by the team as a whole, actions are something Board members take care of personally, thus the theoretical possibility to accomplish the majority of tasks out there without being part of the Board itself. That said the decision on whether we should keep working on a customized version of OSEM is something I'd love to discuss with the Board as a whole, last time I heard of it several people were not happy about how the software was getting along. My plan for this is to first hear all the opinions from the current / next GUADEC (and GNOME.Asia) organizers, then discuss the proposed changes with the Board and finally find someone to be able to look into the code again. (maybe another OPW intern?) What I want to avoid is building a software that organizers won't use and finding out what the current needs are is something that requires planning, time and coordination between the involved teams. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
2014-05-20 20:56 GMT+02:00 Andy Tai a...@gnu.org: Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? Indeed yes, although GNOME has its own roadmap, design and views which obviously differ from what other GNOME forks are providing to users we will never ever think about closing the door to anyone willing to contribute and provide their opinions back upstream. (with GNOME still being the upstream for those forks) One of the free software beauties is its malleability, like you can shape a metal the way you want the same can be achieved with the code licensed under a free software license. Some users and communities were not happy about the direction GNOME was taking, that's legit, someone should be free to use the DE of their choice, the DE that helps them being more productive, the DE that makes them feel at home, the DE that has all the features they need where they need them. I will be more than happy to welcome back those communities and contributors, try to engage them and hear their opinions finding a common path. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Tobias Mueller
And the missing URL: [1] https://launchpad.net/bugzilla.gnome.org 2014-05-20 22:04 GMT+02:00 Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org: 2014-05-20 1:32 GMT+02:00 Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 15:28 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: As the board minutes show from a few weeks ago, the board has been in touch with some advisory board members to find out if they could donate some person time towards the upgrade. Since then, the sysadmin team has also been in touch with someone who may be able to port the only customisation that we really need. What resources would you steer towards the goal? Is this customization the Splinter patch review system? Splinter is currently being actively maintained upstream so bringing in the latest Bugzilla release will also bring a newer Splinter. The major customization that still needs porting and is currently being looked at is related to the attachments statuses (it being the attachment status you can set on the Create New Attachment page) which is custom to the GNOME Bugzilla istance. The changes there are huge and spread over several files as you can see by diffing the 3.4 upstream branch against the bugzilla.gnome.org branch hosted on LP. (the header at [1] has the instructions for generating the diff) We are in contact with someone who might be able to help on this matter, let's hope we'll finally be able to make some progress on this matter. As of today the only service that needs some polishing is our Bugzilla installation, sadly a lot of customizations and changes were added to stock BZ and we ended up having a lot of customizations and extensions without anyone properly maintaining them. We are currently evaluating whether we should just drop some of the old / useless extensions and bring our BZ installation as close to the stock installation as possible to prevent any delay when a newer release will be out. We don't want this situation to happen ever again. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: About possible participation in Rest the Net campaign
2014-05-20 21:47 GMT+02:00 Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org: Currently gnome.org does not even use HTTPS by default, let alone HSTS or PFS. If we are planning to endorse this campaign, I think we should also implement their recommendations. Assuming gnome.org stands for www.gnome.org I'm asking you whether it makes sense to abuse the use of SSL even when not really needed? the main GNOME website hosts news, articles, Foundation and Foundation Membership information, no sensitive information is being sent over the wire unencrypted and eavesdropping such information would be harmless. That said except the whole website being covered with SSL on demand if the user really wants every single byte encrypted the relevant areas (being wp-login and wp-admin) are automatically redirected to HTTPS for secure logins to happen. It has to be said a few other websites (like help.gnome.org and planet.gnome.org) are currently being served through HTTPS by default (even if they are serving static pages with no sensitive information or login form exposed to the public) but the reason behind it is merely related to the fact we have a permanent redirect rule on our proxies that forward all the requests being sent to the unencrypted wires to a SSL-enabled vhost which then reverse proxies the requests to the internal network. Honestly I don't think SSL should be abused when it's not really needed and most of all I still think the GNOME Infrastructure would care deeply about the privacy and security of its users even without serving the planet, the documentation website and the main GNOME website with HTTPS by default. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Thanks Andrea, On 05/20/2014 05:23 PM, Andrea Veri wrote: snip What I would aim for is someone with great communication / marketing skills for attracting new advisory board members but most of all a strong passion and dedication for the free software movement, with these feelings being stronger than the desire to earn an high stipend. (at least until the Foundation finances are back on track again) So, how would you distribute your 25 pebbles? Seems like 7 each on fundraising, cheap and promotion, and 4 on philosophical alignment? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Yes, the pebbles distribution you made is what makes more sense to me at this time! thanks Dave for your question! 2014-05-21 0:36 GMT+02:00 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Thanks Andrea, On 05/20/2014 05:23 PM, Andrea Veri wrote: snip What I would aim for is someone with great communication / marketing skills for attracting new advisory board members but most of all a strong passion and dedication for the free software movement, with these feelings being stronger than the desire to earn an high stipend. (at least until the Foundation finances are back on track again) So, how would you distribute your 25 pebbles? Seems like 7 each on fundraising, cheap and promotion, and 4 on philosophical alignment? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: About possible participation in Rest the Net campaign
On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 00:33 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote: Assuming gnome.org stands for www.gnome.org I'm asking you whether it makes sense to abuse the use of SSL even when not really needed? From your response, I can see that you're concerned primarily with protecting users' personal information. From that perspective, I'm basically satisfied as long as our Bugzilla uses SSL, and it does, so great! In contrast, Reset the Net is interested in countering pervasive surveillance, which really does require HTTPS/HSTS to be used on all pages. Their goal is not to protect users' passwords, it's to prevent the NSA from determining whether our users are visiting http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3 or http://www.gnome.org/news/. It's an encrypt the web campaign, and it'd be silly for GNOME to sign up if we don't really mean it. (It'd also be a bit silly to run a $2 privacy campaign and then not participate in this, but I guess there are real disadvantages to abusing SSL: increased power costs, correct?) signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
- Original Message - From: Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com To: Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com Cc: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 9:12:35 AM Subject: Re: Question for candidates On 20 May 2014 01:55, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Max sakana...@gmail.com To: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2014 9:18:33 PM Subject: Question for candidates Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? The GNOME.Asia team is doing a fantastic job organizing the conference and it will undoubtedly boost the interest in GNOME. It would be great to have meetups of people working on GNOME and free software in Beijing throughout the year, so that more people who learned about GNOME at the conference are interested in travelling to the next year's location. Local meetups are a great idea and have proven to be popular when organised, even if only for GNOME Beers around releases. As the question is about plans for the future, how are you planning to help this happen? I would generally just like to encourage people to organize these locally. Meg Ford's blog is a great source of inspiration and ideas on what to do to foster a local community, as she and Jim Campbell started the Chicagoan Hacking on GNOME group. One of the findings she made was for a larger turn-out, it's good to have broader events that include hacking on various free software projects. http://fordmeg.blogspot.com/ For running newcomers workshops, I already recommended OpenHatch resources and GNOME Newcomers Workshop and Tutorial resources, which I created. I'd like to invite people to help out with the Newcomers Workshop at GUADEC and then replicate it locally. Myself and the board are available to answer any questions about hosting local events. Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) I created a new activities to track page for the board and added it there. We will find out what is going on with it and encourage development. There are many issues that the board tracks and works on, why do you think that the board should take over the tracking of this rather than let those who created it (OPW interns and mentors) and those who would benefit from it (GUADEC and GNOME.Asia organisers) keep track? This relates to organizing events, which is one of the key functions of the Foundation the board needs to facilitate. Given that the board rarely interferes in development, how do you propose to encourage further work on this project? This particular project is an infrastructure project, rather than GNOME technology development project. Even with GNOME technology projects, it's sometimes appropriate for the board to get involved to encourage development, such as in the areas of privacy and accessibility, for which we had fundraising campaigns. For this work, we can ask people who worked on the system about their availability to continue the work and/or ask them to make a call on Planet GNOME for new volunteers, along with the explanation of the work that has been done and that yet needs to be done. If no volunteers step up, the board can investigate allocating resources to this project. Other idea? -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? We should continue to provide materials and encouragement for past OPW and GSoC participants to run introduction to free software / GNOME / GSoC / OPW sessions and host meetups in their cities throughout the year, so that we have more applicants from Asia applying for these programs who have experience contributing to free software. There are materials available for OpenHatch Open Source Comes to Campus and GNOME Newcomers Workshop, which can be used for such events. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? Of 39 interns GNOME has this summer, 14 are from India, 1 from China, and 1 from Philippines. As I mentioned above, we need to encourage these people and other community members to promote the internship programs and help people become contributors before they apply. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) There is https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide , which we can encourage people to fill out. There are also translators, whose information you can get from Git or
Re: question for candidates
Le mardi 20 mai 2014 à 11:56 -0700, Andy Tai a écrit : What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? I am unaware of the GTK+ project actively discouraging* participation, and I'm not sure that downstreams are choosing not to fix GTK+ because they specifically don't want to - rather, they're undermanned just the same, and busy enough with their own amount of bugs (just look at how long release cycles are for apps like GIMP, Inkscape, PTV...). It is not a problem easily fixed by marketing/outreach (and I say this from experience as the PTV marketing machine!). I think anyone will agree that GTK+ needs help, but whether or not that happens is a technical matter, heavily dependent on available skilled manpower. GTK+ is, as far as I know, an open meritocracy like any other respectable Free Software project and I'm pretty sure the maintainers are overjoyed when potential new contributors show up, which I suspect is a very rare occurrence. The way I see it (with my downstream/community hat on), GTK+ is a big/complex codebase, with an overloaded infrastructure (in this case, the bug tracker) leading to an unclear course of action, lagging community interaction, somewhat foggy roadmap and maintainers being in survival mode, which is perfectly understandable given the circumstances. The infrastructure (or process) side of things is something I'd like to help address (I touched upon the subject in one of my GUADEC 2013 talks), but it's really not going to happen overnight, especially as we are all volunteers. Related reading: the comments section of https://oli.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/engaging-developers/ *: I posit that it is simply a side-effect of all I've mentioned above, which makes it kind of a chicken-and-egg situation. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
- Original Message - From: Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org To: Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com Cc: emilychen...@gmail.com, foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 6:25:22 AM Subject: Re: Question for candidates [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] One possible idea would be to have joint events with KDE. One joint event could cost less, in total, than two separate events. I don't know what practical obstacles there might be, but in principle I think it is ok. Hi Richard, As other people mentioned, we've had joint events with KDE, which logistically worked out well. However, GUADEC is a 200-300 person event, and our goal for it is to have GNOME community members meet each other and have a chance to interact and work face-to-face. This becomes more difficult in a group twice the size, where not everyone is a GNOME user or contributor. This is why it was decided to host GUADEC separately and to have dedicated freedesktop hackfests that contributors involved with common technologies can attend, despite the financial attractiveness to sponsors of a joint event. As you know, GNOME.Asia is co-located with FUDCon this year, and it would be interesting to know how that works out. GNOME.Asia has been much smaller than GUADEC in the past, and having many people attend it because of the co-location is definitely a positive outcome, so our interest in co-locating it might be different from co-locating GUADEC. Hope you enjoy your trip to Beijing and thank you for speaking at this joint event! Marina -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
Pardon my late reply. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Andy Tai a...@gnu.org wrote: Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. I think inclusivity of these projects are very important. Embracing these other projects is an important step in making sure that GTK+ and GLib are healthy eco-systems that projects downstream can depend on. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? We are already reaching out and we've made a little progress. During the West Coast Hackfest, thanks to Allan Day, we were able to invite one of the ElementaryOS designers over, and he was able to spend a couple days with us. One of the positive outcomes was that we are hopefully set to eliminate ElementaryOS's private widget set library and use GNOME's. In turn, there are several widgets that Matthias have identified that was useful for GTK+. So here is an excellent example of how diversity solves problems. I can say that both GNOME and ElementaryOS folks were quite enthusiastic afterwards from my conversations with them.[1] A couple comments on the West Coast Hackfest - the hackfest is geared to be outward facing. Most of our conferences and hackfests are quite insular and internal. You want GNOME hackers to be exposed to people who use our software or might want to use our software. In turn, we want to really highlight the benefits of using the GNOME stack. We don't do enough of this. I hope the next year, we can work on a more aggressive conference instead of a hackfest that will bring more attention to the GNOME eco-system to people who are developing either software solutions or turnkey hardware appliances like kiosks. In general, thanks to the hard work of Tiffany, Christian Hergert, and Cosimo we had successful hackfest and is a good base. Now regarding foundation and these other projects. I've long thought that need to find a way to support these projects. I have a proposal in the works that will suggest that the Foundation will help pay for hackfests that does not benefit GNOME the product (e.g. the desktop) but does benefit GNOME the eco-system. The idea is that in exchange for the money, that everyone would participate in working in the lower levels of the stack and not necessarily the design. This is controversial because of using our finances, but there are questions on whether this will dilute the brand. But that is a separate discussion. Nothing excites me more than seeing GNOME partner wtih more people and organization, being diversified will help hopefully attract more adboard members as well. We live in interesting times, we have many projects that have pick up the design the desktop as a product bug, and they have choosen GNOME as the basis of it. I think that is fantastic. sri [1] See my blog post on West Coast Hackfest, the release notes for the last GTK+ release, and Matthias's post on West Coast Hackfest -- Andy Tai, a...@atai.org Year 2010 民國99年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Max sakana...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Growth in Asia has been a bit of a puzzle for me. But let's think strategically on how we could promote and grow in asia. Now, I think there are a couple of things that we can do in terms of promotion. Let's first talk about Tizen. Tizen stack is the basis of the mobile phone stack which interestingly enough contains many pieces of GNOME technologies. So by extension people who use Tizen use GNOME technologies and there is a wealth of companies specifically in Asia that are using Tizen for IVI, Mobile, and IOT. There is probably some fundraising opportunities there and a way to get our name out. How about partnering with Asian based distros and make sure that we have a specific asian experience on GNOME? Recruiting folks who might be interesting to do this? Most of these ideas require a stable platform to do volunteer recruitiment. So while they maybe good ideas, you need to make sure that we put in an infrastrucutre in place that immediately makes them useful. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? Should there be a plan? We should take applicants who are interesterd regardless of race, creed, or color. In general, we seem to have good representation from Asia in tehse programs. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? I think the same thing applies as above. Now, if you're talking about highlighting the program in Asia, the best place to start is to put posters in universities or popular cultural events. For instance, in SXSW, we put a lot of posters out there talking about teh next round of OPW. We even had some responses of that. Having presentations from GNOME OPW students in Asia is another good way to do this. At Linuxcon, there are a number of OPW kernel who are doing BOF and presentation and they are coming as a group to talk about the work tehy are doing. We did something similar at GUADEC last year, but we should really expand that to other areas. While tech conferences and universities are a good place, don't be afraid to go to places that are unusual. Open air markets for instance might be interesting. Pay a kid to walk around handling fliers to out to people outside a store? Or maybe do it yourself. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) How do we get these member / resource together? This isn't something the board itself can solve. This is really something that you want the engagement team to be working on. The board can help fund, and provide logistical support. But ultimately, we want to get enthusiastic people recruit others. Sometimes that is really easy. For instance, I knwo at least two people we brougiht into the foundation simply because we noticed that they were doingpro-bono support on #gnome. Sending them a t-shirt and sponsoring their inclusion into GNOME Foundation is a great way to reward people like them. -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? I would love to be involved, but my opportunities to travel is quite small due to job constraints and time constraints. But I would love to help logistically if I can. In fact, I encouraged at least one person in the foundation to help GNOME Asia with the conference logistics as an event planner. Max, it's unfortunate you did not run for the board this year. I hope you or Emily Chen will consider running next year. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Full disclosure - I wrok for Intel as the Tizen SCM architect. Since I brought up Tizen, I wanted to make it known that there is a relationship. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:35 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me wrote: On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Max sakana...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Growth in Asia has been a bit of a puzzle for me. But let's think strategically on how we could promote and grow in asia. Now, I think there are a couple of things that we can do in terms of promotion. Let's first talk about Tizen. Tizen stack is the basis of the mobile phone stack which interestingly enough contains many pieces of GNOME technologies. So by extension people who use Tizen use GNOME technologies and there is a wealth of companies specifically in Asia that are using Tizen for IVI, Mobile, and IOT. There is probably some fundraising opportunities there and a way to get our name out. How about partnering with Asian based distros and make sure that we have a specific asian experience on GNOME? Recruiting folks who might be interesting to do this? Most of these ideas require a stable platform to do volunteer recruitiment. So while they maybe good ideas, you need to make sure that we put in an infrastrucutre in place that immediately makes them useful. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? Should there be a plan? We should take applicants who are interesterd regardless of race, creed, or color. In general, we seem to have good representation from Asia in tehse programs. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? I think the same thing applies as above. Now, if you're talking about highlighting the program in Asia, the best place to start is to put posters in universities or popular cultural events. For instance, in SXSW, we put a lot of posters out there talking about teh next round of OPW. We even had some responses of that. Having presentations from GNOME OPW students in Asia is another good way to do this. At Linuxcon, there are a number of OPW kernel who are doing BOF and presentation and they are coming as a group to talk about the work tehy are doing. We did something similar at GUADEC last year, but we should really expand that to other areas. While tech conferences and universities are a good place, don't be afraid to go to places that are unusual. Open air markets for instance might be interesting. Pay a kid to walk around handling fliers to out to people outside a store? Or maybe do it yourself. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) How do we get these member / resource together? This isn't something the board itself can solve. This is really something that you want the engagement team to be working on. The board can help fund, and provide logistical support. But ultimately, we want to get enthusiastic people recruit others. Sometimes that is really easy. For instance, I knwo at least two people we brougiht into the foundation simply because we noticed that they were doingpro-bono support on #gnome. Sending them a t-shirt and sponsoring their inclusion into GNOME Foundation is a great way to reward people like them. -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? I would love to be involved, but my opportunities to travel is quite small due to job constraints and time constraints. But I would love to help logistically if I can. In fact, I encouraged at least one person in the foundation to help GNOME Asia with the conference logistics as an event planner. Max, it's unfortunate you did not run for the board this year. I hope you or Emily Chen will consider running next year. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:16 AM, Emily Chen emilychen...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I would like to ask below questions to future board: 1. For GNOME big event, call for sponsor is really important, what is your plan to call for more sponsors for conference like GUADEC and GNOME.Asia ? I've read some of the responses of the other candidates, and I would say that I largely agree that having diversified group both local and corporate is a good starting point. But for that we need to create relationships with these companies. Our advisory board mainly consists of tech giants like Google who support Free Software. But it would be interesting to use our existing set of regional mailing lists to brainstorm ways to talk with local companies. For instance, we have very few companies that are purely European, Latin American or Indian. Why is that? Those are good questions to ask. Who are using our stack? Did you know? If you use DBus, you're using our stack? GLib is a dependency. Start with that conversation to the companies you talk with at a local conference. Max alluded to this question a bit but he focused purely on activity in Asia. But that answer needs to be answered globally. The plan really rests on having a competent Executive Director who can make cogent arguments to propspective donors. Let me give you an example, go through all the projects on http://01.org/, how many of those projects depend on DBus? Gstreamer? How many blu-ray players depend on libxml2? Have you ever looked at the packaging of various common consumer devices like your SmartTV? Read the licenses? Identify any of the libraries? Free Software is ubquitous. Every large company has some kind of plan for Free Software/Open Source, some of them have a community manager. 2. What is the top 3 goals for GNOME Foundation in the next year, in your opinion ? I think getting our finances in order is a good start. Secondly, I really like to continue working on volunteer capture. Volunteers are the lifeblood of an open source project, and we want to be able to get diversified set of talents. Not necessarily talking about coders, but people who have background in marketing, technical writing, video editing, and so forth. If you didn't have people like Bastian Hougaard, you wouldn't have that awesome release video for GNOME 3.12. Those people don't come easily. Finally, we really do need to find a good Executive Director, one is saavy and can build the financial net to fund these important initiatives. 3. How to raise and increase the fund for GNOME Foundation ? I think I answered this above. Increasing our value to our current adboard members, by showing improvement on the stack, show how we are improving the Linux (the kernel) eco-system are examples that I think will resonate with our adboard member. Obviously, we will need to find new sources of income, and that could be micro-payment system. For instance, if a bug is fixed on bugzilla, then a donation button could be presented so that money can go back into the foundation. Continue working on getting specific fundraising like we've done for privacy. These are all good ways to get revenue. Finally, build the best damn desktop out there. Money will come if we are successful in our endeavor. 4. How many hours you work in GNOME Board related work each week? I generally work about 5-7 hours a week on GNOME Foundation. It's been fluctuating lately because Ive been putting efforts in engagement and the qa team. sri Thanks! Emily Chen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Anish Patil
On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 9:22 PM, anish patil anish.develo...@gmail.com wrote: I did try to run hackfest in India couple of times but real problem is fund raising, i did reach few Indian companies to sponsor for events/hackfests but unfortunately that did not go that well. In Bangalore, we have four GNOMEies as I know of (Arun Raghavan, Aruna S, Srinivasa Ragavan and myself). Aruna is involved and is an active FMSK person. FSMK is very keen on bringing FOSS to students and Bangalore people. Though each of us have our own time commitments to take care of, the planned talk/hackfest at FSMK did not go through. Anish, would you be interested in picking this up from where it was left off? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
2014-05-21 3:08 GMT+00:00 Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com: - Original Message - From: Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org To: Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com Cc: emilychen...@gmail.com, foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 6:25:22 AM Subject: Re: Question for candidates [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] One possible idea would be to have joint events with KDE. One joint event could cost less, in total, than two separate events. I don't know what practical obstacles there might be, but in principle I think it is ok. Hi Richard, As other people mentioned, we've had joint events with KDE, which logistically worked out well. However, GUADEC is a 200-300 person event, and our goal for it is to have GNOME community members meet each other and have a chance to interact and work face-to-face. This becomes more difficult in a group twice the size, where not everyone is a GNOME user or contributor. This is why it was decided to host GUADEC separately and to have dedicated freedesktop hackfests that contributors involved with common technologies can attend, despite the financial attractiveness to sponsors of a joint event. As you know, GNOME.Asia is co-located with FUDCon this year, and it would be interesting to know how that works out. GNOME.Asia has been much smaller than GUADEC in the past, and having many people attend it because of the co-location is definitely a positive outcome, so our interest in co-locating it might be different from co-locating GUADEC. I second what Marina said about GNOME.Asia. The goal of GNOME.Asia is to promote GNOME in Asian region. Most of the audience are GNOME/Linux users, FOSS community people. only 20% are core developers and leads from GNOME community. This is different from GUADEC. Then co-host with other conference like FUDCon is working very well this way, because our audience is the same, we have common speakers, local organizers are already familiar with each other. This year, in GNOME.Asia/ FUDCon 2014, we bring more speakers, attract more audience, find more local sponsors, at the same time, we reduce the cost by share with FUDCon. Hope you enjoy your trip to Beijing and thank you for speaking at this joint event! Yes, we are looking forward to RMS's speech this Sunday. -Emily Marina -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Upcoming deadline - candidates please answer the question from the foundation
Yes, sorry, it's been a little busy with personal projects at home, so I haven't had as much time to answer. I've been working on answering them as I go. :) On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 2:56 AM, Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se wrote: We're five days away from voting opening. While some candidates have been very active in answering questions from the foundation, other are falling behind. I will be unable to vote for you if I have no idea where you're standing. In addition to that, board-list is a high traffic list so keeping up with these questions is a good test drive for candidates :) Thank you for taking the time! - Andreas ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Anish Patil
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 9:35 PM, Sindhu S sind...@live.in wrote: On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 9:22 PM, anish patil anish.develo...@gmail.com wrote: I did try to run hackfest in India couple of times but real problem is fund raising, i did reach few Indian companies to sponsor for events/hackfests but unfortunately that did not go that well. In Bangalore, we have four GNOMEies as I know of (Arun Raghavan, Aruna S, Srinivasa Ragavan and myself). Aruna is involved and is an active FMSK person. FSMK is very keen on bringing FOSS to students and Bangalore people. Though each of us have our own time commitments to take care of, the planned talk/hackfest at FSMK did not go through. Anish, would you be interested in picking this up from where it was left off? I randomly joined the gnome.in list last week, mostly because I was working on an article regarding hackfests and saw that you were organizing it, there was a lot of traffic on the mailing list last year, but then nothing since. I was planning on posting just to invigorate the list to see if we could bring some discussion back as I was somewhat interested in seeing what happened? I have a events planner if you need help. :-) Just ask! sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] for downstream, there's the SUSE conference or the Fedora Flock; To cooperate formally with the SUSE conference would pose an ethical problem because SUSE contains lots of nonfree software. To have the event in proximity to the SUSE conference, without any public relationship with it, would not have such a problem. for accessing the commercial side there's the Linux Foundation. To cooperate formally with a Linux Foundation event would run into a problem -- they would probably want to call the GNU/Linux system Linux, and we should not accept that. However, having the event in proximity to one of their events, without any public relationship, would not have such a problem. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Free software does not mean that the developers have to be volunteers. It means that the users have the essential freedoms so that they have control over the software that does their computing. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html. We're happy when the developers of free software get paid. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
