Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections 2014 - Candidates
On 05/21/2014 12:25 PM, Stormy Peters wrote: I'm really excited about the number and the involvement of all the candidates. Thanks to all of you for supporting GNOME! +1 from me! Also awesome to see such a diverse candidate list, both in terms of geography and gender! Dave. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Fabiana Simões fabianapsim...@gmail.com mailto:fabianapsim...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Foundation Members, I'm happy to announce the following candidates for this year's Board of Directors elections: * Tobias Mueller * Oliver Propst * Jean-François Fortin Tam * Karen Sandler * Andrea Veri * Anish Patil * Emily Gonyer * Marina Zhurakhinskaya * Ekaterina Gerasimova * Sriram Ramkrishna * David King Please see https://vote.gnome.org/2014/candidates.html for details. Foundation Members are invited to ask questions to the candidates by sending them to foundation-list. Please try to avoid duplicates, and bear in mind that candidates invest a lot of time in answering questions. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at membership-committee at gnome.org http://gnome.org. Cheers, Fabiana - on behalf of the GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-annou...@gnome.org mailto: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 -- 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: Questions for the candidates: finances
Le lundi 19 mai 2014 à 11:19 -0700, Jim Nelson a écrit : 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 tend to think that corporate donations are desirable for many reasons. I doubt I need to go at length here to point out that a handful of corps with marketing/charity/RD budgets are easier to target and convince than a thousand individuals working hard to earn every penny, that GNOME needs an ecosystem that includes not just hobbyists but also people who are paid to do maintenance professionally, and so on and so forth. I don't yet have a magical answer for an easy new funding model for GNOME (if it was so easy, there wouldn't be any problems to fix), but as part of my duties I would like to brainstorm and explore new venues. Just from the top of my head: - Check the possibility for grants from public institutions and look into corporate sponsors from outside our traditional circles, instead of limiting ourselves to our current corporate ecosystem. - Humble Indie Bundle-style in-app-store donations system, though there was some legal/technical problem with that idea, I forgot which, maybe someone here remembers? Otherwise I ought to ask hughsie again. - Online services for individuals - Out-of-the-box fundraising schemes. We might have some surprises there. However funny that might sound at first glance, I've seen golf tournaments (and other event types) providing massive amounts of funds to some non-profits. - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story - Untapped potential, like the privacy fundraising initiative - Other fancy ideas that may arise ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Question for candidates: OEMs
On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 14:35 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote: - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story Dell is currently shipping Ubuntu computers running Unity. Wouldn't it be desirable to see a major OEM shipping GNOME as well? If so, what steps do you believe GNOME, and the board in particular, should take to achieve this goal? 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: OEMs
On 2014-05-22 15:10, Michael Catanzaro wrote: On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 14:35 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote: - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story Dell is currently shipping Ubuntu computers running Unity. Wouldn't it be desirable to see a major OEM shipping GNOME as well? If so, what steps do you believe GNOME, and the board in particular, should take to achieve this goal? As Executive Director,I had a few calls/emails with Dell, trying to get a foothold in the company (or get a donation since they're using GNOME technologies) without too much luck. I think the Foundation needs to promote GNOME as much as possible and find partners, but we need successes to point to as well to get the message across. There are a few companies that have been working on products with GNOME in the last couple of years but already at least one of those efforts have fizzled. My fingers are crossed for the products still under development (I'm looking at you, Endless Mobile, for one) which will create more of an opportunity to approach new partners. With Android having met so much success we need a compelling story - I think we have that, but it's hard to communicate when it's more theoretical. In Dell's case they believe they need to contract with a company who will stand behind the technology, and Canonical serves that function. This is not an easy problem for the GNOME Foundation itself to solve. karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: OEMs
Quite frankly, I don't think this is a fair question to ask. We all would like that to happen of course but we don't have our own OS (at least not just yet), and there is no way Dell, or any OEM for that matter, is going to ship an OS without a well stablished commercial entity behind (from which they can reliably get the kind of support they can't get from the community), which at that point means that it won't be branded as GNOME but SUSE/RHEL... you name it. Realistically, to have OEMs shipping GNOME in a commercial product we need a set of things we don't currently have (like people employed to work on certification, training and support). 2014-05-22 21:10 GMT+02:00 Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org: On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 14:35 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote: - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story Dell is currently shipping Ubuntu computers running Unity. Wouldn't it be desirable to see a major OEM shipping GNOME as well? If so, what steps do you believe GNOME, and the board in particular, should take to achieve this goal? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Cheers, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
Hiya Jim! On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org wrote: Hello everyone, 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?) Corporate sponsorship tends to bring in a lot of money in and it is always beneficial to be able to increase that. If you wanted to do grass roots based fundraising, that would require setting up a better donation system than we have now. We can definitely do better, and the board has had some discussions about alternative systems last year. Some people have suggested using flattr or some other method of micro-payments that could bring in revenue. I think I threw out something about tying donations to bug fixes. You could setup marketing calls to various companies who might be using our stack and ask for donations that way for smaller amounts like 1000 dollars or 5000 dollars. In general, they do okay, but they won't be very large. You need to grow the audience to really take advantage of that strategy. Another idea might be to take advantage of funding opportunities like grants from the government or companies. We don't necessarily have to make a technology argument, we could focus on programs like OPW or our underlying philosophy of freedom. We are after all a philanthropic organization, we could make that argument. Here is a grant application from JP Morgan as an example: http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Corporate-Responsibility/grant-programs Of course this one is corporate, but I'm sure we can find others. Another idea is to fundraise at conferences, and not necessarily our tech ones. Most of fundraising is about making 1:1 connections and then making a compelling argument. sri -- Jim ___ 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 - Sriram Ramkrishna
Sorry for my late reply. GMail is horrible with finding old threads sometimes. On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:08 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Sri, On 14 May 2014 01:16, Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me wrote: Affiliation: Intel Corporation I'm running for a second term as Director of the GNOME Foundation. I plan on continuing my efforts in outreach both inside of GNOME Foundation and to external. There is still many things to do in order to make our platform and desktop attractive to everyone and I wish to continue talking about our story. I can continue to be effective in leveraging what I've learned as Director as well as the extensive set of contacts I have as part of my day job and the open source project I am involved there as well. Could you give us a few example of what you would like do to make the GNOME desktop more attractive? Let me modify my statement a bit - I want to make GNOME attractive to everyone both as a place to volunteer for non-technical projects, to hack on cool technology, and of course a pleasant experience to use. That being said: For volunteer capture, we should continue to make sure that we have a great path to being able to get to someone human, or mailing list to get simple tasks to work on. We should have volunteers that make sure that the documentation for getting JHbuild up and running is smooth. Examples should always work with the latest code from git. To some extent, the QA team is looking at some of this. Basically, we continue to increase the quality of GNOME by integrating with GNOME Continuous with good unit tests, and also making sure that JHBuild works for the most part and is predictable. Nothing stops frustrates people more when they can't even get to the part they want to do but have to spend long hours just trying to get set up and failing at it. During my tenure as Director, I have organized a hackfest, help start a QA team, and worked to get many people involved in GNOME as contributors. Long hours and days were spend engaging the Free and Open Source community. I find myself continuing to be energized in being part of this organization of which I am proud of. I ask for your vote and confidence to continue working on the board. Hackfest organisation, team management/contribution/organisation and outreach are some of the core tasks that many of our community members do as part of their contributions to GNOME. In what ways did your board membership affect your ability to do these and what can be done to make it easier for other community members to do these without joining the board? Being part of the board help me get exposed to situations that I would not normally be exposed to. Whether it is issues with reimbursements or confusion with process that kind of thing. You see the big picture when you're trying to put on an event and what not.Because you see the big picture, you're able to see where something is broken. So doing the work on the core tasks makes you a better director. It doesn't necessarily mean the other way around. My activities doing hackfests and team management is what helps gives context to when you see something that is not working right. The counter is that your own ideas are challenged of maybe what is fair and what isn't. Others can give you a different side of a story. I've always enjoyed our discussions on the board precisely because of this. You learn something. That's cool. :) sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Sriram Ramkrishna
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 1:21 AM, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me wrote: Affiliation: Intel Corporation I'm running for a second term as Director of the GNOME Foundation. I plan on continuing my efforts in outreach both inside of GNOME Foundation and to external. There is still many things to do in order to make our platform and desktop attractive to everyone and I wish to continue talking about our story. I can continue to be effective in leveraging what I've learned as Director What have you learned the past year as a Director ? I learned that sometimes being open and transparent to the public is the wrong thing to do. It's okay to reveal our finances within the foundation and to those who have graciously donated to us, but sometimes not okay to reveal to the general public. It is a surreal experience doing damage control and I'm being called into account by an angry commentator who neither has a financial stake in GNOME nor even uses GNOME but feels that they deserve answers. How we reveal our information in the public is important and it is important that we get our messaging correct when we deliver bad news to the Internet. In a talk I gave, I said something along the lines of bad news travel fast, ugly news travel even faster through social media. A point that sadly has proven true. as well as the extensive set of contacts I have as part of my day job and the open source project I am involved there as well. Can you provide any exemple of how these contacts have benefited GNOME and/or how you plan to leverage them in the coming year? In the future, you'll see a GNOME page on 01.org. :-) This just another angle of having greater name exposure and also demonstrates how much GNOME technologies are being relied on for a number of projects that are being worked on. 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. ]]] SUSE is a company, not a product, therefore it can not contains nonfree software. The company SUSE makes a GNU/Linux distro which they call SUSE Linux; it is nonfree. Of course, the distro is not the same thing as the company, but since they are both called SUSE, promoting one is promoting the other. -- 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
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Alberto Ruiz ar...@gnome.org wrote: Do you have examples of situations where Red Hat (or any other company or corporation for that matter) has trumped what most of the community wants/needs? If you do, what do you think the board could/should do about it? I presume that it is the fact that a lot of the core maintainers of GNOME are Red Hat employees. From what I understand of Red Hat culture, that doesn't really mean much. I was having drinks with a person who used to work at a company who got bought out by Red Hat. I believe it was Cygnus. The biggest culture shock they had was the fact that Red Hat employees regularly flamed each other on a number of mailing lists and often quite gleefully. I'm not sure Red Hat is the picture of corporate toe the line that you generally see at other places. I think in general, FOSS people do tend to be an ornery crowd. :-) If there is an issue though with voices not being heard then that should be addressed. sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
