Re: Some questions for the candidates
Tobias: On 06/ 7/13 04:51 AM, Tobias Mueller wrote: On 06.06.2013 23:04, Brian Cameron wrote: Advisory board members are encouraged to join when there is clear value in doing so. What work has been done over the past year to increase this value or effectively communicate such values? Off the top of my hat, I don't know any actions that were done pro-actively to increase value for the advisory board. But I may well be corrected. We are primarily a Free Software community, after all. So the bigger part of our focus shall be our community and our software. I would say that the Annual Report is a primary vehicle for communicating value, which is why it has always been important to make sure that existing and potential advisory board members get copies to help them justify their contributions with their management. I have noticed the GNOME Foundation continues to do a good job in making the report, but it has always a struggle to put together. The GNOME Foundation has always done very work-intensive and professional-looking glossy reports thanks to volunteer effort. Using it to effectively helping advisory board members understand the value and values of the community is a hard thing to properly attract advisory board membership, and this only one aspect of what such reports need to do. If you have any suggestions as to how to increase the value, I am confident that all current and running members of the board are interested to hear them. Or better: Seeing them implemented ;-) I do not have any particular suggestions beyond keep up the good work with marketing efforts like the Annual Report and FoG programs. I was more just curious to hear more about the relations between the board and advisory board these days and to generally discuss. --- Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some questions for the candidates
Tobias: On 06/ 5/13 05:39 PM, Tobias Mueller wrote: Can you be an advocate for more corporate support? Yes. We should try to find out what it is that keeps companies from joining the advisory board, despite recent years being economically tough. Another area is better service to sponsors for our conferences. We had some discussions in the advisory board that will hopefully continue to identify areas of improvement. Advisory board members are encouraged to join when there is clear value in doing so. What work has been done over the past year to increase this value or effectively communicate such values? For example, how many times have advisory board members had issues where membership helped to resolve their problem? What efforts have been made to include advisory board members in Foundation event planning (e.g. Hackfests) and making sure that such events have clear benefits to advisory board member needs? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Question to GNOME Foundation Board candidates
My question to the candidates: For returning board members, what are 3 conrete accomplishments on the board that you are most proud of? How many action items did you accept over your last term and what percentage were completed? If things did not get done or tended to get done very late, please explain why. If you were to give your own performance a grade, what would it be? For all candidates, how do you see being on the board will enhance or facilitate the volunteer work you already do in the commutity? How many hours per week do you expect you will be able to dedicate to working on the board on a regular basis? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Fwd: Reminder: FOSDEM CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 - Call for Talks
Christophe: On 12/10/12 04:30 AM, Christophe Fergeau wrote: Hey Brian, The FOSDEM devroom has always been organized like that, ie with me taking care of the organization for GNOME, and doing it on GNOME mailing list. Over the years we evolved from a GNOME-only devroom to a joint devroom with KDE, to a devroom where we try to gather as many DEs as possible. Thanks! The work you and others are doing is great. When I first complained, I incorrectly thought that no effort was made to contact freedesktop.org. I apologize for the confusion. I should have asked you guys about it off-line before raising issue. Having been involved with organizing two Desktop Summit events, I have seen a lot of the benefits of cross-desktop planning. But, also, that there are many ways this needs to be improved. One problem with cross-desktop events is that they, historically, seem to represent only a handful of Desktop communities very well. Inclusiveness is something to strive for, and not something to attain or achieve. So we can't always rely on what has worked in the past. I'm not sure doing part of the devroom organization on a freedesktop mailing list would help a lot as we need to make sure the call for talks goes to the right communities rather than expecting people to watch freedesktop mailing lists. I'm not sure why anyone might think having discussion on a freedesktop mailing list would prevent making sure a call for talks was forwarded to the right places. I have often heard people complain that there is no point to doing planning on the right forum because that forum seems too dead. The gnome marketing mailing list suffered from that problem a few years ago, and seems more useful after encouragement. What kind of planning would you have expected to see on freedesktop MLs? It will be interesting to see some blog write-up after the event to learn how effective the currently used approach works to draw people from different communities. Survey data from attendees provided some real valuable input about how The Desktop Summit was working. Perhaps something more simple is appropriate for this event, but I do hope some useful metrics will be tracked to measure how effective we are. Perhaps any such discussion might be the sort of appropriate one to consider having on a freedesktop.org forum. Would you have liked to be involved in the organization and feel you cannot do it the way it has been done? No. I feel like I am involved with the organization just by having a discussion with you about it. Instead I am hoping to encourage consideration of ways to improve. The two Desktop Summit events that I helped to organize were both dominated by GNOME and KDE people, so I am not sure that the approaches used in the past work the best. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Fwd: Reminder: FOSDEM CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 - Call for Talks
Christophe: I am glad to hear that there is some cross-desktop coordination going on. That said, how do we really expect to make much progress when efforts to meet in person are not matched with efforts to organize planning on appropriate cross-desktop forums, like mailing lists on FreeDesktop.org? In other words, I just expect more planning and discussion about events like this at FreeDesktop directly. It would be more likely that other appropriate forums would not be overlooked if there were more central discussion and planning. In my opinion, our efforts to rejuvinate collaborate activitiy also should focus on helping to revive and energize discussion on forums like these. Brian On 12/ 5/12 11:37 AM, Christophe Fergeau wrote: Hi Brian, 2012/12/4 Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com mailto:brian.came...@oracle.com Christophe: If CrossDesktop DevRoom is THE place for cross-desktop entente, then why have I seen no discussion about this event on any FreeDesktop mail forum? I only notice GNOME mailing lists in the current cc:list, or am I missing something? I only cc'ed GNOME lists because I'm acting as the GNOME representative. Pau has sent emails to xdg-list http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2012-November/012581.html , and is also taking care of the KDE community. Unity, XFCE, e17, ... mailing lists should have received a similar Call for talks from other people helping with the devroom. Christophe ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Fwd: Reminder: FOSDEM CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 - Call for Talks
Christophe: If CrossDesktop DevRoom is THE place for cross-desktop entente, then why have I seen no discussion about this event on any FreeDesktop mail forum? I only notice GNOME mailing lists in the current cc:list, or am I missing something? What FreeDesktop forum is even supposed to be used for announcing events and activities? Would this be freedesk...@freedesktop.org, platf...@freedesktop.org (which hasn't seen but 3 emails since 2005) or maybe distributi...@freedesktop.org? --- Brian On 12/ 4/12 09:05 AM, Christophe Fergeau wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: *Pau Garcia i Quiles* pgqui...@elpauer.org mailto:pgqui...@elpauer.org Date: 2012/11/29 Subject: Reminder: FOSDEM CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 - Call for Talks To: x...@lists.freedesktop.org mailto:x...@lists.freedesktop.org Hello, The Call for Talks for the CrossDesktop DevRoom at FOSDEM 2013 is officially open and will close in two weeks (Dec 14th). FreeDesktop.org is THE place for cross-desktop entente, sure there is a lot of things to talk about. Please submit your talk proposals ASAP! --8--- * FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the tracks will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperativity amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop). Talks can be very specific, such as developing mobile applications with Qt Quick; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2012 schedule might give you some inspiration: https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/crossdesktop_devroom.html https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/crossdesktop_devroom.html Please include the following information when submitting a proposal: * Your name * The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects) * Short abstract of one or two paragraphs * Short bio * Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. The deadline for submissions is December 14th 2012. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 2-3 February 2013. Please submit your proposals to crossdesktop-devr...@lists.fosdem.org mailto:crossdesktop-devr...@lists.fosdem.org(subscribtion page for the mailing list: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/crossdesktop-devroom) -- The CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 Organization Team* --8--- -- Pau Garcia i Quiles http://www.elpauer.org (Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer) ___ xdg mailing list x...@lists.freedesktop.org mailto:x...@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
RMS: On 11/17/12 07:53 PM, Richard Stallman wrote: Tools that use non-free technologies like Skype or Vonage are not just popular, but a requirement for many people who pay for such services. How many average people would purchase a device that did not support such tools? Is this a real issue? On a free operating system, developers can implement whatever they wish. And users can install it if they wish. Most commercial products that work with video require non-free codecs. While users may do what they wish, installing free software that implements non-free codecs may be considered a crime in some places. This seems to be a disconnect of subject. Before, you were talking about support for Skype. The only company that might plausibly implement a program for Skype on GNU/Linux is Skype. So my response is about that. If Skype wants to implement its snooping-enabled nofree software on GNU/Linux, it can do so, and users can install it if they wish. Like any nonfree software, this would be unethical, but I see no reason why it would be a crime. My point is that we must not do _anything_ that could be construed as recommending that nonfree software, and that includes integrating it. Our duty, rather than integrating nonfree software, is to differentiate it -- not do anything that would grant it ethical legitimacy. Good point. I was really not trying to recommend any non-free software. My examples were just meant to be currently popular examples. Instead I was just trying to highlight that there seems to be a disconnect between the GNOME project team's stated goals of reaching the average computer user when so many average users believe they need non-free products, such as tools that interact with and create media. The same applies to DRM software, which I supposed would be implemented by the same companies that use the DRM, if at all. This too would be proprietary software, and malicious too, so we must not do anything that would grant it ethical legitimacy. I respect that those artists who create digital art should have mechanisms to own their artwork or to control how it should be consumed or presented. However, DRM systems should minimally not disallow the financially disadvantaged from participating in digital culture. Otherwise would be inhumane. Since some states which treat their citizens as enemies persecute such software, GNOME would not be directly involved with it. Aside, perhaps, from helping to envision what a usable accessible desktop for the world's average financially disadvantaged user might look like. Considering that OLPC is a significant distributor of GNOME already and that free software has obvious benefits in regions affected by poverty. I would encourage the GNOME product to focus more strongly on this and other important humanitarian use cases. Currently free software systems are unable to support popular ubiquitous devices, like certain touch-screen features or a DVD movie player. It seems clear humanitarian concerns have not been considered deeply here. As multimedia and human interaction devices become more sophisticated, this will likely become a more serious problem for the desktop. Perhaps it might be possible to help craft more sophisticated law that better protects the ability of companies and artists to profit from their creative work in a more humane manner. To me, this seems like a topic worthy of discussion and action amongst free software desktop developers. Though, you may be talking about something else when you say GNOME should not be directly involved. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
RMS: On 11/19/12 03:32 PM, Richard Stallman wrote: I respect that those artists who create digital art should have mechanisms to own their artwork or to control how it should be consumed or presented. This is why we started the DefectiveByDesign.org. I suggest making GNOME inform users about DefectiveByDesign.org so as to boost the campaign. (People reading this might want to sign up.) How do you propose GNOME should inform users? Any promotion in the GNOME source code would be complicated, if not impossible, to require. Two noteworthy erroneous assumptions in that text. * That DRM is set up by artists for their own personal goals. Typically it is implemented by companies. I did not intend for this to be an assumption. I did not say that what we call DRM is the specific solution that should be used for artists to own their artwork. Instead I was trying to only suggest that digital artists should be able to profit from their digital artwork. Maybe it is possible to profit from artwork that you do not own, but that probably requires more social reorganization than I can comprehend today. * That we consume digital works. One of the advantages of digital formats is that using them does not consume them, or even wear them out. Consume is not the best word to use as you point out. Some works of art are expensive and require financing. Most movies or digital games cost a small fortune to make, for example. DRM may not be the best way for such works to be financed, but it is a popular way used by many average people today. This is why, I think, the DefectiveByDesign campaign exists as a voice of contrast. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
Richard: On 11/16/12 07:12 PM, Richard Stallman wrote: Tools that use non-free technologies like Skype or Vonage are not just popular, but a requirement for many people who pay for such services. How many average people would purchase a device that did not support such tools? Is this a real issue? On a free operating system, developers can implement whatever they wish. And users can install it if they wish. Most commercial products that work with video require non-free codecs. While users may do what they wish, installing free software that implements non-free codecs may be considered a crime in some places. Support for Skype has already been implemented on GNU/Linux. You should never use it, because you would be encouraging someone else to use nonfree software. But as for whether it will be supported, the answer is already yes. I use Solaris, so the fact that it works on GNU/Linux is interesting, but not helpful. This illustrates an example of why this is a problem, I think. But, if the average user is the target, how does GNOME plan to provide access to non-free multimedia that the average user tends to access and create? Companies can implement DRM applications on GNU/Linux if they wish, and users can install them -- on a free system, we could not stop them if we wanted to. Not if they were coordinated to act in mass, perhaps. Licenses to support technologies like video can be expensive. While free software users might pool together resources to develop a solution, there isn't a good solution today or any organizations or companies paying such license fees on behalf of free software use. Aside from Fluendo who I believe paid a license for MP3 and is freely giving away decoder codecs for it. Unfortunatly they don't provide an encoder. But we must not do anything that would make us provide this nonfree software. That would contradict the principle that we stand for: software should be free. Sure. I think a real complication is that it is perhaps less clear if a commercial creative work or art, such as audio or video should be free in the same sense. If consumers should expect to be able to access media with DRM, then the software to support DRM needs to be licensed for free software use or users cannot legally use it in many countries. Some companies may provide GNU/Linux or Solaris non-free driver or codec solutions, but support is often pretty bad and some programs only have license to support media in a particular context (such as a phone call via their client as a paid service). A perfect solution would be if they just fixed patent law to exclude free software from needing license to access specific hardware devices, which is anti-competitive, I think. Or to at least only make it possible to have exclusive control over a device, codec, or technology for a much shorter period of time. I'm not sure what the best solution may be, but I think laws that make it hard, if not impossible, to deliver things like a free DVD player in OLPC laptops using free software for children in the developing world is an example of broken law, IMHO. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
Seif: On 11/15/12 03:31 AM, Seif Lotfy wrote: Good points Brian :) I like the last part this advanced UNIX-hacker type does not seem to be the primary user GNOME is focusing on anymore. For better or worse, I would say that most Solaris GNOME users probably fall either in the advanced UNIX-hacker category, or the type of user who uses a Solaris GNOME desktop in a very focused or controlled environment such as a kiosk or call center environment. So, the desktop on Solaris seems to be increasingly diverging from the needs of the GNOME community. But I think the GNOME community has been conscious that platforms like Solaris were being left behind as decisions were being made. May I ask you however to try to reply to each question with one sentence if possible so I can create a small overview able chart I have difficulty answering Stormy's 3 questions because I do my GNOME work on Solaris, and Solaris desktop products are not well served by the new OpenGL and Linux-focused directions that the GNOME product is taking. I had been struggling to keep GNOME 3 working on Solaris, but that work fell to the wayside as it became clear that Fallback mode is going away. I imagine that you are probably looking for answers from people more engaged with current development, and not people like me. If I were try to answer the questions, I guess I would say: 1. Where's the product going? In directions that make it less and less useful on Solaris. 2. What problem are we trying to solve? The future of the Solaris desktop. 3. How are we going to do that? Not sure. Hopefully this will become more clear over time. For example, maybe Solaris desktop products will support OpenGL at some point in the future. Collaboration could become easier at that time. --- Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
Allan: On 11/15/12 06:46 AM, Allan Day wrote: Brian Cameronbrian.came...@oracle.com wrote: But I think the GNOME community has been conscious that platforms like Solaris were being left behind as decisions were being made. That really depends on how you define the needs of the advanced UNIX-hacker category. GNOME 3 may have differences from traditional desktop environments of the past (it also has a lot of similarities too), but it is definitely intended to be an effective environment for developers or system administrators. (I'm speaking from a UX design point of view here, obviously.) I do agree that the GNOME 3 designers have kept the advanced UNIX hacker in mind. I did not mean to imply otherwise. I would instead say that this type of user is of a lesser priority than they were in the past. Is this not a fair statement? IMHO, the archetypal UNIX hacker is the person in a Matrix-like multiscreen virtual-reality pod using touch-screen hand gestures to access all sorts of remote programs around the globe. But, isn't the plan for GNOME to lose many multi-screen and remote-X features for the time being in favor of better support for the average user's needs? As you say, GNOME should be an effective environment for hackers that do not need features GNOME will not support. I would say most hackers find the ability to access remote machines in a multi-screen environment more important than the ability to use a touch-screen, though. Is there a plan for features that hackers need to be addressed? Perhaps by the time GNOME 3 is scheduled to be included with Enterprise Linux distros in addition to FOSS hobbyist distros? If GNOME wanted to seriously keep its hacker user-base, I would think it would be smarter to maintain the Fallback mode until such features have suitable replacements. Also, I'd think that if the GNOME community were able to provide a better support story for GNOME fallback mode, a lot of FUD about the need for GNOME to continue forking would evaporate. But hasn't the release team already decided that the need to make GNOME more slim and maintainable trumps backwards compatibility and such typical hacker needs? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
Peteris: On 11/15/12 06:36 AM, Peteris Krisjanis wrote: T , 2012.11.14. 22:37 -0600, Brian Cameron rakstīja: On 11/15/12 03:31 AM, Seif Lotfy wrote: But is there any strong reasons why Oracle won't chime in and support further development of GNOME Panel (let's call it GNOME Classic - that all Fallback mode don't make any justice to it)? Is it financial problem? Strategic? I think it just lacks core maintainer, that's all. I have been encouraging the Oracle Desktop team to step up and help, but resources are more limited than they were in the past. I have found it difficult to get folks at Oracle motivated to help, though. I think partially because it is not clear that fixing this problem is as easy to fix as you seem to suggest. Note that Oracle released Solaris 11 with GNOME 2.30/2.32 not long ago. It is probably to be expected that Solaris is more focused on maintaining such supported products than on new development at this point in the release cycle. In past years, Sun and Oracle dedicated significant resources towards GNOME helping in areas like QA, usability, stability, a11y, multi-user desktop features, community building (e.g. GNOME.Asia) and more. It is hard to know if more resources now will really be such a game changer at a time when highly visible GNOME senior engineers keep pressing that non-Linux GNOME is so much on their own. That said, I am sure that Oracle will continue helping in ways. The Oracle Desktop team is, for example, currently working to integrate GTK3 into Solaris 12. While OpenGL may not work well on Sun Ray today, some GTK3 programs likely will be needed by Solaris users. Especially if the GNOME community starts only providing security fixes for GTK3 versions of programs. It is not clear to me if the GNOME community has any plan or recommendations for dealing with GNOME 2 support, such as a plan to provide security fixes. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME now
I think one of the most significant challenges for any free desktop that is trying to reach the average user is how to deal with the fact that most people like using computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. to interact with non-free multimedia. Not just viewing movies and listening to music, but also creating content in increasingly collaborative ways. Tools that use non-free technologies like Skype or Vonage are not just popular, but a requirement for many people who pay for such services. How many average people would purchase a device that did not support such tools? Proprietary companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft coordinate sophisticated agreements with media companies and often go along with nasty DRM agreements required by those who own the rights to popular media. Even some popular artists, like The Beatles, are very controlling about who can access the media they control. If you avoid DRM, you probably have to avoid such popular artists - including pretty much anything released on a DVD. In certain markets, not being able to access non-free media may not be a problem. The device the FedEx employee uses to collect signatures or a Point-of-Sale system might be good examples of devices that do not need much media support. Such markets might be an ideal focus for a free desktop environment that, perhaps naturally, lacks strong DRM support. But, if the average user is the target, how does GNOME plan to provide access to non-free multimedia that the average user tends to access and create? Is the community working to make GNOME attractive to some big company that can negotiate the expensive licenses needed to provide access? Or is GNOME focusing on users who do not have an interest in using, accessing or creating non-free media? Is GNOME just waiting until relevant patents expire and these issue hopefully just go away? I always thought that GNOME more appealed to hacker types because hackers tend to be more agreeable to figuring out how to work in a DRM-free environment. For example, a hacker would likely be more willing to rip their audio in OGG format. But this advanced UNIX-hacker type does not seem to be the primary user GNOME is focusing on anymore. Brian On 11/14/12 11:08 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 8:10 AM, Seif Lotfy s...@lotfy.com mailto:s...@lotfy.com wrote: Quoting Stormy Peters comment on a recent blog post concerning GNOME: We haven’t shared our vision or our roadmap for the future. Where’s the product going? What problem are we trying to solve? How are we going to do that? Good question. As a member of the board of directors I can't really answer this question at the moment either, without having to organize my thoughts. So many different point of views and ideas in the community that are not well discussed. The first thing that pops up in my head is GNOME OS. But then I am kinda lost. Maybe this is something we need to discuss here on the mailing list. Lets try to answer those 3 questions. What about one sentence per question for a start? I am avoiding a blog post since I am not sure its the best way to reach most of our contributors. For me, it's our byline right? A distraction free desktop. Our designs are all based on being able to write a desktop that allows us to get our work done, multi-task with whatever interruptions that we have in our daily life. Where are we going? Are you talking about development or user land? What do other people think? sri Cheers Seif ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org mailto: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 meeting minutes - was (Re: A question for the candidates)
Emmanuele: On 05/28/12 12:06 AM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: [just a bit of backstory, here, also to help out eventual other candidates in case I'm not elected] the meeting minutes are written down during the meeting itself by using a collaborative editor, so that everyone on the meeting can actually review in real time what's being written (this also helps in case I could not hear or understand what was being said, or when I am talking about some topic/action item, in which case I cannot really take notes). It was Vincent's idea to use a collaborative editor, and something we started really using in my first term as director. I think it does make minute taking a lot easier. Since Karen, Zana, and multiple directors tend to help with the note-taking, the notes end up better written. after the meeting is over, the minute is published on the Foundation's restricted wiki space, for further review, in case I missed a private section, or I was being overzealous with one, as well as for clearing up some of the action items. after some time pass, the wiki page for the minutes is copied over to the public section of the Foundation's wiki space, and the contents are sent using an email. none of this is automated: Brian was just exceptionally good at sending out minutes every two weeks. :-) I can confirm that our process is not very automated, and putting together good minutes is time consuming. I would say the work Emmanuele has done compares well with the work done by other GNOME Foundation secretaries. While they have not been as timely as they could be, the quality of the content has remained high. During my two terms as secretary, I did most of the work of preparing the agenda even though agenda preparation is really the role of the president. This year, since I have been acting as president, I have been preparing the agendas. The last week's minutes (whether made public or not) are used as a template to build the agenda for the next meeting, which is also on our internal wiki. While preparing the agenda, I will fill out the Discussed on the mailing list section and many of these topics feed into the new agenda. In this regards, the process has been working very well in the past year. I think the job of putting together the minutes works best when the President and Secretary work together like this. So this is an area of improvement. my main two issues as serving as secretary this year were being overzealous with people reviewing my note-taking (not a native english speaker, and the conference call phone line can be pretty messy at times), as well as reviewing the private sections. the first issue can be ascribed to me being in my first term; As I am putting together the agenda, I review and update the minutes when I notice ways to improve it. I think many board members do the same. Your English is quite good, and I rarely find myself correcting it. Meeting minutes seems crucial to run a public discussion between the board and its members as Germán has highlighted and it's not because no one asked that no one thought it was not important anymore. I agree with you, and if I'm serving as secretary on the next term, I'll make a point of addressing my obvious shortcoming of this term. It was ambitious of you to take on an officer position in your first term, and I think you should better recognize the good work you have been doing even in the face of constructive criticism. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Announcing Board of Directors Elections 2012
Foundation Members: Anyone considering running for the board should read this: http://vote.gnome.org/overview.html On 05/16/12 09:10 AM, Tobias Mueller wrote: Just a quick reminder that as per http://vote.gnome.org/2012/rules.html the last day to announce candidacies and submit summary statements is this Sunday, the 2012-05-20. Thanks for the reminder, Tobias. Already several exciting candidates have stepped forward, including: - David Nielsen (GNOME Community Volunteer) - Bastien Nocera (Red Hat UK Ltd) - Emmanuele Bassi (Intel Corporation) - Andreas Nilsson (GNOME Community Volunteer) - Joanmarie Diggs (Igalia, S.L.) Having worked closed with all these people, I highly recommend them all. It is great to see that 3 of these candidates are folks who have served as officers on the board before, a candidate who will represent the FOSS a11y community, and GNOME Community Volunteers. Yet, with only 5 people, more people need to step forward or we will need to extend the deadline. So, as we are rapidly approaching the 11th hour, I want to encourage those people who have been seriously considering running for the board to do so. The GNOME Foundation needs your help. There is a lot of work to do in the upcoming months. For example, it has been a tradition at GUADEC to announce the location of the next year's GUADEC event. The GNOME Foundation and the KDE e.V. board is currently working to put together a Press Release that will highlight our future plans. You should expect to see this shortly. Until then, it is not possible to start the bidding process for next year's event. So, we are running late on this. GUADEC planning like this is going to be the amongst the first big tasks that the new board will need to help with. Boston Summits and hackfests need to be organized. So, I am disappointed that to see that nobody who is on the GUADEC or GNOME.Asia organizing committees or others with event planning experience seem to be considering representing their teams on the board. Likewise, I think the board would particularly benefit from more representation from the marketing, usability, and design teams. I would like to encourage more GNOME Community Volunteers to consider running, and people with other affiliations (Lionel?). I would like to encourage people who are considering running to do so, and particularly encourage someone from Canonical (Rodrigo?) or Suse to consider. I privately encouraged Joanie and Max (from GNOME.Asia) to run and am especially happy to see you took the dive, Joanie. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Brian Cameron - Stepping down from the board
Friends in the GNOME community: After serving 4 terms on The GNOME Foundation board of directors, I will be stepping down at the end of this term. I would like to thank everyone in the community who has supported me and allowed me to represent them on this board. It has been a profoundly rewarding and truly inspirational experience to help The GNOME Foundation and GNOME community to grow. The years that I have served on the board have been exciting and productive times. I am proud to have served as president and secretary; to have been involved with the development, release and celebration surrounding the GNOME 3 release; and to have helped with the development of successful GNOME programs like the Outreach Program for Women. In my time on the board, I have witnessed so much growth within the community. Since then, the GNOME Foundation has hired two executive directors, started having successful annual summits in Asia, and has more than doubled the number of hackfests held each year. Just to mention a few highlights. My stepping down should not be viewed as me becoming less involved with GNOME. I plan to continue working on GNOME for Oracle and expect that I will continue helping the GNOME Foundation and community in many ways. I mostly feel that it is just time for me to step down to reclaim some of my life back. 4.5 years (including one 18-month term in 2008-2009) is a long time to serve on The GNOME Foundation board of directors. I believe that only Jonathan Blandford served as a board member for a longer period of time (5 years). With the two most senior board members (Germán and myself) both stepping down at the end of this term, it is especially important for passionate people to serve the community. So I again encourage people who are considering to run for the board to step forward. It is a great way to increase one's involvement with GNOME and free software and to help make sure that GNOME continues to rock. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Announcing Board of Directors Elections 2012
Reminder that the list of candidates for the board of directors opened yesterday on May 7th. If you are interested in running for the board of directors, then I very much encourage you to do so. It is a great way to deepen ones involvement with GNOME and free software communities. If you would like to see an example of how to announce your candidacy, I will share a link to the one I wrote last year: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2011-May/msg00010.html What does it take to be a good board member? In my experience, effective board members: - Have the time to dedicate to The GNOME Foundation and community. For example, I have found that I dedicate roughly 6-10 hours a week on GNOME Foundation activities. - Have a productive volunteer ethic, are involved with GNOME teams, participate in IRC meetings, etc. - Are effective and diplomatic communicators. The sort of people you often find helping to moderate difficult community discussions or helping to organize GNOME projects and committees. - Have experience working on the sorts of projects that The GNOME Foundation is involved with. For example, the GNOME Foundation invests a lot of energy organizing events, so having event planning experience can be a big help. Other examples would include experience with fund raising (Friends of GNOME), working with GNOME User's Groups, GNOME merchandise, etc. Brian On 04/17/12 05:14 PM, Brian Cameron wrote: Dear Foundation Members, The GNOME Foundation board of directors and the GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee are pleased to announce the upcoming elections for the Board of Directors in Spring 2012. The most important deadlines (UTC) in the timeline are the following: *GNOME Board Elections 2012* 2012-05-20: List of candidates closed 2012-05-27: Voting Begins 2012-06-10: Voting Ends 2012-06-19: Challenges End ELECTIONS = The seven members of our current Board of Directors have been ruling GNOME for 12 months now. We, the GNOME Foundation Members, will have to elect a the board of directors for the next year. CANDIDACY = If you want to run for one of the seven positions on The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, then send an email to foundation-announce gnome org and elections gnome org with your full name, e-mail, corporate affiliation (if any), and your reasons for wanting to serve as a director. Candidacies must be announced prior to 2012-05-20, 23:59 UTC. All discussion related to the elections should be held on foundation-list. Members are invited to ask questions to one or all candidates on that list (see below). A list of candidates will be announced on 2012-05-23. At this point, you are invited to ask the candidates questions by sending them to foundation-list. These candidates might become your representative, so do not hesitate to ask them questions. Please try to avoid asking duplicate questions that others have already asked. Also, bear in mind that the candidates invest a lot of time answering questions, so please be reasonable with the amount and scope of the questions. You can also send your questions to membership-committee gnome org instead, so that the committee can collect, sift and sort the questions before sending them to foundation-list for the candidates to respond. Though, if you prefer to ask your questions directly, please do so. ELECTORATE == Every GNOME foundation member whose membership is valid in the range of the full voting period, including challenges (2012-05-27 - 2012-06-19) is eligible to vote. If you are not a member yet, please consider applying for membership ASAP. Late applications will most likely not be processed in time. The GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee will inform those people who might need to renew via email. We recommend that members also double check this to avoid a missed opportunity to vote. Please verify that the email address that is associated with your GNOME Foundation membership is valid and that you are able to read emails sent to this address. VOTING == The Electorate will receive complete instructions on how to vote by 2012-05-27 via email. The 7 candidates who receive the most votes as counted by a single transferable vote system (Scottish STV) will be elected, except that no more than two individuals affiliated with any one corporation may be elected. In the event of a tie for the final slot on the board, the Elections Committee will schedule run-off elections as soon as possible. May 2012 Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun 1 2 3 4 5 6 (7) 8 9 10 11 12 13 Announcements and list of candidates opens (7th) 14 15 16 17 18 19 (20) List of candidates closed (20th) 21 22 (23) 24 25 26 (27) List of candidates announced (23rd) Instructions to vote are sent (27th) 28 29 30 31 June 2012 Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (10) Votes must be returned (10th) 11 (12) 13 14 15 16 17 Preliminary results are announced (12th
Announcing Board of Directors Elections 2012
Dear Foundation Members, The GNOME Foundation board of directors and the GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee are pleased to announce the upcoming elections for the Board of Directors in Spring 2012. The most important deadlines (UTC) in the timeline are the following: *GNOME Board Elections 2012* 2012-05-20: List of candidates closed 2012-05-27: Voting Begins 2012-06-10: Voting Ends 2012-06-19: Challenges End ELECTIONS = The seven members of our current Board of Directors have been ruling GNOME for 12 months now. We, the GNOME Foundation Members, will have to elect a the board of directors for the next year. CANDIDACY = If you want to run for one of the seven positions on The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, then send an email to foundation-announce gnome org and elections gnome org with your full name, e-mail, corporate affiliation (if any), and your reasons for wanting to serve as a director. Candidacies must be announced prior to 2012-05-20, 23:59 UTC. All discussion related to the elections should be held on foundation-list. Members are invited to ask questions to one or all candidates on that list (see below). A list of candidates will be announced on 2012-05-23. At this point, you are invited to ask the candidates questions by sending them to foundation-list. These candidates might become your representative, so do not hesitate to ask them questions. Please try to avoid asking duplicate questions that others have already asked. Also, bear in mind that the candidates invest a lot of time answering questions, so please be reasonable with the amount and scope of the questions. You can also send your questions to membership-committee gnome org instead, so that the committee can collect, sift and sort the questions before sending them to foundation-list for the candidates to respond. Though, if you prefer to ask your questions directly, please do so. ELECTORATE == Every GNOME foundation member whose membership is valid in the range of the full voting period, including challenges (2012-05-27 - 2012-06-19) is eligible to vote. If you are not a member yet, please consider applying for membership ASAP. Late applications will most likely not be processed in time. The GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee will inform those people who might need to renew via email. We recommend that members also double check this to avoid a missed opportunity to vote. Please verify that the email address that is associated with your GNOME Foundation membership is valid and that you are able to read emails sent to this address. VOTING == The Electorate will receive complete instructions on how to vote by 2012-05-27 via email. The 7 candidates who receive the most votes as counted by a single transferable vote system (Scottish STV) will be elected, except that no more than two individuals affiliated with any one corporation may be elected. In the event of a tie for the final slot on the board, the Elections Committee will schedule run-off elections as soon as possible. May 2012 Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun 1 2 3 4 5 6 (7) 8 9 10 11 12 13 Announcements and list of candidates opens (7th) 14 15 16 17 18 19 (20) List of candidates closed (20th) 21 22 (23) 24 25 26 (27) List of candidates announced (23rd) Instructions to vote are sent (27th) 28 29 30 31 June 2012 Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (10) Votes must be returned (10th) 11 (12) 13 14 15 16 17 Preliminary results are announced (12th) 18 (19) 20 21 22 23 24 Challenges to the results closed (19th) 25 26 27 28 29 30 --- More information about The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee and the voting process can be found here: https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee http://vote.gnome.org --- Happy Voting, Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME.Asia 2012 Official Announcement
Hosting GNOME.Asia 2012 June 9-15, 2012 Hong Kong It is with great pleasure that we announce that Hong Kong has been selected as the venue of our upcoming GNOME.Asia 2012. GNOME.Asia 2012 follows the release of GNOME 3.4, helping to bring new desktop paradigms that facilitate user interaction in the computing world. It will be a great place to celebrate and explore the many new features and enhancements to the groundbreaking GNOME 3 release and to help make GNOME as successful as possible. Hong Kong is well known for being one of the largest cities in Asia, with a thriving cultural scene, solid infrastructure, and robust public transportation system. Many countries have a visa-free period for travel with Hong Kong and the city has well integrated international connections. We believe that hosting the event in Hong Kong will bring the spotlight on GNOME and make an impact locally, regionally and internationally in terms of business and community building. Aside from being a business capital, Hong Kong is also well known as a tourist destination that is famous for its food, shopping and many attractions. Potential sites for the conference are the Breakthrough Youth Village Campsite and City University of Hong Kong, and reasonable rates for accommodations have been arranged. We are currently evaluating the best possible dates for the event, and should be able to announce it within the coming week. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the GNOME.Asia 2012 bidding process, especially the great work from Team GNOME Hong Kong and Team GNOME Indonesia. We look forward to working with you more in the future! Brian Cameron GNOME Foundation President === Best regards Max ___ gnome-asia-committee-list mailing list gnome-asia-committee-l...@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-asia-committee-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME Foot Logo Trademark
Foundation Members: I am happy to report that the GNOME Foot logo currently used by GNOME has been trademarked as Reg. # 4063108 filed November 29, 2011. The GNOME Foundation is aware that we need to renew the GNOME word mark (Reg. #3142483) before September 2012, and we are now working to get this done. With the recommendation of the SFLC and Karen Sandler, the GNOME Foundation is not planning to renew the trademark for the old GNOME foot logo used with GNOME 1.x (Reg. #3142484) since this logo is no longer actively used with any GNOME products. More detail about GNOME Trademarks can be found here: http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/ Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
What kind of device is GNOME 3 best suited for?
I realize that there is a lot of development going on to make GNOME 3 function well on new kinds of devices, such as touch screen support. Awesome, really. However, I wonder on what sort of device GNOME 3 is best targeted for. Most tablets that are currently popular differentiate themselves a lot by features that relate to media. Many people love doing things like playing and creating audio and video using touch screen devices. We are starting to see products like this on the market, for example: http://www.digitech.com/en/products/ipb-10-programmable-pedalboard Wow! One challenge, I think, for the free software community is providing free media services, yet so much popular media is wrapped up in DRM and patents. Perhaps guitar effects pedals, while cool, is probably a pretty small market. However, I suspect there are markets where a GNOME 3 based desktop would be quite useful, such as in specific-use hardware like, perhaps point-of-sale systems. a PoS system based on free software would be an affordable solution to many small business owners, I'd think. I am sure this has been discussed, but I am curious what sort of devices people think GNOME 3 would be best suited for. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Desktop Summit Planning
Foundation: A point of clarification: On Wed 14 Dec 2011 04:42, Brian Cameronbrian.came...@oracle.com writes: 3. The GNOME community has been having trouble finding volunteers to help make events successful lately. You mention that we had a problem with this in the last Desktop Summit. Has this been a problem in other events as well? Yes, as you might remember, we have had difficulties organizing the Boston Summit this past year, ending up relocating the event to Montreal rather last minute. Also, most of the volunteers who have made GNOME.Asia successful the past few years have indicated that they are stepping down, so the future of GNOME.Asia is unclear and plans are behind normal schedule. We need volunteer help in these areas badly. If we want to have the Boston Summit at MIT again, I believe we need to secure rooms in the next month or two. Any volunteers? We need help in these areas. Over the years, GNOME community events have grown in frequency, size and the expectations of hosting professional quality events. It is a challenge for a volunteer community to keep up with consistently year after year. Currently, events tend to be planned in isolation and there is too much reinventing of wheels. GUADEC planning, for example, tends to mostly be done by the team who won the bid, and their ability to put together a good event does vary quite a bit from year to year. Fortunately, the 2012 GUADEC Planning team does seem to be in good shape, so this is one upcoming event that I am not so concerned about. I am happy to hear several people report positively about the GNOME volunteer presence at the Desktop Summit, and I apologize for not mentioning the name of every volunteer who did a great job helping to make the event successful, such as Patricia Santana Cruz, Chris Kühl, Jon Nordby, Stormy Peters, Andreas Nilsson, and and William from Texas. I am sure there are many more who have not yet been mentioned. That said, I do think that the last Desktop Summit event suffered from a general lack of participation on the GNOME side of things. When we were unable to find a sponsor for GNOME social events, alternatives were not organized, for example. GNOME was unable to find resources to help with infrastructure issues, such as identify management or helping to setup a registration system (a longstanding problem we seem to have year after year). More seriously, a event like the Desktop Summit should inspire collaborative work and there did not seem to be enough effort in terms of planning concrete collaborative activities. If we are to hold Desktop Summits in the future, I think we need to focus more energy in these areas to make them successful. I am not trying to make volunteers who did a great job feel badly that they did not do enough. Instead, I am trying to highlight that the amount of work is great and growing. We need to consider how to better address this going forward. How we can ramp up the energy? If the workload is too great, should we scale back our event planning efforts, or find help in other ways (e.g. perhaps by hiring more event planning help)? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Desktop Summit Planning
GNOME Foundation Members: At two previous GNOME Foundation IRC meetings, there has been discussion about how to approach the Desktop Summit[1] going forward. At the October 26th IRC meeting, Jon McCann spoke about his concerns about the Desktop Summit.[2] At the November 23rd meeting, Dave Neary (who was also very involved in making the past Desktop Summit happen), highlighted that there are real benefits to sharing facilities and that concerns can be fixed.[3] Dave pointed out that it would be best if a decision could be made sooner than later, since it is hard to start putting together bids for 2014 if the scope of the event is not clear. In support of having a Desktop Summit, the survey results taken at the event did report that a strong majority of attendees felt the event was a success and wanted it to continue at the 2-year interval. At the last GNOME Foundation Advisory board meeting, there was also strong support with only one advisory board representative against. The approving advisory board representatives felt that combining GUADEC and Akademy makes it easier for them to coordinate (e.g. sending people) and they appreciate that a combined event eases their ability to sponsor. Also, the past two Desktop Summit events have been profitable. The biggest complaints about the Desktop Summit seem to be: 1. It subtracts momentum from the GNOME brand and community. With GNOME 3 to focus on, the community needs to more focus on making GNOME 3 a success, less on collaboration. 2. It is hard to measure what specific collaborative benefits are being made possible by the Desktop Summit. It is hard to point to specific advances that have been accomplished. Some have concerns that not a lot of collaboration is actually being done. The GNOME Foundation board of directors has been discussing this topic at length[4]. The board is divided with 3 directors believing that the event needs to be organized significantly differently to continue, 3 directors believing that the survey results and advisory board discussions indicate the will of the Foundation community, and 1 director undecided.[5] In discussion, the following options have been suggested as ways to improve the event. 1. To not have a large combined GNOME+KDE event, and to instead have a smaller Desktop Summit or focused hackfest(s) with a more clear agenda to work on specific and measurable collaborative tasks. GUADEC and Akademy would continue as separate events. 2. To arrange the Desktop Summit so that it is more of a co-located event. The GNOME and KDE events are separate but overlap on certain days. For example, GUADEC could happen first and continue for several days, then a few combined days of Desktop Summit followed by several days of Akademy. This setup would likely be more complicated for bidding, since it would likely require a more dynamic space to accommodate the shifting needs. 3. The GNOME community has been having trouble finding volunteers to help make events successful lately. Some people like Dave Neary, Lennart Poettering, and Ekaterina Gerasimova did a great job volunteering to make the last Desktop Summit a success. However, the fact that there were too few volunteers engaged caused some real issues. Many of the things GNOME folks have complained about the last Desktop Summit were caused more by a lack of GNOME volunteers helping than anything else. For a Desktop Summit to be successful, we need to more clearly see that the GNOME community is more interested to engage and wanting to get involved. The board would like for the Foundation membership to help discuss and decide whether it makes sense to move forward with having a Desktop Summit. Although the Desktop Summit survey results indicated a strong majority were supportive of the current format, we want to want to understand what plans would engage GNOME Foundation members and volunteers the most. If we choose to have a Desktop Summit, we need to consider how the event needs to evolve to be more effectively collaborative and whether we think it should keep to the current 2-year schedule. The board has some concerns that this topic may be controversial, or generate flames. So, please, before responding take a moment to collect your thoughts and try to avoid rash responses. Keep in mind the GNOME Code of Conduct[6]. Thanks, Brian --- [1] https://www.desktopsummit.org/ [2] https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20111026 [3] https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC2023 [4] https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110809 https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110823 https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20111018 [5] https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/2001 [6] https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org
Re: Additional Hackfests - Brno
Reminder that you have 2 days to touch base with the Brno organizers to organize any additional hackfests there over February 17-21. Brian On 11/30/11 01:26 PM, Brian Cameron wrote: The Brno Hackfest organizers have recently let the GNOME Foundation board know that additional rooms for Hackfest use can be secured for roughly $25-42 USD per day (depending on the size of room needed). Rooms can be available from February 17-21. However, the organizers need to reserve rooms no later than December 14th. To me, this cost sounds rather reasonable. So, if any GNOME projects would like to meet with the Docs and GTK+ teams at Brno, please discuss and make arrangements in the next two weeks. The GNOME Foundation would be happy to discuss covering the costs of additional rooms needed for any additional approved Hackfest(s). Please contact bo...@gnome.org if you have any questions or want to discuss organizing any Hackfest. For details about the current Hackfests planned for Brno: https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/BrnoDocs2012 https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/GtkBrno2012 Let the board know even if you would like to plan a Hackfest at some other location or timeframe. There are currently no hackfests planned after February, so it would be good to start planning for more. I understand the Marketing and a11y teams have been talking about having a Hackfest. Have others? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal - merge the Foundation blog into gnome.org
Allan: On 12/ 5/11 04:17 AM, Allan Day wrote: Ping. Does someone who is on the board want to comment? How do we take this forward? I very much like the idea of streamlining the way we get the word out, so I think merging the new feed for gnome.org and the Foundation blog. We could probably do other things to make the News more visible, like make recent news more visible on the GNOME front page(s) for a period of time. I believe that one reason there is a Foundation blog is because using it ensures that the news is visible on Planet. It would be ideal if we made sure that people on Planet saw the latest news, though this could probably be done in other ways aside from having a Foundation blog. Perhaps, as I suggested earlier, we could just integrate News into the Planet front page more tightly. I am not sure what you are asking, though, when you ask how do we take this forward. Is there disagreement about how we should set this up, or do we need help making the changes? For example, do you think we need to involve the sysadmin team? Brian 2011/11/30 Andrea Veria...@gnome.org: On Wed, 30 Nov 2011, Dave Neary wrote: I'm sure there are a few people who would contest this - who are consciously not foundation members for some reason, while being GNOME hackers - and there is also the technical difficulty of where you draw the line for membership rights like having a vote in elections, but I think by and large, defining the membership of the GNOME Foundation as people involved in the GNOME project is fine. I'd be interested to hear why people don't feel they want to be Foundation members. I think it would be beneficial for the project if there is a closer relationship between being a contributor and being a Foundation member. So would I! But I know that in the past when we've talked about the value of foundation membership, there have been one or two people who said I don't want to be a foundation member. Things are changing on that side, we (Membership Committee) had several discussions and meetings with a few members of the Board about the guidelines and policies to adopt when renewing or accepting new Foundation members. If there is a problem, people should take it to foundation-list and discuss a possible solution, saying I don't want to be a Foundation member without a rationale or a motivation will definitely take us no where. During past elections (June 2011) we had some issues with the renewals notifications, someone mailed me saying there was a problem, the Committee had a meeting and everything is going great now or should I start talking about the criticisms we received about our application's form? The Foundation website is under a complete facelift and it'll go live really soon with a brand new application's page, more user-friendly with less fields and without the so-bad checkbox people out there hate so much. This is the way to solve problems and I will never stop saying that every GNOME hacker is *welcome* to join the Foundation, the way I see the GNOME Foundation is it being a big family, we should help each other and we should collaborate to make GNOME a better place for everyone. Fighting each other is *not* the way to go, please think about that. cheers, Andrea ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Additional Hackfests - Brno
The Brno Hackfest organizers have recently let the GNOME Foundation board know that additional rooms for Hackfest use can be secured for roughly $25-42 USD per day (depending on the size of room needed). Rooms can be available from February 17-21. However, the organizers need to reserve rooms no later than December 14th. To me, this cost sounds rather reasonable. So, if any GNOME projects would like to meet with the Docs and GTK+ teams at Brno, please discuss and make arrangements in the next two weeks. The GNOME Foundation would be happy to discuss covering the costs of additional rooms needed for any additional approved Hackfest(s). Please contact bo...@gnome.org if you have any questions or want to discuss organizing any Hackfest. For details about the current Hackfests planned for Brno: https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/BrnoDocs2012 https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/GtkBrno2012 Let the board know even if you would like to plan a Hackfest at some other location or timeframe. There are currently no hackfests planned after February, so it would be good to start planning for more. I understand the Marketing and a11y teams have been talking about having a Hackfest. Have others? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: New Foundation Members
Welcome new members! Brian On 11/18/11 05:04 AM, Andrea Veri wrote: Hi, The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee is proud to announce our newly approved Foundation Members. Please welcome and thank them for their great and valuable contributions over the GNOME Foundation. They are: * * Stéphane Maniaci (two Google Summer of Code within GNOME, little contributions to the GNOME-Shell's and PiTiVi's modules) * Maciej Piechotka (libgee's library maintainer, several bug reports and bug triaging work) * Antoine Jacoutot (Porting and packaging GNOME for the OpenBSD distribution) * Michael Hill (GNOME Documentation, organized the Toronto GNOME 3.2's Release party) * Jim Campbell (GNOME Documentation Team) * David Nielsen (Banshee, 2011 GNOME+Mono Hackfest) * Karen Sandler (Legal work and advices for the GNOME Foundation through the SFLC, GNOME's Executive Director) * Nilamdyuti Goswami (Assamese's language translations for GNOME 3.0 and 3.2) * Zhang Weiwu (Core member of the Beijing GNOME Users Group, GNOME Advocate and Ambassador) * Patricia Santana Cruz (Cheese, Desktop Summit 2011, Bug reporting and triaging) * Tong Hui (Beijing GNOME Users Group, GNOME-related talks and event organizator in Beijing) * Syntax is Name Surname (area of involvement) For any further question you may have, feel free to mail us at membership-committee@gnome org. (or me directly) Andrea Veri, on behalf of the GNOME Membership Committee ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - September 20, 2011
Paul: Great to see you on the list! = Minutes for Meeting of September 20 = [...] * Brian - Follow up with getting Alan Day and Sumana Harihareswara to sign the Copyright Assessment from SFLC. I can't seem to find any info about a SFLC 'Copyright Assessment' anywhere; could you tell me what that is or where to find info about it? This was for back in Feb / March / April when Sumana and Allan were hired as consultants to help with marketing the GNOME 3.0 launch. The Copyright Assessment was for if they created any marketing materials while as a consultant, GNOME would have the rights to those materials. As far as the form itself, I'm not sure, though I remember getting their signature for something - Rosanna would have a copy. Yes, we did already complete the paperwork for their work contracts. The GNOME Foundation legal advisers recommended they sign an additional Copyright Assessment form, but never provided us with a copy of the form for them to sign. I just had a meeting with Karen today to get this moving again. We will likely ask Alan and Sumana to sign the form when it is ready. My understanding is that this form is just a simple agreement to confirm that Alan and Sumana are agreeable to license the work they did for The GNOME Foundation under standard and reasonable free licenses. So, I do not imagine that this will be anything troublesome. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: The Boston (or Boston) Summit?
Joanie: The announcement was just made today that the summit is October 8-10 in Montreal: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2011-September/msg0.html Brian The other day I heard an interesting rumor, which I've since been able to confirm [1]: There's a small chance that the Boston Summit might be the Montreal Summit. Montreal is all kinds of charming awesomeness, and if that is where the Summit is going to be this year, that's great. But it does of course mean that some people who didn't have to travel will now have to, and that some meetings of convenience with non-GNOME local folks might need to be rescheduled. Thus, for the purpose of managing logistics, I would find it extremely helpful to know where the Summit will be this year and if it will be held on the traditional date (i.e. only one month from now). With apologies to all for being a noodge (and especially to Emmanuele for my impatience after he suggested we might know something today.) Thanks in advance! --joanie [1] https://live.gnome.org/Boston2011 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - June 28th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the June 28th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110628 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- = Minutes for Meeting of June 28th, 2011 = == Next Meeting == July 12th, 2011 == Attending == * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Karen Sandler * Rosanna Yuen === Regrets === * Og Maciel * Stormy Peters * Emily Chen === Missing === == Recurring Items == * Review past action items. * Did each person update their action items? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to use gobby server for better minute taking. == New Items == * New board and next meeting * Election results announced * https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-June/msg00030.html * The next board will include: * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emmanuele Bassi * Stormy Peters * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Ryan Lortie * Shaun McCance * ACTION: Germán - To touch base with the membership committee about finalizing the vote, and to invite the new members to the next board meeting. * CA Legal Status * The GNOME Foundation is no longer a suspended organization in the state of California. Thanks Karen! * GNOME Foundation IRC meeting on June 29th. * ACTION: Andreas - Will moderate the IRC meeting on the 29th. * GObject-Introspection Hackfest * ACTION: Germán - Will touch base with the GObject-Introspection Hackfest and make sure that people attending also attend the Desktop Summit if possible. * Olav Vitters pinged the board about RHN entitlements. * ACTION: Bastien - Will touch base with the appropriate people in Red Hat to see if the RHN entitlements can be approved. * There are some GNOME related domains that need to be transferred to The GNOME Foundation. * ACTION: Karen - Will take over discussions to take over ownership of some GNOME related domains. * LojaGeek.com needs attention with their merchandising agreement. * ACTION: Brian - Will provide Karen with past discussions about LojaGeek. * ACTION: Karen - Will follow up with LojaGeek. * Boston Summit Organization * ACTION: Karen - Will contact people to try and push forward the organization of Boston Summit. * Debian/GNOME logo license question * ACTION: Karen - Will follow up with Debian about their usage of the GNOME logo. == Completed Actions == * Emily - Will work with Pockey Lam to ensure that MOSC2011 (Malaysia, July 3-5, 2011) has the GNOME resources needed. * Emily - Will contact the guadec-list and gugmeisters mailing lists to encourage people to get involved with GUADEC 2012 planning. * Emily - To contact owners of the Quarterly Report sections and get the reports finished. == Status of action items == * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. (will ping again) * Andreas - Will look into the possibility of a Desktop Summit design where the facade is more neutral. * Andreas - Will blog a Desktop Summit status report. * Andreas - Will discuss with Ryan Lortie providing support contracts for GTK+. * Andreas - To verify meeting times for the Desktop Summit. That August 9th is a good date for the board and AGM meetings and August 10th for the Advisory Board meeting. Will confirm on board list, then the advisory board list. * Andreas - To start work on next 2011 Annual Report ASAP (due start FY2012). Taken over from Paul. * Andreas - Will help Emily publish the quarterly report. * Bastien - To discuss the use of badges (a-la Creative Commons, last.fm page colors, or PSN badges). * Bastien - To talk to Olav Vitters about using bugzilla to track Friends of GNOME post card sending. * Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering. * Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME. * Bastien - Will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there. * Bastien - Reach out to the GNOME Advisory Board via email to see if they can help out with providing contacts at Yahoo. * Bastien - To make sure that the IM, Contacts Social Hackfest gets added to http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests. * Bastien - To put together a proposal for how technical issues could be mediated within the community. * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this. * Brian - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from
Meeting Minutes Published - June 14th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the June 14th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110614 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- = Minutes for Meeting of June 14th, 2011 = == Next Meeting == June 28th, 2011 == Attending == * Andreas Nilsson * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Karen Sandler * Og Maciel * Stormy Peters === Regrets === * Bastien Nocera * Rosanna Yuen === Missing === == Recurring Items == * Review past action items. * Did each person update their action items? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to use gobby server for better minute taking. == New Items == * Discussed recent changes to the board. * The board thanks Paul for his dedicated work on the board and wishes him the best in his future endeavors! * Welcome Karen as the new GNOME Foundation ED * Verified that Karen has access to important mailing lists, Wiki pages, etc. * Karen - Will compose a press release by the end of the week. * Brian - Will work with Karen to finish I9 paperwork. * Planning for the Advisory Board meeting next week on Tuesday the 21st. * Agenda will include: * Will announce the new ED at the Advisory Board, then on the advisory board and foundation mailing lists. * Talk about the Desktop Summit * Talk about recent hackfests (and ask about ideas for new ones). * GUADEC 2012 call for bids is closing. * Quarterly Report Plans - Update * Q1 report is closing tomorrow. Will then send to marketing-list by Friday for a final review. * Emily Andreas - Will publish the Q1 quarterly report on the web on Friday * Build GUADEC Event Committee - Update * Currently doing the call for bids for GUADEC 2012. * https://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2012/Bids * Will have an update after the GUADEC Planning Committee IRC meeting on Monday the 20th. * GUADEC planning committee will decide if the deadline needs to be extended or not at the GUADEC Planning Committee IRC meeting. == Completed Actions == * Andreas - To send another e-mail to advisory board to remind about upcoming Advisory Board meeting dates and times. * Brian - Will work with Karen to finish I9 paperwork. == Status of action items == * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. (will ping again) * Andreas - Will look into the possibility of a Desktop Summit design where the facade is more neutral. * Andreas - Will blog a Desktop Summit status report. * Andreas - Will discuss with Ryan Lortie providing support contracts for GTK+. * Andreas - To verify meeting times for the Desktop Summit. That August 9th is a good date for the board and AGM meetings and August 10th for the Advisory Board meeting. Will confirm on board list, then the advisory board list. * Andreas - To start work on next 2011 Annual Report ASAP (due start FY2012). Taken over from Paul. * Andreas - Will help Emily publish the quarterly report. * Bastien - To discuss the use of badges (a-la Creative Commons, last.fm page colors, or PSN badges). * Bastien - To talk to Olav Vitters about using bugzilla to track Friends of GNOME post card sending. * Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering. * Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME. * Bastien - Will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there. * Bastien - Reach out to the GNOME Advisory Board via email to see if they can help out with providing contacts at Yahoo. * Bastien - To make sure that the IM, Contacts Social Hackfest gets added to http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests. * Bastien - To put together a proposal for how technical issues could be mediated within the community. * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this. * Brian - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent Untz. Look at the archives in 2005 and try to determine which companies can use the GNOME trademark. Know what kind of contracts we had with them. Taken over from Jorge. * Brian - Will follow up with the lawyers to discuss what would be involved to provide liability protection like what the Conservancy provides and to see if they have any perspective about whether the GNOME Foundation should allow GNOME projects to join Conservancy. * Brian - Will touch base with the GIMP organizers to find out their plans for the GIMP money. * Brian Og
Meeting Minutes Published - June 7th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the June 7th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110607 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- = Minutes for Meeting of June 7th, 2011 = == Next Meeting == June 14th, 2011 == Attending == * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters === Regrets === * Paul Cutler === Missing === == Recurring Items == * Review past action items. * Did each person update their action items? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to use gobby server for better minute taking. == New Items == * Paul is stepping down. * Andreas is stepping up to replace Paul as president. * Bastien is stepping up as vice-president. * After the board agreed Stormy should be considered first as replacement for Paul, Germán asked Stormy, and she agreed to step up to the board. * ACTION: Brian - Wiki and mailing-list updates for Stormy to reflect she is on the board. * ACTION: Andreas - Will send the announcement of the board member changes on Tuesday, June 14th or later. * ED Hiring next steps. * We will need to schedule a meeting with Karen as soon as she signs the contract. * ACTION: Og - Will ping the new ED and the lawyers tomorrow and make sure things are moving along. * Canonical and Banshee Revenue Sharing - Update * ACTION: Stormy - To take over Canonical related action items from Paul. * Annual Report * ACTION: Andreas - Will take over the Financial Report actions. * ACTION: Stormy - Will take over GnuCash automation actions. * Quarterly Report Plans * ACTION: Andreas - Will help Emily publish the quarterly report. * ACTION: Germán - Will finish the Financial section of the quarterly report. * Build GUADEC Event Committee * Brian and Emily attended the first GUADEC Event Committee meeting. * GUADEC 2012 Bids * https://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2012/Bids * Discussed what's needed for a successful GUADEC bid. Would like to have it in a country where it has not been before. * Past GUADEC Budget Information * https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/FinancialStatus * ACTION: Germán - To send link to previous year's GUADEC's budgets to guadec-list. * Can we send goodies to Pockey Lam for the MOSC2011 conference in Malaysia (July 3-5, 2011) * ACTION: Emily - Will work with Pockey Lam to ensure that MOSC2011 has the GNOME resources needed. * Seeking $3,209 (USD) for sending speakers to COSCUP. * Approved by the board. Bastien abstained since he is a speaker. Stormy abstained as she just started at the start of the meeting and has not reviewed the budget. All other votes by those present were positive. * Sponsor FISL accommodation for two Brazilian contributors ($350). * Approved unanimously. * IM, Contacts Social Hackfest (June 13-17, Cambridge) * Everything is moving along well, according to Bastien. * https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/IMContactsSocial2011 * Bank update (Rosanna) * Gotten most of the money returned. Getting all of the funds will take 6-8 weeks. * Rosanna has a meeting with the bank tomorrow to discuss these ongoing issues. Will provide an update after the meeting. * Dates for GUADEC advisory board meeting, board meeting and (all hands) meeting. * ACTION: Andreas - To send another e-mail to adboard to remind about upcoming Advisory Board meeting dates and times. * Membership Renewal Issues. * Some people's renewal emails went to spam and they did not catch it in time to renew in time for voting. * ACTION: Germán - Will talk to membership committee to see if we can do something to help remind people to renew memberships to avoid people losing the ability to vote. == Completed Actions == * Andreas - Will send the announcement of the board member changes on Tuesday, June 14th or later. * Brian - Wiki and mailing-list updates for Stormy to reflect she is on the board. * Brian - Will call the lawyer to find status on ED hiring and update the board. * Emily - Will take care of handling funds from GNOME 3.0 Goodies. Send out a updated expense budget report after produced GNOME 3 goodies. Will need to adjust after spending money to deliver gifts for the GNOME 3 Party Best Photo winners. * Emily - Update Tracking ID for 112 Launch Party Packages. * Germán - To send link to previous year's GUADEC's budgets to guadec-list. This new action item was done shortly after the meeting. * Og - Will ping the new ED and the lawyers tomorrow and make sure things are moving along
Re: Two Questions for the Board Candidates
On 05/26/11 12:38, Lefty wrote: I'd be interested to know what, if anything, candidates for the Board propose to do to address the ongoing waste of time and energy in the community over trivia like Linux versus GNU/Linux, free versus open source, and the like. This extends to things like litmus tests on mailing lists derailing discussions into observations about which email clients or operating systems participants might be using at the time they post, for example. Since GNOME is a free software project, some discussion about topics like GNU/Linux are bound to happen, and at times these do become tense. I do not think there is a problem in discussing such topics as long as they are done in the right forums. In the past I have suggested creating a new mailing list focused on free software specific GNOME topics. If such discussions are creating too much noise on other lists, this might be a good solution. The GNOME Foundation board does work to deal with issues when discussions become problematic, wasteful of time, or violate the Code of Conduct. The board typically only gets involved in exceptional situations. Generally, it does seem that people try to be reasonable and responsible with their communications. With GNOME 3 recently being released, there are probably more things to debate, discuss, and get heated about than normal. So, I agree the board will likely need to be more involved with helping to moderate discussions and keep the community focused on what is important. Attempts to divide the community and delegitimize individuals and their viewpoints are common, and becoming increasingly so in the past few years. Bad feelings have driven many away from the level of involvement in the community they've previously had. Do candidates see this as a problem? Do they have any proposals for addressing it? Yes, it is a problem when the GNOME community attitude is unwelcoming. I believe that through making better efforts to moderate, and to do more things to welcome new people (such as programs like the Women's Outreach program) help to create a more suitable atmosphere for collaboration. That said, there will be some degree of conflict and disagreement in any group. It sometimes can be hard to draw the line between ongoing bad behavior and a passionate outburst. So, these sorts of situations will always need to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Second: Do candidates have any view as to how the disastrous attempts at engagement by GNOME with the mobile space might be improved on? Do candidates have any thoughts on the future of GNOME with respect to the mobile space? I very much feel the same as Stormy. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
Dave: I was away last week travelling, so I'm coming late to the election campaign. I have almost decided who I would like to vote for, but there are still a few things which are important to me when considering a prospective board member. 1. If elected, will you seek a named position (chairman/treasurer/secretary) on the board? If so, why? I have served as secretary for the past two years. I am undecided about what position I might seek in the next term, but I do think I will seek some position again. 2. Board meetings are minuted, and these minutes are published regularly. However, the board also increasingly makes decisions on board-list with the Apache +1/0/-1 convention. Would you support the minuting of these votes, including recording any -1 votes? Yes I would. This seems a reasonable request to me, and I approve of being more transparent. That said, I think it is very rare when a vote is controversial. 3. I think financial transparency is important. If you plan on applying for the treasurer position, what changes (if any) would you propose for the budgeting process? How often would you publish financial reports for the foundation? Are you happy with the level of transparency in the board's finances now? I am not planning to run for treasurer. I would like to see The GNOME Foundation become more transparent and to release information more regularly. In the past year, we really struggled to get the Annual Report completed and it was quite late. The GNOME Foundation really needs more interested volunteers to help with things like this, especially if there is interest in improving things in these areas. 4. Our relationship with a number of groups has suffered this year - and one of the lesser known ones (but one I'm involvedd in) is the Libre Graphics Meeting organisers (a group of people representing a couple of dozen free art projects). Are you aware that the LGM organisers withdrew all the funds that the GNOME Foundation was managing for them this year, because they have been unhappy with the responsiveness and quality of communication with the foundation over the past 2 - 3 years? Do you have any thoughts on why this particular relationship degraded? The LGM's needs were beyond the capacity of our abilities and staffing. Considering the frequency that they needed access to their funds, it makes more sense for them to manage their own funds. While the situation was frustrating, I think it is a sign that LGM is very robust that they outgrew the services GNOME could provide them. And will you commit to handling or delegating answers to all time-critical queries which come to the board during your term? We really try our best. Things sometimes do become problems when a request or query is made and there is no clear person to delegate to. Improving the structure of the GNOME community is often a part of the solution. For example, the board is currently working to create an Event Planning committee to help deal with the most common sorts of queries the board tends to currently deal with. 5. In general, as a board member communication is vital to keep people outside the board informed whenever there is a delay or when extra input is needed on something they're working on. For incumbents, are you happy with the level of communication reactivity in the current board? For new candidates, what would you like to do to ensure that the communication reactivity of the board improves in the coming term? As secretary, I have worked hard to keep communication channels open and to keep people informed. Is there more we could do? Of course. I would like to continue to help build teams of volunteers. I think that GNOME tends to work best, as a community, when we encourage people to get more actively involved in helping to ensure that things are working well, communication is effective, etc. 6. Board members are ambassadors for the foundation. I think it's important that board members be social, and be nice. Are you nice? I think I am nicer, but uglier, than the average American. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
RMS: * What do you think GNOME should do to help promote the ideals of free software, beyond being composed of free programs. GNOME is a free software project, so I do think it is important to work to promote the ideals of free software. I think GNOME does a great job doing this in many ways. We do this already by encouraging more involvement by women via the Women's Outreach Program, more involvement by students via Google Summer of Code, and so on. There is a lot more we could do. For example, it would be exciting if the FSF and GNOME could do joint fund raising to improve free software accessibility or to organize something more significant for Software Freedom Day. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: on-line services
Gil: On 05/26/11 17:27, Gil Forcada wrote: Hi members, Everyday more and more services are offered on the cloud and there's also initiatives powered by Free Software (tomboy on-line...). One of the main problems for Free Software projects providing cloud services is the hardware/administration/connection expenses which are mostly a no-go for a Free Software project without any backing from a big corporation. Thanks for the great question. The GNOME community already provides a lot of great on-line services ranging from source code control systems, a CRM system, and a significant web presence. So, I think it is important to recognize that this is not something completely new. The main development is that such services seem to be more end-user focused rather than developer focused. I helped in these efforts by helping to push the Tomboy Online hackfest in the past year. One challenge that has been hampering efforts in this vein has been the fact that GNOME's server hardware has been aging. Over the past couple of years, the board has been working with the community to address these issues, but there is more to do. As a member of a the future board will you look for ways to promote and look for resources to offer these free software cloud services? Maybe part of a funding campaign (be a Friend of GNOME and have a Tomboy on-line account for free). Most specific decisions on how to run Friends of GNOME and do such promotion is handled by GNOME Marketing Team. Many board members are a part of the Marketing Team, so there is some overlap. I am supportive of any campaign to improve the presence of GNOME and free software online services. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS
Andy: On 05/26/11 04:51, Andy Wingo wrote: You just used the name Richard Stallman as a token for this argument is invalid. You then proceeded to call someone stalinist; was it Richard? Was it GNOME OS proponents? Unclear. This was a poor attempt at humor, I guess. With my words I was only trying to discourage a divisive attitude such as Richard sometimes seems to when he talks about GNU/Linux. I clearly failed miserably. In any case, it's quite offensive, especially coming from a member of and candidate for the board. Apologies, I did not mean to offend. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for all board candidates
Jeff: On 05/26/11 07:43, Jeff Schroeder wrote: 1.) For incumbents, have you missed any meetings? What is your % of missed vs attended meetings and why? For new challengers, how much time can you dedicate to working on the board each week? How do you plan on spending that time? Overall, attendance has been quite good on the board over the past year. I think this board has been more active than past boards I have served on. Since Stormy left her position as ED, the board has naturally been under pressure to keep the momentum going. I missed 3 (out of 23) board meetings and 0 (out of 5) advisory board meetings in the past year. One missed meeting I could not attend since I was on a plane to GNOME.Asia on 8/19/2010. Most board members missed at least one meeting in the past year due to time zone conversion confusion, and it happened twice to me. 2.) Other open source / free software projects run their meetings in the open via IRC (such as Fedora's FESCO I believe). Would you consider that, and if not, what about recording how board members vote on a given topic. This includes +1 / -1 / abstains and perhaps give a small comment on any -1 or abstain. As GNOME Foundation secretary, I have worked hard to make sure that GNOME Foundation board discussion with useful links are included in the minutes. When a vote is controversial, I have tried to provide details. The fact that you see so few notes about -1 or abstain votes is more because the board tends to be in agreement on most matters. In my opinion, as an open foundation, the transparency of the board is absolutely critical _where possible_. Leaders should always set the example for members. I think that the level of transparency has been good. If people think there are any particular issues, lets talk about them and figure out how to improve things. Some private meetings are necessary to deal with some things, such as employee or advisory board relations, non-for-profit tax status, etc. The GNOME Foundation has been running regular public IRC meetings to discuss community concerns. Often the agenda is empty, as it is at the moment: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes#Foundation_IRC_Meetings You are right that many of the things that the board works on are things that would be better managed more publicly by committees or teams, such as the Release Team, the Marketing Team, and the Travel Planning Committee. The board recognizes this and is currently working to set up a new Events Planning Committee and better formalize the GUADEC planning committee. This should help. When people notice that topics are being discussed at the board level that people think should be better discussed at a wider level, then we normally talk about them on this mailing list or at the next IRC meeting. Join us, it would be great to get more community involvement and help. * When: Wednesday, May 18th, 14:00 UTC * Where: irc.gnome.org, #foundation * Next Meeting: Wednesday, June 1st, 14:00 UTC * Agenda: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MeetingAgenda Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidates question: Contributor agreement
Olav: On 05/26/11 05:01, Olav Vitters wrote: Given that we already have a policy on copyright assignments[1], I wondered what is your position regarding contributor agreements[2]? Should the board do something with contributor agreements and if so, what should be done? I am proud to say that over the past few years The GNOME Foundation has gotten several modules to drop their frivolous demands for assignments by applying pressure in this area. The GNOME Copyright assignment policy is clear that while we generally oppose them, still any situation must be considered on a case-by-case basis. So, whenever there is an issue, we still need to discuss it and this often takes time. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
Andy: On 05/25/11 13:10, Andy Tai wrote: As Fedora is the only current GNU/Linux distribution adapting GNOME 3.0 as the default desktop, how would you facilitate to make GNOME technologies to work well (meaning minimal local patching needed) on other GNU/Linux distributions like Debian, and such distributions which may work on components competing with certain parts of GNOME, such as Ubuntu? And how would you facilitate to make GNOME 3 run well on other free OS environments, especially the BSD based ones, like OpenBSD and FreeBSD? I think everyone is encouraged to work towards making GNOME work to meet their needs, as with any free software. As long as patches can be kept manageable and under control, then I do not foresee any serious problems. And how would you facilitate collaborations with Ubuntu, especially, despite the different viewpoints of developers on issues like GNOME Shell vs. Unity? The GNOME Foundation already does work to encourage discussion between important contributors. There are a lot of topics to consider and discuss surrounding GNOME Shell and Unity and other technologies based on GNOME. I am sure this will be a big focus over the next year and beyond. At any rate, I think that Unity and GNOME Shell share enough infrastructure that there should be no serious concern that we will stop collaborating. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - May 10th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the May 10th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110510 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of May 10th, 2011 Next Meeting * May 24th, 2011 Board Meeting Private Agenda Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Og Maciel * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Paul Cutler Missing * Germán Póo-Caamaño Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person update their action items? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to use gobby server for better minute taking. New Items * Marketing Update and Post Mortum. Alan Day and Sumana Harihareswara joined for this section of the meeting. o Things to focus on: + The Fedora 15 release will be the first release with GNOME 3 so it will likely shape public perceptions. + Need to coordinate better planning for the 3.2 release, and releases going forward. + Building relationships with Journalists and media. + Set up press kit materials. + Build burst capacity into *.gnome.org sites. + Need a leader for the Ambassador program. o Considered ways to improve marketing involvement: + Getting more people involved with updating the website or GNOME Journal. + Better recognition. + One of the conclusions was that if we just execute better on the things we know we should be doing, we will see improvement. We do not necessarily need more plans or structure. It is important to return email promptly, be encouraging, and so on. o Alan and Sumana agreed to put together a Wiki page to highlight their experience working for The GNOME Foundation to help people get better engaged and involved with The GNOME community. * Open Help Conference o The board oted +6 to approve the budget of $3,170 for 4 people to attend. o ACTION: Brian - One attendee to the Open Help Conference needs an invitation letter for their Visa. Brian to provide a signed copy to Shaun McCance. o ACTION: Brian - To notify Shaun McCance that the hackfest costs will be covered. * COSCUP asked if a GNOME speaker could talk at COSCUP 2011. o This COSCUP conference focus is Gadgets beyond Smartphones, so they are looking for a speaker to talk about topics like small footprint devices like netbooks and mobile. o Bastien expressed interest in attending COSCUP in Taiwan to discuss GNOME Mobile, which is the topic of the upcoming COSCUP event. + Emily and Bastien to discuss further offline. * The board approved Bastien signing the GTK+/MeeGo contract for The GNOME Foundation. o ACTION: Bastien - To sign and send the GTK+/MeeGo contract back to Igalia. * The board approved budgeting $2,500 (USD) for Og traveling to FISL. * The board approved sending GNOME stickers to Paul to hand out at Fedora events. Completed Actions * Andreas - To invite Marina Zhurakhinskaya (Women's Outreach), Shaun McCance (upcoming OpenHelp Hackfest), and Dave Neary (Desktop Summit training) to talk at the meeting. * Andreas - To collect 3 bullet items from each speaker highlighting what they will talk about. * Bastien - To respond to Ryan Lortie's propsoal to improve technical leadership. This new action was done shortly after the meeting. * Brian - One attendee to the Open Help Conference needs an invitation letter for their Visa. Brian to provide a signed copy to Shaun McCance. The new action was done shortly after the meeting. * Brian - To notify Shaun McCance that the hackfest costs will be covered. This new action was done shortly after the meeting. Status of action items * Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. (will ping again). * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. (will ping again) * Andreas - Will look into the possibility of a Desktop Summit design where the facade is more neutral. * Andreas - Will blog a Desktop
Meeting Minutes Published - April 26th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the April 26th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110426 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of April 26th, 2011 Next Meeting * May 10th, 2011 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Emily Chen Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person update their action items? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to use gobby server for better minute taking. New Items * Advisory Board Meeting o Next meeting planned for Tuesday, May 3rd. o ACTION: Andreas - To invite Marina Zhurakhinskaya (Women's Outreach), Shaun McCance (upcoming OpenHelp Hackfest), and Dave Neary (Desktop Summit training) to talk at the meeting. o ACTION: Andreas - To collect 3 bullet items from each speaker highlighting what they will talk about. * Sriram Ramkrishna raised some interesting questions about rhythmbox and MeeGo on April 19th. o Plan to raise this issue with the Intel Advisory Board members. * The two marketing contracts are signed and completed. o Paul recommended inviting Allan and Sumana to an upcoming board meeting to do a post-mortum. The board agreed. o ACTION: Brian - Follow up with getting Alan Day and Sumana Harihareswara to sign the Copyright Assessment from SFLC. * Brian wrote a proposal on April 14th about how to better organize earmarked fundraising. o ACTION: All board members - To review and comment Brian's April 14th proposal regarding better organizing earmarked fundraising. * Improving relations with Canonical o Meeting now scheduled for April 27th. Completed Actions * Brian - Will draft an 2012 GUADEC Call for Bids email based on previous ones. * Paul - Will put together an email to Canonical regarding working towards improving relations. (Cancelled per board meeting 4/12) * Paul - Set up a phone call with the right people at Canonical, the GNOME Foundation board and/or GNOME release team to discuss how to improve relations. (Scheduled for April 27) * Paul - Will work with Allan Day and Sumana Harihareswara to get the marketing contracts signed. (Done and forwarded to Rosanna) * Paul - Sent Justin credit card info for Trademark application * Paul - Will email John (J5) Palmieri to find out what needs to happen for Boston Summit 2011 planning. Status of action items * Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. (will ping again). * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. (will ping again) * Andreas - Will look into the possibility of a Desktop Summit design where the facade is more neutral. * Andreas - Will blog a Desktop Summit status report. * Andreas - Will discuss with Ryan Lortie providing support contracts for GTK+. * Andreas - Will look into planet.gnome.org header to see if we can add a link to see news.gnome.org. This will help more readers to hopefully notice IRC meeting. * Bastien - Will try to find people who can consolidate the feedback about the Texas Instruments Zoom2 device to provide back to Texas Instruments. * Bastien - Will take over the internal review process task from Diego Urrelo (hopefully he can automate it). * Bastien - To find a way to automate the process of exporting results from internal review process and email it to the board. * Bastien - To discuss the use of badges (a-la Creative Commons, last.fm page colors, or PSN badges). * Bastien - To talk to Olav Vitters about using bugzilla to track Friends of GNOME post card sending. * Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering. * Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME. * Bastien - Will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there. * Bastien - Reach out to the GNOME Advisory Board via email to see if they can help out with providing contacts at Yahoo. * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian
Re: Call for hosts for GUADEC 2012
Jon: On 04/27/11 09:56 AM, William Jon McCann wrote: What does this call (and its deadline) mean with regard to a potential co-hosting with aKademy in 2012 again (Desktop Summit)? The GNOME Foundation board and the aKademy board has already decided that the Desktop Summit will be a bi-annual event for the time being. Oh, that is unfortunate. I assume that a newly elected board will be able to reverse this decision. Is that correct? Yes, I thought that should have been clear by my saying for the time being. Since there are questions, I will try to be more clear. I think that GNOME and aKademy have only really agreed to have a co-hosted event in 2011 and to not have a co-hosted event in 2012. Beyond that, I do not think there is a real clear plan beyond a recognition that having a co-hosted event bi-annually seems to be a forming pattern. Decisions are very much being made year-by-year. But, correct, these decisions will be made by future elected boards and I would imagine that they would base their decisions on input from The GNOME Foundation community and how well things go in Berlin. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - March 29th, 2011
Olav: On 04/26/11 09:35 AM, Olav Vitters wrote: On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 09:29:09AM -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: For example, there have been several occasions where organizations have approached The GNOME Foundation wanting to donate funds with the idea of doing a link exchange. We have turned away such offers in That were real contacts with organizations that *really* wanted to support GNOME? I know of at least two occasions where there was a real discussion with another organization that worked with Free Software who wanted to advertise on the GNOME website. We turned them both away because we couldn't agree how to promote their organization on The GNOME website. I also see loads of link exchange emails for gnome.org and regard all as spam. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term link exchange. It really does not describe well the two situations that we had in the past. I used the term more because I figured people would understand the concept. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Call for hosts for GUADEC 2012
The GNOME Foundation invites proposals to host GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, during the Summer of 2012. GUADEC is the biggest gathering of GNOME users and developers and includes a multi-day conference, the annual general meeting of the members of the GNOME Foundation, and a week of coding, meeting, and discussing. For those of you who would like to host the next GUADEC in 2012 you are hereby invited to write a formal invitation to the board of the GNOME Foundation at board gnome org. The deadline for the proposals is June 20, 2011. Please send proposals to bo...@gnome.org. The conference will require availability of facilities for one week, including a weekend, during the summer. Dates should avoid other key free software conferences. Key points which proposals should consider, and which will be taken into account when deciding among candidates, are: * Local community support for hosting the conference. * Venue details. Information about infrastructure and facilities to hold the conference should be provided. * Information about how internet connectivity will be managed. * Lodging choices ranging from affordable housing to nicer hotels, and information about distances between the venue and lodging options. * The availability of restaurants or the organization of catering on-site, cost of food/beer. * The availability and cost of travel from major European cities. * Local industry and government support. * Please provide a reasonably detailed budget. * Bear in mind that at GUADEC, the hallway track and social activities are also very important. See the GUADEC check list [1] and the call-for-bids for previous GNOME events for additional things to consider when putting together a call-for-bids. Also feel free to contact bo...@gnome.org if you have any questions or need help. A few words of advice: organizing a conference of this size is hard work, but there are many people in the community with experience who will be there to help you. Thank you and looking forward to your bids! Brian [1] - http://live.gnome.org/GuadecPlanningHowTo/CheckList ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - March 29th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the March 29th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110329 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of March 29th, 2011 Next Meeting * April 11th, 2011 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person update their action items? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to use gobby server for better minute taking. New Items * On February 16th, Joanmarie Diggs asked if the GNOME a11y PayPal account can be used to receive GNOME a11y funds. o The main issue is that The GNOME Foundation does not have the staff to handle the accounting. Currently all PayPal transactions are handled manually. If this could be automated, this would make it more possible to consider this sort of request. o Perhaps The GNOME Foundation needs to find volunteers or hire people to help with accounting or to automate PayPal CRM automation. o ACTION: Paul - Will write a response to Joanie Diggs to discuss how to move forward regarding receiving GNOME a11y funds. * There has also been discussion about whether GNOME projects should be allowed to join Conservancy. o Andreas, Bastien, Paul: -1 o Emily, German, Og, Paul: 0 o ACTION: Brian - Will follow up with the lawyers to discuss what would be involved to provide liability protection like what the Conservancy provides and to see if they have any perspective about whether the GNOME Foundation should allow GNOME projects to join Conservancy. o ACTION: Paul Andreas - Will raise their concerns allowing GNOME projects joining the Conservancy. * CiviCRM Improvements o The board decided to approve $1,000 (USD) to improve the CiviCRM, as Rosanna requested. o ACTION: Og - Will notify Rosanna that $1,000 (USD) to improve CiviCRM has been approved. * GNOME 3 release! o Andreas feels that the GNOME 3 release is solid. * GNOME.Asia (Brian, Andreas, or Emily - update) o Lots of good work getting done on marketing, the release team, improving websites, fixing bugs. o Everybody in Bangalore is excited about the Hackfest. o The entrance admission has been eliminated, so the number of participants is naturally increasing. o The event is profitable even though there is no longer an entrance fee. * GNOME 3 Launch Party Update o Some parties have had trouble receiving the goodies due to tax issues. o Alan Emily are planning a GNOME 3 Launch Party photo competition. o The board decided to return the $700 (USD) surplus to The GNOME Foundation bank account. * Johannes Schmid informed the board that at the Toronto hackfest that they discussed about an organization that decided to use Qt instead of GTK+ mainly because they were able to get a support contract for Qt. Therefore we thought it might be a good idea to give interested companies a chance to present themselves as commercial support options on developer.gnome.org. Perhaps via some Get support link. Do we have any response? o ACTION: Andreas - Will discuss with Ryan Lortie providing support contracts for GTK+. * Improve news.gnome.org o ACTION: Andreas - Will look into planet.gnome.org header to see if we can add a link to see news.gnome.org. This will help more readers to hopefully notice IRC meeting. * Continuing to work towards improving relationships with Canonical. Completed Actions * Bastien - To e-mail Murray about contacting UPS one more time regarding the lost Event Box. * Bastien - Will help find a home for the European Event Box. * Emily - Create a PO in Oracle and transfer the gold sponsorship from Oracle to GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 (Done, in process) * Emily - Produce, Deliver and Tracking goodies for GNOME 3.0 Launch Parties.(Done) * Emily - Prepare to launch the GNOME Store in Beijing o http://gnome.taobao.com/ * Og - Will notify Rosanna that $1,000 (USD) to improve CiviCRM has been approved. This new action item was completed shortly after the meeting. Status
Meeting Minutes Published - March 15th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the March 15th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110315 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of March 15th, 2011 Next Meeting * March 29th, 2011 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person update their action items? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to use gobby server for better minute taking. New Items * Discussion about improving The GNOME Foundation relationship with Canonical. o Mark Shuttleworth raised some good questions and concerns about GNOME direction and GNOME release team process to the board. o ACTION: Paul - Will put together an email to Canonical regarding working towards improving relations. o ACTION: Paul - Set up a phone call with the right people at Canonical, the GNOME Foundation board and/or GNOME release team to discuss how to improve relations. * Fraudulent check o A person not affiliated with GNOME brought to the board's attention a fraudulent check that was used for a non-GNOME related promotion. o The check used publicly available account information (used for donations), and used a GNOME account that does not allow for withdrawals. o The recipient of the check did not try to deposit it, as it looked fraudulent. * ED Hiring o The board agreed to do away with the bonus plan and instead roll $15,000 (USD) into the salary directly. This is, on average, the amount Stormy received via bonus in past years. * Bastien is looking for new contacts at Yahoo. o ACTION: Bastien - Reach out to the GNOME Advisory Board via email to see if they can help out with providing contacts at Yahoo. * Desktop Summit o The registration website is currently using KDE infrastructure. o Some people are not comfortable with this, but this was the easiest way to get things done with very limited resources. o ACTION: Andreas - Will look into the possibility of a design where the facade is more neutral. o ACTION: Andreas - Will blog a Desktop Summit status report. * GNOME 3.0 Launch o After producing and shipping the GNOME 3.0 launch goodies to 112 registered launch parties, there is $739.96 (USD) budget remaining. o How should the budget be used? Options discussed: + Transfer the money back to the GNOME Foundation account. + Use the money to support Bangalore GNOME.Asia Summit and 3.0 Hackfest. + Use the money to provide more goodies for parties (e.g. for parties that registered late). + Use the money to provide goodies to offer in exchange for a donation at GNOME.Asia? o The board agreed to consider these options and vote via email after the meeting. o ACTION: Emily - Follow by email about vote for the options for extra money o ACTION: Emily - Update Tracking ID for 112 Launch Party Packages. o ACTION: Emily - Prepare to launch the GNOME Store in Beijing o ACTION: Emily - Create a PO in Oracle and transfer the gold sponsorship from Oracle to GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 o Emily - Produce, Deliver and Tracking goodies for GNOME 3.0 Launch Parties. * The GNOME Foundation acquired the gnome-touch.org domain. Completed Actions * Andreas - Will send out emails to get more contacts or suggestions for someone who may be interested in applying. * Og - Will work to update the GNOME websites to update pages that refer to Stormy as the Executive Director. * Og - Will email the ED mailing list and ask for an update on how the hiring process is going, how many applications, etc. * Og - Will email the foundation-list mailing list with a reminder of January 12th IRC meeting time details. * Paul - To send email to the Advisory Board to request for help regarding Dave Neary's request. (Complete thanks to Vincent's reminder) * Paul - Will discuss with Canonical what we can do to improve communication. (Conference call with Rick Spencer
Meeting Minutes Published - February 15th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the March 1st GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110301 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of March 1st, 2011 Next Meeting * March 8th, 2011 Attending * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Andreas Nilsson Regrets * Rosanna Yuen Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Marketing Contract o Allan Day and Sumana Harihareswara both accepted the Marketing contract position. o Plan is to provide guidance via the gnome-marketing mailing list. Several board members are subscribed to this list. o Need to finalize the contract. o ACTION - Brian will finalize contract with Allan Day and Sumana Harihareswara * ED Hiring o The ED Hiring Committee provided the board with recommendations. The board is currently planning interviews. o ACTION: Brian to provide the questions the ED Hiring Committee used when doing interviews to the board via email. * Improving communication with Canonical o ACTION: Paul will discuss with Canonical what we can do to improve communication. * Event Box o ACTION: Bastien will help find a home for the European Event Box. * Hardware o The System76 laptop will be made available to the new ED when hired. o A new laptop will be purchased to replace Rosanna's aging one. o ACTION: Paul will follow-up to acquire a laptop for Rosanna. Completed Actions * Brian - To provide the questions the ED Hiring Committee used when doing interviews to the board via email. This new action item was completed shortly after the meeting. * Paul - Updated foundation.gnome.org to remove Stormy's bio * Paul - Extended job offers to two marketing contractors and let the others know they didn't get the position * Paul - Will update the GNOME Mobile website with the link and logo improvements. * Rosanna - Will take care of providing funds needed for production of goodies to be sent to registered parties. * Rosanna - Will handle the purchase orders with Google for GIMP/GStreamer GSoC mentor payments as she has been doing it already for GNOME. Status of action items * Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. (will ping again). * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. (will ping again) * Andreas - Will send out emails to get more contacts or suggestions for someone who may be interested in applying. * Bastien - Will try to find people who can consolidate the feedback about the Texas Instruments Zoom2 device to provide back to Texas Instruments. * Bastien - Will take over the internal review process task from Diego Urrelo (hopefully he can automate it). * Bastien - To find a way to automate the process of exporting results from internal review process and email it to the board. * Bastien - To discuss the use of badges (a-la Creative Commons, last.fm page colors, or PSN badges). * Bastien - To talk to Olav Vitters about using bugzilla to track Friends of GNOME post card sending. * Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering. * Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME. * Bastien - Will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there. * Bastien - To e-mail Murray about contacting UPS one more time regarding the lost Event Box. * Bastien - To e-mail GIMP about changing their website, and procedure for donating. * Bastien - Will email Joanie about options about whether it makes sense for orca to consider being a FreeDesktop project. * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this. * Brian - Check records of organizations with existing contracts
Re: Dropping TM when using GNOME Brand?
Vincent: A few years ago, it was agreed that it's fine to use the GNOME logo with just GNOME instead of GNOME™: the trademark is still valid even if we don't explicitly put the ™. Is this still valid? Use cases: - GNOME logo during boot of the GNOME 3 live image - GNOME logo in the System Information panel of the control center - etc. I asked our legal folks this question, and they responded as follows: Yes, it is recommended that you generally use the Tm, but in isolated instances it's fine to go without. I hope this is helpful. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Dropping TM when using GNOME Brand?
Allan: Sounds good. Let me know when you have the page updated and I'll ask the legal folks to give it a final look over to make sure the wording is good. Brian On 03/ 2/11 09:43 AM, Allan Day wrote: I understand that as it's okay to remove the TM in the two examples I gave. If someone disagrees, shout loud :-) Thanks for the clarification. I'll add these notes to our brand guidelines [1] if that's OK. Allan [1] http://live.gnome.org/BrandGuidelines ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - February 15th, 2011
The meeting minutes for the February 15th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110215 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Next Meeting * March 1st, 2011 Attending * Bastien Nocera * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Brian Cameron * Og Maciel Regrets * Andreas Nilsson Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Marketing Contract o Several candidates have applied. o The Board has approved to spend $10,000 USD and hire two people to assist with GNOME marketing (+6). * FAD in Ghana o The board agreed that we would like to budget sending 2 people if possible (spending up to USD $5,000). o ACTION: Brian to follow up with Ben to find out if he is interesting in going, and to try to identify 2 people to go. * GNOME 3.0 Launch parties - Budget and update o There are now 130 registered parties. Originally planned for 100 parties. + 25 parties in India alone. o The board has agreed to spend USD $7,111 in support of the launch parties since more parties have registered than expected. The previous amount was USD $5,926. o Originally planned for 500 t-shirts. Now planning 600. o Planning to produce some things locally if there are a large number of parties in a region. * GNOME.Asia Summit 2011 update o Google is now a Platinum sponsor. Thank you to Google! * Servers o The board has approved the purchase of the hardware needed + Two new servers. One is similar to ComboBox to host VMs to migrate GNOME services too, including Tomboy Online and others. The second server (USD $2000+) will host mission critical services, including LDAP, git and account related services. + This replaces the button server which has crashed multiple times in the last year. * Dave Neary's Advisory board request o ACTION: Paul to send email to the Advisory Board to request for help. * Trademark issues - can we update GNOME Mobile with a link to the GNOME Mobile product? o ACTION: Brian will mail Paul the link to the GNOME mobile product that we should add to the Mobile website, and follow up with the lawyers. To trademark GNOME Mobile, the GNOME logo needs to be more clearly associated with the GNOME Mobile product. o ACTION: Paul will update the GNOME Mobile website with the link and logo improvements. * The board voted to support the Banshee maintainers proposal for Amazon / Banshee integration with Canonical. * Rosanna highlighted that the taxes are due today. They are not ready, but an extension has been filed. Completed Actions * Andreas - Will invite Dave Neary to give an update to the advisory board. * Andreas - Will find out if the Desktop Summit call for Sponsors will be ready to present at the advisory board meeting. * Brian - Will send out an email to marketing-list about a deadline for resume submission. * Brian - To follow up with Ben to find out if he is interesting in going, and to try to identify 2 people to go. This new action was done shortly after the meeting. * Brian - Will mail Paul the link to the GNOME mobile product that we should add to the Mobile website, and follow up with the lawyers. To trademark GNOME Mobile, the GNOME logo needs to be more clearly associated with the GNOME Mobile product. This new action was done shortly after the meeting. * Paul - Will follow up with the marketing-list to provide more details about what sort of work we would like to have done for the marketing contract. * Paul - Will send an email to announce the meeting agenda to the advisory board list by Friday. Status of action items * Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. (will ping again). * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 1st, 2011
Og: On 02/16/11 02:16 PM, Og Maciel wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Brian Cameronbrian.came...@oracle.com wrote: Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Og Maciel Was I there or not? :) Can you fix the Wiki if it is in error? Thanks, Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 1st, 2011
Stormy: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com mailto:brian.came...@oracle.com wrote: * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? Has this been happening? Some of the action items have been there for a long time. Some have been on there since last July. We did do a review of action items during the December 23rd and January 6th meetings. We did close a lot of old and stale actions, as you can see: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20101223 http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110106 That said, there are probably some that we missed and should address. I already added it to our agenda for the next meeting to do this again. * Orca / Software Freedom Conservancy o Discussions underway. The SFC is working to determine if it is possible for GNOME projects to join the SFC. o ACTION: Bastien will email Joanie about options about whether it makes sense for orca to consider being a FreeDesktop project. What would be the advantage for GNOME projects to join the SFC? I thought the GNOME Foundation provided all the services that SFC does. (I'm not opposed to the idea, just would like to understand why the projects want to.) I think their website explains the benefits: http://sfconservancy.org/overview/ http://sfconservancy.org/members/services/ http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/ The main benefits seem to be that they will help your project take care of finances/fundraising, and they also provide some protection against liabilities. The above website provides more details. So far, we have just had some discussions with the folks at Conservancy about whether it makes sense for GNOME projects to be a part of Conservancy. That said, it is not yet clear if the Conservancy will accept GNOME projects. We are waiting to find out from them if it is even an option. I believe that the orca project is interested in using Conservancy to accept donations targeting the orca project. There has been some discussion amongst the board about whether it might make sense to allow people to make GNOME a11y donations via Friends of GNOME or otherwise handle this within The GNOME community. However, some people (e.g. the marketing team) has concerns that if we open the door to allowing specific GNOME subgroups or projects to receive earmarked funds that this would or could spiral out of control, or make FoG too complicated. But, even if we supported receiving a11y funds via some GNOME Foundation mechanism, I think Joanie is still interested in having orca join the Conservancy if possible since she has indicated that she is very interested in the liability protection that they offer. There has been some discussion about whether The GNOME Foundation could provide similar protections, but I believe that their liability protection is possible because of the way their organization is structured. For example, they require that all project funds be managed centrally by them. I am not sure it would be practical or possible for The GNOME Foundation to require this of all GNOME modules. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - February 1st, 2011
Og: Looking on the board mailing list archives, you did send regrets to the list on February 1st. So I think you did not attend. Brian On 02/16/11 03:07 PM, Og Maciel wrote: On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Stormy Petersstormy.pet...@gmail.com wrote: You represent GNOME. You are a director on the Board of Directors. You represent me and everyone of the GNOME Foundation members. If my congressman/woman could not remember if they participated in important discussions, I'd be equally concerned. Understood. I hope you'll accept my word that I am fully committed to the work I do for the GNOME Foundation and that the fact I was confused about being present at said meeting was by no means lack of my interest or commitment. I have been to one too many meetings and was truly confused. I sure hope this lapse won't tarnish all the hard work I have done so far. As your representative I value your concern and thank you so much for making sure I stay true to my commitment to the Foundation and community. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - January 18, 2011
The meeting minutes for the January 6th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110118 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of January 18th, 2011 Next Meeting * February 1st, 2011 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets Missing * Brian Cameron Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Mono Hackfest: o http://live.gnome.org/GNOME%2BMonoHackfest2010 o Held in Brussels, February 7-11 (directly after FOSDEM 2011). o The Board has approved it. (+6) * Event Box: o FOSDEM is in a couple of weeks and GNOME 3 is around the corner. Having a functional Event Box in Europe is a must. o Bastien will ask to Murray to insist to UPS wrt the lost Event Box. o We are going to replace the old event box with a new one. €3,000 would be ok, but it should not restricted to that. If it were necessary, €5,000 well spent still would be ok. The figures are approximate. o [ACTION]: Bastien to e-mail Murray about contacting UPS one more time regarding the lost Event Box. * Friends of GNOME (FoG) updates o Needs to follow up with those who have deliverables. + Not getting replies. Does the Board have any suggestions? o Keeping Previous Donors web page up to date. o Helping Rosanna track new subscriptions and donations. + GIMP # [ACTION]: Bastien to e-mail GIMP about changing their website, and procedure for donating. + Women's Outreach + a11y * Canonical notified the board of their plans to ship Qt by default. o http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/568 o Discussing how to respond. o What can we do to improve the popularity of GTK+? + Better documentation, examples for User and Developer documentation may improve GTK+'s appeal. + Someone should take on spearheading a series of conversations, hackfests, etc .to raise GTK+ awareness. # GNOME Journal themed publication with coding tutorials? # Get some articles re-published from LWN? Completed Actions * Brian - Will discuss with Bradley Kuhn ideas about how to improve GNOME/a11y Fundraising. * Paul - Will do a call for agenda items to the Advisory Board list. Status of action items * Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. (will ping again). * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. (will ping again) * Andreas - Will send out emails to get more contacts or suggestions for someone who may be interested in applying. * Bastien - Will try to find people who can consolidate the feedback about the Texas Instruments Zoom2 device to provide back to Texas Instruments. * Bastien - Will take over the internal review process task from Diego Urrelo (hopefully he can automate it). * Bastien - To find a way to automate the process of exporting results from internal review process and email it to the board. * Bastien - To discuss the use of badges (a-la Creative Commons, last.fm page colors, or PSN badges). * Bastien - To talk to Olav Vitters about using bugzilla to track Friends of GNOME post card sending. * Bastien - To get _a_ WebOS/Palm contact from Lennart Poettering. * Bastien - To contact the BBC to discuss about possible collaboration in working directly with GNOME. * Bastien - Will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there. * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this. * Brian - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent Untz. Look
Re: Official announcement and invitation to GNOME 3.0 Hackfest and GNOME.Asia Summit 2011
Vinicius: I would really like to go, but at the moment I am worried about how much it would cost for me to go from Brazil to India. Kayak.com tells me it is a 27 hours flight with prices from about USD 1800. Considering that with this amount of money I can almost attend to two European events, I would rather prefer to meet you guys later in some closer venue. If travel cost is the only concern, please consider submitting an application for travel subsidy. http://live.gnome.org/Travel Remember that applications that do a good job of explaining the things you expect to do and get done at the hackfest tend to be taken most seriously. Having a good plan is a more important selection criteria than the cost of travel. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How to open Gnome Malaysia Usergroup
Mohd: On 01/19/11 06:28 AM, Mohd Fazli Azran wrote: Dear sir, I`m representative form Open Source Developer Club Malaysia (OSDCMY). We are the local community in Malaysia that promote and market OSS to Malaysia people. We now to ready to lead the OSS community in Malaysia s now we start many project for OSS any link with may OSS community in Malaysia like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, FreeBSD, Joomla, Drupal and etc. Note that GNOME is a Free Software project. There are some open source groups that do have a GNOME Users Group subgroup. According to the GNOME Users Group guidelines: http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups/Guidelines It is expected that GNOME Users Groups do make an effort to promote and foster both GNOME and free software. There is also a Code of Conduct and Speaker Guidelines that apply to GNOME Users Groups members when they are representing GNOME or at GNOME related functions. There are other details you should review in the Guidelines to fully understand. Just so you understand what a GNOME Users Group means. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: sponsoring a GNOME developer training session at Fedora Action Day Ghana
Ben: This sounds like a wonderful opportunity. Thanks for continuing to help us in this valuable way. Some questions: - When is the date? - Considering it doesn't make sense to travel to someplace like Ghana for just 1 day, how many days lodging do you think is reasonable to motivate volunteers to consider helping us in this way? - What language is the conference held in? Should this affect who goes? - Are there any concerns about getting visas? - Does the event need to be focused on Fedora? If The GNOME Foundation were sending people, could we get GNOME or Free Software in the event title? - What visibility do you expect The GNOME Foundation will get from this? - Could you provide more details about the budget? - Could the GNOME training sessions be held on other days than the conference, so that the volunteer would need to be there for more than 1 day? Or does it make sense to discuss with the event organizers making it a 2-day event or something? We'd have to see a more detailed budget and plan to make a decision, but it sounds very reasonable. It is important to the GNOME Foundation to reach out to the developing world. Are there other conferences in Africa that you think we should be planning to send people? I do think that there should be an announcement on the developing-world list. I think we could be better about posting updates to that list, and notification about possibly interesting events like this. Brian Isaac Sanni-Thomas, one of the Ghanian Fedora Ambassadors that I met at Idlelo [1] last year, is organizing a Fedora Action Day (FAD) [2] in Accra, Ghana: http://d3vnulls.blogspot.com/2010/12/fad-2011-in-ghana.html As part of my continued interest in GNOME related outreach activities in Sub-Saharan Africa, I would like to help setup a GNOME developer training session at this event. This is a great opportunity to promote GNOME in this region because the primary organizors of this event are from Ghana and are already working within F/OSS communities. We have a good chance of attracting people to the GNOME community at this event. What are the possibilities for getting travel sponsorship for this event for 1 or 2 people (not necessarily me)? Here are suggestions for sessions I would like to see but it really depends on the person/people going: * tour of GNOME 3 * hands on session working through the GNOME development work flow (bugzilla, git, fixing real a bug or two, etc) * hands on developer training - work through adding a small feature to a GNOME module I think it would be appropriate to have GNOMErs who have already been doing outreach work in less economically developed countries run these sessions but this is not required. I attended the 'GNOME in Asia and Brazil' session run by Emily Chen and Jonh Wendell this year at GUADEC. I think both of these people are good candidates for running these training sessions at the Accra FAD. I haven't actually spoken to either them yet so I could also post a request of volunteers on my blog. Or one of you guys could ask for volunteers and pick an appropriate person/people. One of the challenges I see with this proposal is that Ghana is a long way to travel in terms of time and money for only a one day event. One of my personal goals for my outreach activities is to make this kind of situation disappear by having GNOMErs in Sub-Saharan Africa. But since we're not there yet, we're left with this situation. Thanks for your time. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks, Ben 1. http://www.idlelo.net/ 2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Issue with meeting minutes
In the latest GNOME Foundation board meeting minutes (January 6th), some information that we intended to keep private was included: * Hiring updates o Marketing: only Lefty has applied so far (private) + ACTION: Andreas will send out emails to get more contacts or suggestions for someone who may be interested in applying. We did not mean to highlight specifics about who had applied for this position. Instead we meant to communicate that we were simply seeking more applications at this point in time. Apologies for this oversight, Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How to open Gnome Malaysia Usergroup
Mohd: Thank you for expressing an interest in setting up a GNOME Users Group. Note that The GNOME Foundation has official User's Groups sign the Trademark Agreement for Users Groups which you can find here: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark So, the first step would be to send bo...@gnome.org a signed copy of the form if you find it agreeable. Also the gugmasters mailing list is for people interested in GNOME User's Groups, so it would be a good forum to join and discuss further. Information about the list, including subscription information, is here: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gugmasters-list http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gugmasters-list/ There is also a mailing list for GNOME users in Malaysia: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-my-list Also, you might find the asia-summit-list to be a useful resource for general Asian GNOME topics: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/asia-summit-list Brian I`m representative form Open Source Developer Club Malaysia (OSDCMY). We are the local community in Malaysia that promote and market OSS to Malaysia people. We now to ready to lead the OSS community in Malaysia s now we start many project for OSS any link with may OSS community in Malaysia like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, FreeBSD, Joomla, Drupal and etc. But in Malaysia i can see we not have any GNOME community. So think we better start one and we can start 1st translation project. OSDC.My already manage the biggest open source conference almost 2 years already we call it Malaysia Open Source Conference (MOSC http://conf.oss.my). We now are prepare to do our 3rd MOSC2011 for this years. Yeah need a lot of work to do now. But at least we can make people interest about OSS and perhaps we can be one of the contributor to the OSS community around the world. If we not start now others will not start. I`m also involve other OSS ambassador like Fedora, openSUSE PCBSD and OWASP. Hope GNOME ca help us how to start GNOME Malaysia. Thanks ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - January 6, 2011
The meeting minutes for the January 6th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110106 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of January 6th, 2011 Next Meeting * January 18th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Brian Cameron * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Bastien Nocera * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Friends of GNOME (FoG) Updates o Needs to follow up with those who have deliverables. o Keeping Previous Donors web page up to date. o Helping Zana track new subscriptions and donations. + GIMP + Women's Outreach + a11y * a11y Fundraising o Normally FoG alternates between general and specific campaigns. Perhaps the schedule or pattern could be changed. Considering we are already not on schedule with FoG, a new schedule needs to be considered anyway. o The next FoG Campaign was intended to be for raising money for servers. Could consider doing an a11y campaign instead. o ACTION: Brian will discuss with Bradley Kuhn ideas about how to improve GNOME/a11y Fundraising. * Hiring updates o Marketing: only Lefty has applied so far (private) + ACTION: Andreas will send out emails to get more contacts or suggestions for someone who may be interested in applying. o ED: + ACTION: Og will email the ED mailing list and ask for an update on how the hiring process is going, how many applications, etc. * Action item review. Closed a few stale action items. * Meetings o IRC Meeting - The meeting was planned for January 5th and was missed. Now planned for Wednesday, January 12th. + ACTION: Og will email the foundation-list mailing list with a reminder of January 12th IRC meeting time details. o Advisory Board + Have not had a meeting since November. + ACTION: Paul will do a call for agenda items to the adboard list. Completed Actions * Andreas - Will finish the Friends of GNOME revamp and find someone with proper javascript skills to help. * Andreas - To take the GUADEC feedback and post it to a public wiki page. * Bastien - Setup committee to look at GTK+/MeeGo integration bids. * Bastien - To form a working group to review the GTK+/MeeGo bids and choose a final list. * Brian - Get information about what should be in an Employee Handbook. Draft approved by board. Now under review by the GNOME legal team. * Brian - To draft initial email about hiring marketing help. Paul will assist with editing and send to marketing-list. * Emily - To send the budget for the GNOME 3.0 launch activities to the board for review and vote. * Germán - Will help Paul put together the Financial Report for the Annual Report. * Paul - Will lead putting together the GNOME Annual Report. * Paul - To work with Jonathan Blandford for the pants article in the annual report. * Rosanna - Research the GNOME Guidestar website and update if necessary. Rosanna sent an update about the status of Guidestar, but work is still needed. Need to find someone to keep the website up-to-date. Status of action items * Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. (will ping again). * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. (will ping again) * Bastien - Will try to find people who can consolidate the feedback about the Texas Instruments Zoom2 device to provide back to Texas Instruments. * Bastien - Will take over the internal review process task from Diego Urrelo (hopefully he can automate it). * Bastien - To find a way to automate the process of exporting results from internal review process and email it to the board. * Bastien - To discuss the use of badges
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - December 23, 2010
Dave: * Brian - Develop trademark usage forms for common use cases. James Vasile from legal is working with Brian on this. I suggest looking at the MariaDB trademark guidelines for a good starting point. I especially like that they have outlined overall goals that inform the policy (kind of like the GPL preamble) - this is the check-list by which the trademark policy forms' success can be measured. I assume you mean this: http://kb.askmonty.org/v/mariadb-trademark-policy Our guidelines seem reasonably similar: http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/ Aside from having more clear Goals (their goals look good), I think it might also be nice if we released our policy and related forms under a nice free license like they have. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - December 23, 2010
The meeting minutes for the December 23rd GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20101223 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of December 23rd, 2010 Next Meeting * January 6th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Bastien Nocera * Og Maciel Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Desktop Summit Update (Andreas) o One of the hardest parts has been selecting the context management system (CMS). Drupal has been selected. There are still questions about where to host it, but that should be resolved soon. o The budget is being worked on. o Beds in Hotel/Hostels have been prebooked for the conference period. o I signed paperwork and sent off to GNOME Foundation and KDE E.v. o The organizers are planning a face-to-face meeting at Fosdem, probably on Saturday during lunch. o Andreas spoke with Kat while in Berlin and checked how things are going. Things are progressing well according to her. * Germán sent the 2011 budget to the foundation-list. * GTK+/MeeGo project call for bids. o A bid was chosen and will be announced soon. Those who submitted bids have been contacted and told if their bid was selected or not. * Marketing contract o Announcement that we have $5,000 to spend on a contractor was sent to the marketing list. o ACTION: Paul will follow up with the marketing-list to provide more details about what sort of work we would like to have done for the marketing contract. * GNOME 3.0 launch events o Emily provided a budget for providing goodies for GNOME 3.0 launch events. o Plan to know exactly how many launch events will be held by the end of February. o Paul, Brian, Germán, and Emily give a +1. * Travel committee wants to try out Egencia o Egencia is a business travel site that is affiliated with expedia.com). o Cost is $375 per year plus $7 per transaction. They can hold this offer only through end of 2010. o This service is only useful for purchasing tickets for U.S. based airlines. o The travel committee believes this service will save time. o Everyone gave a +1, so this is approved. * The board reviewed open action items and closed several that are no longer being actively worked on. Completed Actions * Andreas - To check with Johannes and Shaun about having a Developer Documentation Hackfest. The hackfest is now being organized. * Bastien - Setup committee to look at GTK+/MeeGo integration bids. * Bastien - To form a working group to review the GTK+/MeeGo bids and choose a final list. * Brian - To draft initial email about hiring marketing help. Paul will assist with editing and send to marketing-list. * Germán - Will help Paul put together the Financial Report for the Annual Report. * Germán - Will follow up with Shaun McCance about how the board can help with his proposal for funding developer documentation. The hackfest is now being organized. * Paul - Will lead putting together the GNOME Annual Report. * Paul - To work with Jonathan Blandford for the pants article in the annual report. * Paul - Will create the Executive Director hiring mailing list. * Stormy - To schedule a meeting with companies that do consulting work with GNOME to start discussions on how we can help (how can we work together). Sent email. Got a couple of positive responses. This is no longer being actively worked on. Status of action items * Andreas - Will finish the Friends of GNOME revamp and find someone with proper javascript skills to help. * Andreas - Will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. (will ping again). * Andreas - To take the GUADEC feedback and post it to a public wiki page. (someone else did this I think?) * Andreas - To ask Kat if she can reach out
Meeting Minutes Published - December 9, 2010
The meeting minutes for the December 9th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20101209 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of December 9th, 2010 Next Meeting * December 23rd, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Og Maciel Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Developer Documentation Hackfest (Andreas) o Things went good - discussions about tools to advertise to developers (Anjuta) and what kind of developers to target. New developer.gnome.org as an extension of library.gnome.org - working on redirects and new website to launch. Andreas thought it would be good to have another hackfest in the near future to continue to build on it. o ACTION: Andreas to check with Johannes and Shaun about having a Developer Documentation Hackfest. * Hiring Marketing Help (Brian) o Stormy's proposal that we hire someone on a 5-month contract to help with GNOME 3.0 marketing received 4 +1 votes. o Seeking references from people or consultants who would be interested in a short-term contract to improve GNOME and GNOME 3 marketing. o Email the marketing list with a call for bids o Need to set expectations o ACTION: Brian to draft initial email about hiring marketing help. Paul will assist with editing and send to marketing-list. * The Updating Trademark Agreements (Brian) o ACTION: Paul to review Justin's email about updating trademark agreements and email the marketing team for feedback. * FoG launch update (Og) o The new campaign is for general funding. The next Campaign which will start in April will be focused on funds to purchase sysadmin resources such as servers. o This campaign is to get 100 new subscribers by the end of the year. o About to set up the ruler to measure new subscriptions. o The next campaign starts in April and will be to purchase sysadmin resources, such as needed servers. o According to Zana's research, Google Checkout doesn't do recurring subscriptions. Need to investigate. o ACTION: Og to look into Google Checkout as an annual payment option for FoG. * Budget next steps. Is it ready to share with foundation-list? (Germán) o ACTION: Germán will provide an updated budget for review that we'll plan to send to foundation-list for community review. * GTK+/MeeGo project call for bids (Bastien) o The GNOME Foundation received 2 strong bids and one interesting, but out of scope, bid. o Will consider going back to Nokia and ask for additional funding for the out of scope bid. o Goal is to have the bid selected prior to Dec. 17th o ACTION: Bastien to form a working group to review the GTK+/MeeGo bids and choose a final list. * Annual Report (Paul) o Should be made public in the next week. * GNOME 3.0 launch events GNOME.Asia (Emily) o Pockey sent two updates To the Board with 3 projects that GNOME.Asia is working on: + GNOME.Asia summit - Next week the host city will be chosen and announced (will be April 6th - 10th to coincide with GNOME 3.0 launch). + Global Launch parties (inspired by Software Freedom Day) - Details and costs and launch party materials in Pockey's email. + How to improve GNOME survey - The GNOME.Asia team is putting together a report to highlight how to improve GNOME for Asian users. o ACTION: Emily to send the budget for these activities to the board for review and vote. Completed Actions * Paul - Diego had an action item to send an updated Día GNOME article for the Annual Report. * All Board Members - Review the Executive Director job description. Status of action items * Andreas - Will finish
Re: GNOME's logo been incorrectly used
Dave: On 12/ 8/10 07:46 AM, Dave Neary wrote: Also, there's a decent copyright claim there by the icon author, if his artwork is being reused without his knowledge or consent, unless of course there's a GNOME foot in the wild somewhere under FDL or a CC license. The GNOME Foot could only be licensed by the copyright holder. I'd think any licenses assigned without permission by the copyright holder would not be considered valid. So, how can there be images in the wild? I'd think the copyright holder should know how it has been licensed with permission. Is it not The GNOME Foundation who owns the copyright to the logo? I thought the author of the foot logo image provided the artwork as a part of a contest. Brian Frederic Muller wrote: This company is somehow in my backyard. Do you want me to get in touch with them and test the waters? Fred On 11/29/2010 06:35 PM, Andrew wrote: G'day all, so i was out shopping and i found the gnome foot plastered on some brand of wii accessory, see the attached image, also i did some google'ing and found the website http://www.pro-gamer.com.cn/home.aspx if you look through you can see the gnome foot clearly visible on the main page, and if you click through the image gallery you'll see products with the gnome foot on it. cheers andrew ___ gnome-list mailing list gnome-l...@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 11, 2010
Stormy: Attending * Stormy Peters I was not there but I think about you all lots! Oops, corrected in the Wiki minutes. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - November 11, 2010
The meeting minutes for the November 11th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/2010 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of November 11th, 2010 Next Meeting * December 9th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Stormy Peters * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Emily Chen Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Joanmarie Diggs joined the meeting to give an update on GNOME accessibility. o Currently orca and the a11y project is underfunded. o Many tasks are being done by unpaid and overworked volunteers. o There is not enough manpower to get the work done. o The orca team came up with a 2-year roadmap of work that needs to be done and there are not enough resources to get all the work done. o Fortunately there has been a lot of resources provided by Spain in the past year, but these resources may not continue to be available. o A $40,000 budget for FY2012 would help the a11y project. o The GNOME Foundation currently has a $20,000 a11y budget. Half is allocated for travel and half is allocated for contracting work. This includes roughly a $5,000 surplus from previous year, $10,000 from Mozilla, and $5,000 from F123-Mais Diferenças. * Possible solutions: o Perhaps a Friends of GNOME campaign could target a11y. o Perhaps we could revisit funding a11y tasks via bounties (e.g. The GOPA program). That project did not work so well since the bounties were too small. Perhaps a $40,000 budget would allow for larger bounties. o We should do more PR, blogs, and publish more clear plans about what work we want to do to raise awareness. o Can plan to do a targeted FoG campaign. Plan to do a campaign for servers in Spring, 2011. So, an a11y campaign could follow. o Can we work more closely with advisory board companies to get more people allocated to a11y instead of, or in addition to, raising funds. o Perhaps we could determine a more consistent way to allocate some money from the yearly advisory board fees to programs that need money every year such as a11y. * Next steps: o The a11y team needs to provide a more clear a11y-wide roadmap instead of just an orca roadmap. It would be easier to get resources if we had a clear list of work that needs attention. Joanie said that she hopes that a draft roadmap might be ready in a few weeks. * Review of the Executive Director job description o The board felt that the description put together looks good. o All feedback on the Executive Director job description needs to be done by Sunday so we can make the announcement on Monday. o Hiring committee + Working to put together the committee. + The board considered whether it would be good to do panel interviews. # They tend to be valuable, but it can be complicated to find a time that works for everyone. # Bastien suggests that perhaps we can find a committee that is located in the same region to make timing easier. If so, should we have separate committee's in different regions? * ACTION: Og will work to update the GNOME websites to update pages that refer to Stormy as the Executive Director. Completed Actions * Brian - To write-up the feedback from Stormy's review and to provide it to Stormy. * Paul - Will work on 2010 Annual Report o Paul - To fix the annual report: remove all TM in the GNOME logos, s/GNOME Asia/GNOME.Asia/g, use right font for GNOME logo. o Paul - Will follow up with Germán about the financial data for the Annual Report. * Paul - To make sure Board members have access to the Foundation blog. * Paul - To follow up
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - November 6, 2010
Dave: * Justin Colannino from the Software Freedom Law Center sent the board an email with the form to register the GNOME trademark to review before submission. Have you talked to Luis about the trademark registration process he went through some years ago? He spent a lot of time regularising the situation in 2007/2008. Yes, Luis is involved in discussions. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Tee-Shirt Contest Countries Eligibility
On 11/17/10 12:36 PM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: On 11/17/10 13:35, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: For what it's worth, GNOME pretty much ignores such regulations in all its other dealings. Doesn't necessarily mean that it's violating any law. It just doesn't bother checking. Doing it for such a small contest sounds overkill to me. Plus, if not paying the winners cash means that we can get away with it, I suggest we just give them ten tshirts instead of $100. The GNOME Foundation did put some thought into creating rules for the cash prizes associated with the GOPA program a few years back: http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/a11y/rules/ There will probably be ongoing desires to do things like have contests with cash prizes, so there would be some value in reworking these sorts of rules into something more generic we could use as general rules for these sorts of contests. Is there any interest in the community to help out in this sort of capacity? I think it would be good if we could have better rules that both provide reasonable protection and avoid any sort of discrimination. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - October 28, 2010
The meeting minutes for the October 28th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20101028 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of October 28th, 2010 Next Meeting * November 6th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson (IRC only since he is attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit) * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Stormy Peters * Rosanna Yuen Regrets Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Unity and GNOME 3 o http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/shuttleworth-unity-shell-will-be-default-desktop-in-ubuntu-1104.ars o Canonical announced that Unity will be the default Ubuntu 11.04 desktop. o Unity is based on compiz and not GNOME Shell or mutter. o This news is disappointing. It is also potentially distracting and disruptive to GNOME 3 plans and release. o Paul highlighted that Ubuntu has 70% of the Linux Desktop market share, so losing GNOME Shell on Ubuntu is a big loss. o Regardless, Canonical is still an important ongoing partner in the GNOME community. o While Unity is a concern, it is still more important to focus on making sure that GTK+ based GNOME is competitive with Qt than to fight over the best shell for GNOME. o ACTION: Andreas is at the Ubuntu Developer Summit and is talking to people about the situation with Unity and will write up a report to the board list. * GNOME Foundation IRC Meetings o The most recent October 27th Foundation IRC meeting was better run, organized, and attended than previous IRC meetings. o There were some flaws in the planning. Need to be better about planning future meetings. For example: + The time was not mentioned in the email reminder to foundation-list. + Date/time was not included in /topic of the #foundation IRC channel. o The next IRC meeting is planned for Wednesday, November 3rd * Desktop Summit 2011 o Dave Neary has been playing the lead role in Desktop Summit planning. o Should Dave formally be the leader? How does this fit in with what Kat and Andreas have been doing? o Agreed to discuss on the mailing list. * When will we have a budget for the current fiscal year? o Germán said it will be ready in 1 week. o Emily and Germán agreed to meet over the next week to work together on this. * Nokia / MeeGo call for bids o No updates yet. Bastien has talked with stakeholders in the community to push this. o ACTION: Bastien to mail people he is talking to about the Nokia / MeeGo call for bids about 1) what it would cost to do the work 2) whether they are interested in the project * Status of Annual Report o Paul received a proof document last Tuesday. o Need to update some financial numbers. o Should have the final version done by next week. * Need to tell FreeWear we approved their marketing agreement. o ACTION: Brian to contact FreeWear about moving forward with their marketing agreement. * Stormy leaving The GNOME Foundation o Stormy announced to the board that she is leaving The GNOME Foundation CEO position. She announced this to the board on Wednesday, October 20th. o Stormy and the board agreed to make this information public on Tuesday, November 2nd. Just before the Boston Summit to give people time to have face-to-face interactions with Stormy to help with the transition. o Stormy is going to start a new job to work on the open web at the Mozilla Foundation. o The board wishes her well and the best of luck with her new position in the free software community! o Stormy is planning to run for The GNOME Foundation board of directors in the next term. * Reminder to the board: Complete Stormy's bonus feedback. Completed Actions * Og - Organized the next GNOME Foundation IRC meeting
Meeting Minutes Published - October 14, 2010
The meeting minutes for the October 14th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20101014 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of October 14th, 2010 Next Meeting * October 28th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel (late) * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters Regrets Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * FreeWear.org o The board decided to approve the FreeWear.org proposal to allow them to sell GNOME-branded merchandise. * Boston Summit (November 6-8) o The Boston Summit needs to be announced more widely. o We need to do more promotion since the dates are different this year. The event is not happening over Columbus Day weekend as it has in past years. o The Boston Summit would benefit from some effort to help coordinate an agenda of what people plan to work on. o Most people who attend are core GNOME developers who already know about it, so the lack of an agenda is perhaps not surprising. o This year there may be some costs associated with the venue, coffee/food, a party, and covering travel sponsorships. Last year the cost was $2,568, but this year the costs will likely be higher. o We could get more sponsors and attendees if we develop a more clear message about what we are going to do. o People on the board agreed to ping people who are planning to attend and to try to put together an agenda of what will be worked on there, and to promote the event. o Need to announce that people can submit requests for travel sponsorship. + Need to decide how much travel sponsorship will be funded. In the past The GNOME Foundation has not sponsored much travel costs for The Boston Summit. Last year was the first time and only 1 person was sponsored for that event. o ACTION: Og will email Xan López to see what he plans for the summit. This new action was done shortly after the meeting. Emily will ping Vincent to see what he plans for the summit. o ACTION: All board members will help to put together a draft agenda for the Boston Summit. This involves emailing those who will be participating and collecting information about what things will be worked on. * Foundation IRC Meeting o Selected the date as October 27th. o ACTION: Og received a link to initial ideas from Paul and will publish a post about the Foundation IRC Meeting for October 27, 2010 and send an email to the Board shortly after the meeting. o ACTION: All board members to put together a draft agenda for the Foundation IRC Meeting by Saturday, October 16th. * Desktop Summit 2011 o Andreas attended the Desktop Summit 2011 kick-off meeting in Berlin (September 22-25, 2010). o Andreas reported that the meeting went well and planning is underway. o Lately discussing keynote speakers and the papers committee. Not clear if they have made any decisions on the papers committee. o ACTION': Andreas to ask Kat if she can reach out to the gnome...@gnome.org mailing list about finding local German volunteers to help with the Desktop Summit 2011. * Reminder: Stormy bonus feedback * Nokia / MeeGo call for bids o Bastien reported that the announcement had been sent out, but no replies yet. o ACTION: Bastien will send out a deadline date for the MeeGo call for Bids after getting some feedback from the community * Board meeting at Boston Summit o Andreas is still not sure if he could attend. o Bastien and Germán will not be able to attend. * Women's Outreach Project o http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram o Lots of candidates! o Potential mentors can add their projects to the wiki. Those are the only
Re: Next Foundation IRC list is on November 3rd!
Meeting minutes from today's IRC meeting is here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20101027 The log of the meeting is also attached to the above Wiki page. Brian On 10/27/10 10:42 AM, Stormy Peters wrote: Hi GNOME folks, Thanks for participating in the GNOME Foundation meeting today. For those that were not able to attend, we will be publishing the minutes. We had a lot of topics to discuss and did not get to them even though we went over 30 minutes! So by common agreement, we are having our next meeting next week! When: Wednesday, November 3rd, from 14:00 to 15:30 UTC Where: irc.gnome.org http://irc.gnome.org/, #foundation Foundation IRC meetings are held on #foundation in irc.gimp.org http://irc.gimp.org/ to discuss current matters related to the GNOME Foundation. Any on interested in attending, may attend, just keep the conversation constructive. The meeting page with the agenda is here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MeetingAgenda Please add any topics you'd like to discuss to this page and they will automatically show up on the meeting page: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MembersAgenda Looking forward to another productive meeting! Best, Stormy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - September 30, 2010
The meeting minutes for the September 30th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100930 Discussed on the mailing list [...] * The board approved providing $4,000 (USD) to cover 7º Forum @ Latinoware (November 10-12) travel expenses. o http://www.latinoware.org/ Oops, that should be: * The board approved providing $4,000 (USD) to cover 7º Forum @ ENSL (November 6-7) travel expenses. * http://ensl.org.br/ Sorry about any confusion. I have updated the Wiki minutes with this change. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - September 30, 2010
The meeting minutes for the September 30th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100930 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of September 30th, 2010 Next Meeting * October 14th, 2010 Attending * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Og Maciel * Stormy Peters (attending Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2010) Missing * Andreas Nilsson Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Happy Release Day! o GNOME 2.32 was released on September 29th. o http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.32/ * GNOME.Asia 2011 proposal o Emily detailed plans that the GNOME.Asia community are making to organize a GNOME 3 Launch hackfest in conjunction with the GNOME 3.0 release in early April. o Planning a 5 day hackfest + 1 day conference/Release Party. o The GNOME.Asia organizers are having weekly IRC meetings for planning. o Would like to host developers to work on the mechanics of the GNOME 3.0 release (developers, marketing team, release team) to help make the GNOME 3.0 launch successful. o Currently researching venues in host countries. o Planning to do a survey to find out if people from key teams are willing/able to attend. o ACTION: Emily to send the GNOME 3.0 Launch Hackfest survey to the board and work with Pockey to send to key participants. o ACTION: Emily to talk with other GNOME User's Groups to coordinate the possibility of there being a multi-city GNOME 3.0 Hackfest/Party. * Collecting feedback about GUADEC. o Feedback has been collected on a private Wiki page. Plan to make it public after doing some cleanup. o http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/GuadecFeedback o Was apparently helpful for the Desktop Summit 2011 meeting. o Would be a good topic for discussion on GUADEC mailing lists and other event planning lists. o ACTION: Paul to check GUADEC feedback page for spelling, and possible anonymity leaks. * Om Chandra o Om is the teacher of Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport of Cambodia and an E-Learning Training Coordinator of Open Learning Program of Open Institute NGO who was wanting to work with us. o Possibly interested in receiving GNOME related training. o Emily continues to trade emails with Om to determine the best ways to help. * Fiscal Year End o Fiscal Year Budgeting Process. + Emily: Working on July August expenses. Data has been imported into GnuCash. + Emily will be on vacation from October 1-7, so she will not be able to work on this next week. * GNOME 3 as a Foundation goal -- discussion with membership o ACTION: Paul to follow-up with Og on status of the GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal action. * Board Peer Reviews o Bastien needs information about how the past peer review was handled. o ACTION: Brian to send Bastien a link to past board discussion on how board peer review was managed. o ACTION: Stormy to add Bastien to ?LimeSurvey for board peer review. o Stormy year end review + Brian will start the review process by early next week. * Reminder to board members - Employee Handbook feedback required by tomorrow. * GNOME/FSF Meeting o On Monday, September 27th Brian and Stormy met with Peter Brown from the FSF to discuss collaboration opportunities. o A write-up of the meeting was sent to the board after the meeting. o ACTION: All board members please share your feedback on the GNOME/FSF meeting. * Feedback for Nokia Proposal by Bastien. o ACTION: Bastien to update and flesh out what we expect from bids. * Using Bugzilla of CiviCRM to track Friends of GNOME Postcards o https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630213 o Concern
New GNOME licensing forms - please help
Foundation Members: I have been working with James Vasile and Luis Villa over the past year to update the GNOME Brand licensing forms for merchants and user's groups. We just finished what I think is the last round of review and have addressed all the concerns raised by both James and Luis. I do need some help. The updated User's Group form is currently a web-form, but James recommends that we should really change this to a PDF document and require a signature like we have in the Merchant form. I do not know how to do this, so if there is someone out there who can create PDF files from HTML, I would appreciate some help. We have some users groups that would like to sign the new form, so it would be good if this could be done soon. The new forms are much more clear, address issues that were raised about the old forms, provide better protections, and give Users Groups more freedoms that we think GNOME User's Groups should have. For example, the old form disallowed User's Groups from selling GNOME branded merchandise to support group activities, but the new form allows this with reasonable restrictions. I would appreciate any review or comments from the wider GNOME Foundation community. Direct links to the forms can be found in the footnote[1], and are also available here with some additional information: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark I also created a FAQ and User Group Guidelines, which are needed for these forms. It would be good to get any review comments about these as well http://live.gnome.org/Trademark/FAQ http://live.gnome.org/UserGroups/Guidelines Assuming this is agreeable to the Foundation, I plan to move the new forms to the http://foundation.gnome.org/legal website once the User's Group form is converted to PDF. Brian --- [1] Updated Forms: Latest Merchant Form: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark?action=AttachFiledo=viewtarget=tm_agreement.odt Latest User Group Form: http://live.gnome.org/Trademark?action=AttachFiledo=viewtarget=user_group_agreement.html ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - September 16, 2010
The meeting minutes for the September 16th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100916 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of September 16th, 2010 Next Meeting * September 30th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters Regrets Missing * Bastien Nocera Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Collecting feedback about GUADEC. o ACTION: Andreas to take the GUADEC feedback and post it to a public wiki page, * Developer Documentation Tools hackfest (December 2-5) and the 7º Forum GNOME event in Natal, Brasil (November 5-6th). o Expenses approved for both. * Boston Summit o ACTION: Emily will plan blog posts to announce sponsorship for Boston Summit. * Sponsorship proposal process o ACTION: Stormy to update the hackfest wiki pages to make it clear that The GNOME Foundation needs detailed information about expenses included with proposals if they are asking for GNOME Foundation sponsorship. + Goals for attending: For example, why the sponsored travelers need to be there? + Goals for event. + Costs, broken down to the level of who is traveling from where. Particularly expensive travel costs should be justified. If, for example, on traveler is considerably more expensive than the others, there should be some clear justification. + Potential sponsorship and income. + Provide a write up after the event? o ACTION: Og will start a discussion on the mailing list about how The GNOME Foundation, wants to organize event planning for events that carry the GNOME brand. + Email sent to the Board. * GIMP asked The GNOME Foundation to handle the purchase orders with Google for their GSoC (Google Summer of Code) mentor payments. This past year we handled three student projects for them. o The board voted and approved doing this for GIMP and GStreamer (if GStreamer asks again). o ACTION: Rosanna will handle the purchase orders with Google for GIMP/GStreamer GSoC mentor payments as she has been doing it already for GNOME. * Om Chandra (the teacher of Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport of Cambodia and an E-Learning Training Coordinator of Open Learning Program of Open Institute NGO who was wanting to work with us) wanted sponsorship to attend GUADEC for training. What is the status. o Stormy asked him if he could attend GNOME Asia instead. He agreed, but he had issues with the visa to Taiwan and so was not able to make it. o ACTION: Emily will send Om Chandra an email about whether there is still an opportunity for training or further cooperation. * Fiscal Year Budgeting Process o ACTION: Germán to have a draft Fiscal Year Budget in October for the board to review. * GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal -- discussion with membership o Need to relate 2011 goals to Stormy's performance (and make it measurable). o Emails sent to foundation-list, but not much response. o ACTION: Og will read up on the GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal discussion that has already taken place and will write something to be sent to Stormy for further discussion and feedback. * Stormy fiscal year end review o Discussion about whether we should continue with the bonus plan or move to a flat salary for the next fiscal year. o Difficult to measure Foundation goals (and then relate to those to Stormy where applicable, or not). o ACTION: Brian to send an email to discuss Stormy's bonus and salary process for 2011 with the board. o ACTION: Board to review and finalize Stormy's year-end review feedback and bonus for 2010. * Boston Summit: fees for the venue. o The organizers are working on getting free rooms for us. J5
Meeting Minutes Published - September 2, 2010
The meeting minutes for the September 2nd GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100902 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of September 2nd, 2010 Next Meeting * September 16th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Emily Chen * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Stormy Peters Regrets * Rosanna Yuen * Germán Póo-Caamaño Missing * Brian Cameron Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Nokia Proposal. o The GNOME Foundation met with Nokia to discuss Bastien's proposal how to spend the money they provided, and they liked it. Bastien is now writing up a call for bids. o ACTION: Bastien emailing with Nokia and GTK+/XI2 maintainers to further detail out the proposal of how to spend the money provided by Nokia. Major issues include the bug discussed on d-d-l and touch framework. Bastien gathering more information currently. * Fiscal Year Budgeting Process o Request from GNOME Brazil + Jonh Wendell informed the board that the costs for the 7º Forum GNOME event in Natal, Brasil (November 5-6th) will be $4468.24 (USD). + This event will be co-hosted with ENSL # http://www.ensl.org.br/ o Ping the people who requested budget money from 2010 and ping them for 2011 requests. o ACTION: Emily to create list of everyone who requested money in 2010. Emily will contact them and ask about their plans for 2011. * GNOME 3 as a Foundation goal o Need more discussion with membership. o Emails sent to foundation-list, but not much response. o ACTION: Og will assist with the GNOME 3 as a Foundation goal task. * GNOME IRC Meeting - Define topics o ACTION: Bastien to talk to sysadmins about the GNOME IRC meeting, follow-up on Sept 16th. o ACTION: Paul to start brainstorming for the GNOME IRC meeting. * Release team - application module sets o Paul emailed the release team to follow up on the decision of how applications will be included in GNOME going forward. Short term, this could help the release-notes by adding additional applications. * Hackfests o Ideas for hackfest topics for Italy and Largo Florida. o Two opportunities for hosting a hackfest: Dave Richards (City of Largo) and Daniel Siegel (Bolzano) are willing to host. o Stormy and Daniel emailed 4 or 5 teams and may have a lead. o Bastien pinged Dave Richards. Dave is interested in GNOME Administration (pessulus, sabayon, GSettings) or performance (bootcharts, visual performance). * Boston Summit o Fees for the venue. We have the rooms for free over the weekend. We are working on which rooms and cost for Monday but the Boston Summit will happen that weekend and J5 has announced it. * 2010 Q2 GNOME Quarterly Report Update o It is done - just needs to be posted on the website. * Desktop Summit o Andreas will attend the organization meeting in September to represent the Board. o Still working on who will represent previous GUADEC organizers at this meeting. Dave Neary provided his availability and Vincent Untz will soon. Stormy also asked Reinout van Schouwen. o Should we ask Ekaterina (Kat) Gerasimova to be the GNOME representative for the Desktop Summit? + The Board agreed to this. + Andreas to serve as the liaison/point of contact to help Kat. + ACTION: Andreas to reach out to Ekaterina (Kat) Gerasimova to see if she wants to be the GNOME representative for the 2011 Desktop Summit and, if so, to invite her to the Desktop Summit meeting. * Accessibility team update (Stormy) o There have been some communication issues with the GNOME a11y team and we have several potential opportunities. o ACTION: Brian will follow up with the a11y team to help
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - August 19, 2010
Dave: On 09/ 3/10 03:48 AM, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: * GNOME Trademarks o TM can claim without formal registration o Do we want a (R) registered trademark on the correct GNOME foot / logo? o GNOME foot (old) has a registered trademark o French website + ACTION: Bastien to send the French website a follow-up email about GNOME Trademarks Luis worked on cleaning up GNOME's trademark story around 2006-07 - it would be worthwhile asking him the current situation, since he is the one who took charge of the issue back then. As far as I know, we registered the GNOME foot + wordmark in the US through Wilson Sonsini. I have been working with James Vasile and Luis on this. We have, for example, been working to update the forms to address some of the issues that have been raised over the years. We also wrote a FAQ. Eventually I'd like to see these migrate to the fdo website, but we are still discussing some points with James. http://live.gnome.org/Trademark * Jorge - Check records of organizations with existing contracts to use the GNOME trademark. Taken over from Vincent. Look at the archives in 2005 and try to determine which companies can use the GNOME trademark. Know what kind of contracts we had with them. I can help fill in some gaps here - there's Killermundi, Hackerthreads, a jewellery creator (although I think his license has lapsed now). I hadn't been aware of Killermundi. Do you have a contact person? I am talking with the people from Hackerthreads and know what's going on with that. The jewelry creator never got off the ground. We prepared the form, but they seemed to lose interest at the last minute and never signed it. While I was on the board, I worked with James Vasile on a trademark license contract, which should be part of the material the board has, for that jeweller, and James tried to make something modular that could be reused. That contract has no automatic renewal clause, and ran for an X year term (X=2 is set in a prefix). I have the last revision we came up with (Stormy should have it too, and it's in board-list archives). Let me know if you want me to send it on. I think the forms on the website I show above are the latest iterations of the forms intended to be modular. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - August 19, 2010
Behdad: On 09/ 3/10 10:07 AM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: On 09/03/10 04:48, Dave Neary wrote: When I was last on board I had started gathering such documents here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPrivate/Documents But can't find them anymore. Either someone removed that page or I'm not allowed to see it (which I assumed as a previous board member I would be). We have archived all the forms on a different page. Though I wasn't aware of Hackermundi before, so I will need to track down that one. If anyone has any pointers, or even can highlight about when discussions went on with them, then that would help me dig through the email archives. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - August 19, 2010
The meeting minutes for the August 19th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100819 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of August 19th, 2010 Next Meeting * September 2nd, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Og Maciel (late) * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters Regrets * Brian Cameron (GNOME.Asia) * Emily Chen (GNOME.Asia) * Germán Póo-Caamaño Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Annual Report o Daniel Galleguillos needs some feedback. Andreas will look at it right after the meeting. + ACTION: Andreas will get feedback for the Annual Report for Daniel Galleguillos. * 2010 Q2 GNOME Quarterly Report Update o All reports now in! Just need to put in format; Vinicius Depizzol will help. Hope to be done by Monday. * Fiscal Year Budgeting Process. o Been discussing process. First step is to reach out to local user groups. About to kick off process. Everyone needs to help - cannot be all German. * GNOME IRC Meeting o Define topics. Paul Cutler will start a brainstorming process for the topics. * Boston Summit o Fees for the venue. The organizers are working on getting free rooms. John (J5) Palmieri has pinged them every week or so and we have not heard back in a while. * Hackfests o GTK+ and WebKitGTK+ + Both are a go. + Do they need funding? Have they done fundraising? + ACTION: Andreas will find out if the GTK+ and WebKitGTK+ Hackfests need help fundraising. o Developer Docs. Looks good now with goals and lots of good attendees. o Dave Richards from the City of Largo would like to host a hackfest at the Boston Summit. He is particularly interested in something around thin clients. + ACTION: Bastien will reach out to Dave Richards from the City of Largo to plan for a hackfest there. o Board mentors for hackfest organizers idea. + ACTION: Stormy will ask Diego Urrelo if he would like to continue to work on the board mentors for hackfest organizers idea. * Nokia Proposal o We met with Nokia to discuss Bastien's proposal: use $50,000 to contract out work to make GTK+ et al work on the platform. They were in agreement. Bastien is now writing up a call for bids. MeeGo might be interested in helping with events around underlying technologies. + ACTION: Bastien to write up a call for bids for Nokia proposal, and discuss the technology with people from Nokia. * GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal o Discussion with membership o Emails sent to foundation-list, but not much response. Should we run another survey? + We want to do another survey for sure (keep questions simple) + ACTION: Og to help in getting the GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal survey topics together + ACTION: Stormy to share feedback on how to build the questions for the GNOME 3 as a Foundation Goal survey. * Advisory Board fees for small businesses o ACTION: Paul will follow-up with Board to read the Advisory Board fees for small businesses proposal, ask for feedback and set a date to vote by. * Initial Marketing Contract o Please vote. Any questions? * security@ being an alias for board-list o Followed up, just need to do it (security@ or release- team-private@ ?) * GNOME IRC Meeting o Schedule next (no QA at AGM) * Mentoring new board members program o Create a mail list like: board-men...@gnome.org ? (Pending to Paul) o Collect mentor wish list from mentees. * Marketing arrangement for Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial) to sell GNOME branded merchandise in Brazil. o Email was sent to Ronaldo but he has not replied. Og will follow up. * GnuCash
Meeting Minutes Published - July 25, 2010
The meeting minutes for the July 25th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100725 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of July 25, 2010 Next Meeting * August 5th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson (late) * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante Urrelo * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Srini Ragavan * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets * Og Maciel Missing * Jorge Castro Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * GNOME Foundation Goals for next year o Board Member Personal Goals: + Paul: # GNOME 3.0 launch success (oversight, communication), marketing, documentation, sysadmin. + Brian: # Make the board more transparent and organized. # Work with James Vasile on merchandising, the employee handbook and other legal matters. # Continue to work to make the Foundation website a more useful resource for getting things done and collaborating. # Define the role of The GNOME Foundation and promote GNOME in the developing world, usability, a11y. + German: # Keep the budget in order and updated every month. + Emily: # Grow GNOME in Asia, fundraising, Friends of GNOME. + Bastien: # Find new ways to collaborate with Yahoo, Nokia, Intel, etc. and work to build new revenue streams. # Focus on GNOME Mobile (see where MeeGo is going) and work with vendors to acquire more development hardware. + Andreas: # Encourage new contributors into the GNOME project and make it an interesting place to participate. # Make GNOME work better with the kernel and distributions. # Focus on promotion and telling the world about the cool stuff we are doing. + Og: # Get more involved with the accessibility team and find ways to help them achieve their goals. # Continue working with the GNOME Translation Project crew and find ways to get more quality translations and new contributors to the next release. # Acknowledge those who have contributed to the success of GNOME doing non-coding tasks by promoting them with blog posts and awards. o Foundation Wide Goals: + Successful launch of GNOME 3.0. + Promote GNOME in the developing world. + Develop GNOME Mobile. + Maintaining the GNOME Brand and Trademark. + Grow the GNOME user base.. + Develop more active local groups (work to get them more involved with upstream, revive gugmasters-list). + Develop a well defined roadmap that both companies and community are behind. + Business development, partnerships. + Run surveys to help prioritize GNOME Foundation goals. * Events o GUADEC (July 26-30) + Open Desktop Day at GUADEC on Monday. # Starts at 10:30am and lasts until about 4pm. # Stormy will do a kickoff presentation followed by community presentations. # ACTION: All board members should plan to join the Open Desktop Day at GUADEC on Monday for the networking at 10:30am, 12:30am, and 3:00pm. + Advisory Board Meeting at GUADEC on Tuesday. # Discussion about planning, preparation, and organizing the agenda
Meeting Minutes Published - August 5, 2010
The meeting minutes for the August 5th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100805 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of August 5th, 2010 Next Meeting * August 19th, 2010 Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen Regrets * Og Maciel * Stormy Peters Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Reassigning action items from previous board members. o Paul will take over the action guifi.net action item. o Paul will take over the Code of Conduct action item. o Andreas will follow up with Vincent to find out the status Philosophy, Copyright Assignment task. o Brian will follow up with who can present GNOME in Cancún. * secur...@gnome.org being an alias for board-list o ACTION: Bastien will investigate whether secur...@gnome.org should be sent to the release team instead of the board. * Scheduling the next GNOME IRC Meeting o Process for setting up an IRC meeting + Create an agenda / Ask for feedback from the community. + Pick a time zone. The time of the meeting is rotated so that people from different time zones can attend meetings more easily. + Email the foundation list, blog about it, send an email before the event. + Remember to the Board members they should be present as much as possible. o It was suggested that perhaps we should rotate the responsibility of managing the IRC meeting. o The board will discuss this on the mailing list and set up an agenda. o ACTION: Paul will send an email to the board to put together an agenda for a GNOME IRC meeting. * ACTION: Paul to make sure Board members have access to the Foundation blog. * GNOME Advisory Board Meeting Update o ACTION: Andreas will follow up with Andrew Savory from LiMo to see if relevant information from their GTK+ study can be made more public. * GUADEC o There were remaining posters and Brian shipped them at a cost of $100 which will be reimbursed. o The board will create a Wiki page with tips to better manage GUADEC/event planning in the future. The Wiki will start as a private Wiki page and will be made more public when it is fleshed out. o ACTION: Bastien will ask for feedback about GUADEC on the gnome-foundation list. o ACTION: Bastien will create private Wiki page to sort ideas about how to better organize events like GUADEC. o ACTION: Bastien will touch base with Gil Forcada and Luis Villa and add their feedback about GUADEC. * Board roles (chairman, secretary, treasurer, etc.) o The board voted and approved the following roles: + Paul - Chairman + Andreas - Vice-Chairman + Germán - Treasurer + Emily - Vice Treasurer + Brian - Secretary + Og - Vice Secretary * Mentoring new board members program o Create a wiki page o Create a mail list like: board-men...@gnome.org + ACTION: Paul will create a board-mentor mailing list. o The new members on the board would prefer a more formal mentor / mentee relationship. * GNOME.Asia Summit (August 14-15) o Wire the $9,225 (USD) funds to Taiwan account. o ACTION: Emily will work with Rosanna on on transferring the money to GNOME.Asia. * Desktop Summit 2011: Berlin - Ekaterina (Kat) Gerasimova @ OpenIsmus o ACTION: Germán will follow up with Murray about Kat helping with planning and possible ack as a sponsor. * Free Agent t-shirt. (Update from GUADEC) o Shirts were sold for €20 and given to volunteers (such as the local volunteer organizers) for free. o About 50 of the 100 were distributed. o The GNOME Foundation made €700, but the costs to print the t-shirts were €1,050. o Brian has
Meeting Minutes Published - July 15, 2010
The meeting minutes for the June 24th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100715 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of July 15, 2010 Next Meeting * July 25th, 2010 at GUADEC Attending * Andreas Nilsson * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante Urrelo * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Jorge Castro * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Srinivasa Ragavan * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets * Bastien Nocera Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Welcome to new board members, and fairwell to members stepping down from the board. * Reassigning key action items: o ACTION: Diego to send an email to board-list to pass on the internal-review-process hat o ACTION: Og will take over from Diego and talk to John and Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial). * GNOME IRC Meeting Update, and schedule for next meeting o Attended by few Foundation members including Board members. Updates on various topics have been included in the minutes. o http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/IRC20100710 o To improve attendance at future meetings, the Board agreed to prepare an agenda prior to the next meeting, which is a month after GUADEC and a month before GNOME 3.0. o ACTION: Paul will organize the next GNOME Foundation IRC meeting and create an agenda. * Meeting planning for GUADEC o GNOME Advisory Board Meeting Update + Advisory Board meeting will be on Tuesday, July 27th at 09:30am local time. + ACTION: Stormy will mail the agenda for the GNOME Advisory Board meeting. o Board meeting: + Board meeting will be held on Sunday, July 25th at 09:30am local time. * Feedback from membership about Stormy's bonus o The board will rework how information about Stormy's bonus and performance reviews moving forward. The process will be to focus more on getting better feedback about GNOME Foundation goals in general. * The Board is negotiating with requests for additional funds from the GNOME.Asia Summit organizers o ACTION: Emily to mail the list about final GNOME.Asia financial situation so that the board can make budget decisions. * Boston Summit o Venue fee is higher than compared with previous years. This is in part due to our need to change the date. o ACTION: Stormy to work with John (J5) Palmieri to negotiate the costs for the Boston Summit. * Desktop Summit 2011: comments on the bids, participating in interviews o Updated bids from: + Berlin + Bulgaria: No response. + Istanbul o ACTION: Paul and Brian have volunteered to help out with the Desktop Summit 2011 bid interviews. * Free Agent t-shirt. o The Board approved printing 100 t-shirts. o ACTION: Brian to make arrangements to print 100 Free Agent t-shirts to have at GUADEC. * 2010 Q2 GNOME Quarterly Report Update o ACTION: All board members - The Board agreed to review the 2010 Q2 GNOME Quarterly Report draft sent by Brian. * Annual Report update o ACTION: Paul will send an email update about the Annual Report to the board. * GNOME 3 as a Foundation goal: o Discussion has been started on foundation-list with few responses. Need to invigorate the discussion. The Board plans to run another survey to try and get more useful feedback from the community. The last survey did not generate very useful information, but we could likely get better information by asking about technical and non-technical goals separately. Completed Actions * Germán - Will contact the students from Bangladesh who requested an invitation letter to find out details about what they need and to address the concerns raised by the organization. -- Bharath Acharya took care of it, the details were received and an invitation letter was sent on July 9th, 2010
Meeting Minutes Published - June 24, 2010
The meeting minutes for the June 24th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100624 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of June 24, 2010 Next Meeting * July 15, 2010 Attending * Bastien Nocera * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante Urrelo (late) * Emily Chen * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Jorge Castro * Og Maciel * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets * Srinivasa Ragavan Missing * Andreas Nilsson Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Annual Report Update o Now picking out pictures to include in the Annual Report. o Plan to have the Annual Report ready for printing on July 15th. * Sysadmin Position o The time to apply is now closed. o The GNOME Foundation got quite a few applications. Currently in the process of reviewing them. * CSUN Conference o The board has agreed to pay $2,000 for the booth, out of the funds allocated for a11y. o ACTION: Stormy will contact Eitan Isaacson to make sure that plans are made to get a booth a CSUN. * Reimbursing additional costs (visa, vaccinations, etc.) for Fernando Herrera's travel to Idlelo (230 Euro) o Germán talked to Fernando and he asked to not be reimbursed. Fernando just wanted to point out that the GNOME Foundation should consider paying for such additional costs when sending representatives to future events.. o ACTION: Germán will update the Travel policy that the Foundation will cover such extra costs when the board requests that a representative attend an event on behalf of GNOME Foundation. o ACTION: Vincent to send a Thank You note to Fernando for representing GNOME at Idlelo. * ACTION: Stormy will follow up with Om Chandra (a teacher of Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport of Cambodia and an E-Learning Training Coordinator of Open Learning Program of Open Institute NGO) to find out if he should receive travel subsidy to GUADEC. * ACTION: Germán will contact the students from Bangladesh who requested an invitation letter to find out details about what they need and to address the concerns raised by the organization. * Desktop Summit 2011: o ACTION: Germán will write a template that people who fill out bids can complete that can be made public. o ACTION: Board members must read the bids received for the Desktop Summit 2011 and make comments or propose questions that have not already been raised. * Making public the results of the GNOME Foundation Goals survey ran last January. o http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-January/msg00135.html o ACTION: Stormy will publish the results of our GNOME Foundation Goals survey. * Texas Instruments Zoom2 devices o Update from Brian. People who have received the device have found it difficult to work with. o ACTION: Bastien will try to find people who can consolidate the feedback about the Texas Instruments Zoom2 device to provide back to Texas Instruments. o ACTION: Brian will provide to Bastien the feedback received so far about the Texas Instruments Zoom2 devices. * Next Foundation IRC meeting o The next Foundation IRC meeting will be held on Saturday July 10th at 2pm UTC. * The Clutter copyright assignment issue has been resolved. There will be no need for copyright assignment. * The board's idea to use the Nokia money was not well received by the GNOME Mobile list. We are discussing and debating on the mobile list. We would like to have an action plan by GUADEC and use the money by the end of the year. * ACTION: Bastien will help Stormy identify some opportunities how to best use the money provided by Nokia. * The board approves spending $3,000 to purchase new t-shirts, mousepads, and stickers for new Friends of GNOME gifts. Also some of the stickers will be used for inclusion in the Event Box. * ACTION: Stormy will set up a doodle survey to figure out the time for the future board
Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
Patryk: Did you miss the common sense part? If the rules are vague, everything can be proved to be against the rules. These rules are for the GNOME Foundation community and the GNOME Foundation community will decide when the rules apply and when they have been broken. I think the GNOME Foundation community is an intelligent, highly educated bunch, and I do not think we need to be so concerned that these guidelines will be used in an abusive or frivolous manner. If, over time, we find that our speaker guidelines are being used in a way that is hampering honest, free speech, then this is something we can discuss and address in the future. Our guidelines are likely to be a living document that will be modified as necessary to ensure that they are used and understood properly. The goal we are trying to achieve with having Speaker Guidelines is to try and help foster an environment where people are more sensitive, aware, and focused on productive discourse. I believe the rules were defined to stop RMS from making jokes. If you don't like his sense of humor, don't invite him. You don't have to ban all kinds of jokes and sarcasm along the way. I have a few things to say about this. 1) There is no benefit in making this issue personal. Over the past 2.5 years that I have been on the board, the board has been asked to help address a situation where someone has been offensive at least a half-dozen times. The Speaker Guidelines were created to help deal with this class of problems, not to deal with any particular person who may have been offensive at any particular time. Please lets avoid derailing this discussion by turning it into a discussion about a particular person or situation. 2) When situations do happen, the board is often criticized that we are slow or ineffective at addressing them. One reason these problems are difficult to address is that we do not have any clear ground rules. Considering how difficult it is to get our community to agree on even simple ground rules, I hope people in the GNOME Foundation community can appreciate the difficulty and frustration the board has trying to address problems when they arise. 3) There is no problem with anyone telling jokes in general. That said, there is always a risk when telling a joke that someone might be offended. So the burden is on the speaker to ensure that any joke is appropriate for the audience at a GNOME technical conference. Humor that is at the expense of a minority or which encourage discrimination is not appropriate for a GNOME technical conference regardless of who says them. But this does not mean that jokes are always bad, or that jokes by any particular speaker are always bad. Also, sometimes people say offensive things without really understanding that their words are offensive, or would be interpreted in that way. The GNOME Foundation is highly diverse and made up of people from around the world, and people from different cultures or backgrounds do not always share the same sensitivities. So, when situations happen, it is important to have ground rules to help educate our speakers so that they understand how to be more considerate and effective speakers in the future. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Speaker Guidelines
Lefty: If it isn't clear already, the Speaker Guidelines are not intended to be used in frivolous ways. If people think that this needs to be spelled out more clearly in the guidelines, then please propose improved text. I can't imagine that anybody would take a complaint about someone giving a talk and using a MacBook seriously, unless the situation were somehow extraordinary (e.g. if a speaker had a GNU/Linux Killer sticker on their MacBook, that might warrant some concern and discussion). There is no need to discuss Apple or Microsoft or any other specific company. If you have concerns about how the guidelines might be applied about topics concerning free source vs. open source vs. proprietary technologies, then let's please talk about this without naming specific companies. Brian On 06/25/10 05:39 PM, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote: On 6/25/10 8:30 AM, Patryk Zawadzkipat...@pld-linux.org wrote: I bet at least one person in the audience is offended when they see the presenter using a Mac. Or sporting a Windows t-shirt. Or using an iPod. Or mentioning that Apple did something better than GNOME. Security, seize and escort the speaker out of the building. :) By the way: I would certainly recommend that anyone who's offended by a presenter using a Mac, wearing a Windows t-shirt, or both at the same time, to take their concerns directly and immediately to the Board of Directors. I would suggest that the Board of Directors tell them to Get a grip. Is it _that_ difficult to distinguish between the sort of offense that someone like Celeste Lyn Paul, a KDE board member, expressed when she wrote ( http://identi.ca/notice/6304540)... Do men really think RMSs virgin joke at #gcds was not sexist? Very disappointed in FLOSS comm chatter about this. ...on the one hand, and the offense that someone who feels a speaker is not being pure enough, or something, by using a non-free-software- movement-approved piece of hardware, or wearing a t-shirt bearing the logo of a non-free-software-movement-approved company, on the other? Do you see no distinction between the two, Patryk? (I am, admittedly, making the assumption that the reason your at least one person is taking offense is because the free software movement has a deep dislike, at the very least, for both Apple and Microsoft. Correct me if they're taking offense on color choices, style/industrial design or some other score.) As I recall, there was no shortage at all of MacBooks in the _audience_ at GCDS, and that's been pretty typical. There were plenty at FOSDEM as well. Do you think someone would be reasonable for your at least one person to take offense at the members of the community who happen to like Macs? What do you think he-or-she should do about this? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - June 10, 2010
The meeting minutes for the June 10th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100610 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of Jun 10, 2010 Next Meeting * June 24, 2010 Attending * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante Urrelo * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Jorge Castro * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Srinivasa Ragavan * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Annual Report o The annual report is coming together. Most of the articles are now actively being worked on. o The one missing piece is the Financial Report. o Plan to have the Annual Report ready for printing on July 15th. o ACTION: Germán will help Paul put together the Financial Report for the Annual Report. * Sysadmin o There are several candidates who have applied. o Currently working to start the interview process. * Linaro o ACTION: Jorge will introduce Stormy to some Linaro folks to see if GNOME can more effectively work with them. * Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial) is making arrangements to sell GNOME branded merchandise o Ronaldo Padula is agreeable with a 10% royalty fee. o Arrangements need to be made to work out how Ronaldo will send profits to the GNOME Foundation o ACTION: Diego to ask Jonh to investigate how Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial) should send profits to the GNOME Foundation. * Nokia arrangement and plans to coordinate with consulting firms o Stormy and Vincent will have meetings during LinuxTag to determine key items to work on. * Philosophy update o There was a meeting to update the latest draft, and the documents have been reworded. o There will be a final review with the advisory board, and then it can be announced. * Copyright Policy o There was another round of conversations and updates to the copyright policy. o ACTION: Vincent to follow up with Rick Spencer on the updated copyright policy and then send to the advisory board. * Co-locating in 2011 o Received four bids o next week = we collect questions from the board; o the week after = bidders answer our questions with clarifications; o the week after = we publish the bids and ask for feedback to the membership; o the week after = we interview the bidders o and then we decide the week of July 19th * GNOME Foundation credit card o Rosanna has an appointment for next Wednesday to acquire a GNOME Foundation credit card. * GNOME.Asia/COSCUP o Update: Richard Stallman will be doing a keynote along with Mark Shuttleworth. * ACTION: Vincent will help Stormy collect names of possible speakers for the GULEV Free Open Source Software Conference 2010 (GFOSSCon) to be held in Cancún, MX. Completed Actions * Germán - Will do the needful to make the bid for GUADEC public. o Not possible. The organization denied making the bid public. There was information provided by the Municipality and they did not give permission to use the information in public. Their argument is that it would undermine their competitive position with regard to other cities if their documentation would become generally available. The most we have is that we may use parts of the text for the conference website, but not put the whole thing online verbatim. * Paul - Will provide the board update in a week to the Board with a list of articles and percentage completed for the Annual Report. * Paul - Will send an Annual Report update by May 16th. * Stormy - Will discuss the opportunity to fund Mobile projects on the GNOME mobile mailing list to determine the best way to coordinate and make use of these resources. * Stormy - Will send an update to the board to highlight the Women Outreach Program plans under discussion. * Stormy - Will schedule a meeting to discuss and create the GTK+ RoadMap
Re: Ensuring GNOME 3 is a Success
You let us know overwhelmingly that ensuring that GNOME 3 is a success is the #1 priority that the GNOME Foundation should be working on according to the survey Stormy ran last January.[1] Sorry, but the reference in my previous email pointed to a non-public link. The survey I am talking about is here: [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2010-January/msg00135.html ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - May 27, 2010
The meeting minutes for the May 27th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100527 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of May 27th, 2010 Next Meeting * June 10, 2010 Attendance * Brian Cameron * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Jorge Castro * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets * Paul Cutler * Srinivasa Ragavan Missing * Diego Escalante Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Shaun McCance's proposal for funding developer documentation. o ACTION: Germán will follow up with Shaun McCance about how the board can help with his proposal for funding developer documentation. * GNOME brand marketing arrangement with Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial) o The board agreed to propose a 10% fee. o ACTION: Brian - Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial) is interested to make arrangements with the GNOME Foundation to sell GNOME branded merchandise. Diego is working with Ronaldo, but was not present at the meeting. The board agreed to make arrangements for a 10% royalty fee. Brian will tell Diego about this so further arrangements can be made. * LWN.net agreement - status o The GNOME Foundation received the legal agreement from the lawyers and this has been shared this with LWN. Once this is finalized, work with marketing can start. * Women Outreach Program o The Womens Outreach Program is moving forward and they are putting together a plan. o Marina will send a notice to the general public when it is finalized. o ACTION: Stormy will send an update to the board to highlight the Women Outreach Program plans under discussion. * LiMo and GTK+ o ACTION: Stormy will schedule a meeting to discuss and create the GTK+ Roadmap. * Making the bid for GUADEC public o Germán is making arrangements to make the GUADEC bid public with Koen Martens. * Sysadmin job o ACTION: Stormy will send out the announcement for the sysadmin job. * Consorcio Fernando de los Rios para la Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento (Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society) is working on a bid to improve GNOME accessibility. Details about the work being done are here: o http://live.gnome.org/Guadalinfo_accesible o http://hoygan.yaco.es/first-results-in-the-evince-a11y-improvements o http://blogs.gnome.org/juanje/2010/05/24/warming-up-with-the-a11y-stuff/ o http://blogs.gnome.org/juanje/2010/05/17/progressing-in-accessibility/ * Finances o The GNOME Foundation has a new invoicing process to make us more responsive to external teams requesting our help with invoicing (teams like LGM for example). o The GNOME Foundation should have the credit cards in the next two weeks. o Pre-purchasing tickets via a service like Orbitz. + More discussion with Orbitz is needed. o GnuCash - status + No update yet. Germán will try to work on this over the next two weeks. If this cannot be done by then, the board will explore other options. * Nokia arrangement to improve GNOME Mobility o We have a list of potential uses for the money, based on discussion on mailing lists. o ACTION: Stormy will write a proposal how to spend the money from Nokia to improve GNOME mobility based on discussion. * Event Updates o GNOME.Asia/COSCUP co-located event in Taiwan + Making good progress with finding sponors. + The website is coming along and should be live soon. + Now working on call for papers. + Minutes from last GNOME.Asia/COSCUP Organizational IRC meeting held on Tuesday, May 25: # http://mail.gnome.org/archives/asia-summit-list/2010-May/msg00080.html o GUADEC + Discussion about the budget. + ACTION: Vincent to mail to all board candidates
Re: Question for the candidates : money !
Lionel: I've a question about GNOME business model and sustanability. As we have seen with the fundrising to hire a sysadmin, money is often a blocking point. The current business model seems to be donations. Actually, The GNOME Foundation acquires money from several sources: - Advisory Board fees - Sponsorship for particular events or programs - Profit from events (such as GUADEC) - Donations (such as Friends of GNOME and the upcoming mobile donations program being discussed on the marketing list) The GNOME Foundation has invested a fair amount of effort in the Friends of GNOME program to increase donations and with good success. However, donations are a small overall percentage of revenue. Also note that The GNOME Foundation is a charity. So, we do need to ensure that money that we receive is used in ways that are aligned with The GNOME Foundation charter. This does restrict how The GNOME Foundation can raise and spend money to a degree. Do you think that donations are good ? Good enough ? With more money, the GNOME Foundation can do more exciting things, so the GNOME Foundation is always looking at ways to improve how money is raised. In the past year, the GNOME Foundation doubled the advisory board fees and this was a significant step making the organization more profitable. Do you plan to work on this business model ? Do you have any proposals ? There is a lot of work going on to improve how the GNOME Foundation raises money: - Statistics show that most money received via Friends of GNOME comes from GNOME users, not people in the GNOME development community. The GNOME Foundation is planning to start a campaign to more effectively reach out to users to make them aware of the Friends of GNOME program, and consider donating. - The board is currently working to develop a program to allow companies and organizations to donate money. This program would be directed at organizations that are not currently advisory board members. This could be something like a Friends of GNOME program for organizations instead of individuals. This could, for example, provide a link exchange, advertising, mention as a sponsor of an event, or other forms of recognition as an incentive to donate money. - By making events more profitable. We are constantly working with event organizers to encourage them to find ways to make events more profitable, or at least sustainable. - Typically sponsorship money that the GNOME Foundation receives is in exchange for some service, such as by organizing a hackfest to get work done in an area that benefits (directly or indirectly) those organizations interested in providing sponsorship. With GNOME 3 approaching, the GNOME Foundation has been working hard to organize a rich set of hackfests to focus on work that needs to get done for GNOME 3 to be successful. The GNOME Foundation needs to continue working hard in this area. However, more can be done. For example, the GNOME Foundation received some sponsorship money last year to upgrade bugzilla. The GNOME Foundation needs to continue to find ways to provide services that will continue to bring in sponsorship money. - Currently the GNOME Foundation is organizing a Women's Outreach Program. Getting more involved with organizing humanitarian events like this could open the doors to finding new sponsors with an interest in promoting humanitarian causes. - Grants are another possible source of revenue. We have done some considerable work preparing ourselves to pursue them. Building a community of volunteers to help with this has been slow going, but our hope is that we can make grants more a part of our revenue generation in time. http://live.gnome.org/Grants Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
Vincent: 1) I've read with interest the mails from the candidates announcing they're running, and most (if not all -- I didn't double-check) include some motivations with examples of what they'd be interested in working on. Why are those tasks/ideas things you cannot work on while not being on the board? Several tasks that I work on for the board are, in fact, things I could do if I weren't on the board. If I am not elected, I anticipate that I would continue participating on GNOME marketing, legal, and other areas. As a board member I act as Stormy's manager and as secretary. I would unlikely be in a position to continue providing these sorts of services to the board if I were not a board member. 2) What are your non-usual (ie, not code, not translations, not documentation, etc.) contributions as a GNOME Foundation member? (organizing events, pushing people to do things, finding sponsors, etc. are all possible answers) I have organized or helped to organize several GNOME events including the GNOME Usability hackfest and GNOME.Asia (3 years running). I also tend to be involved with getting things done on the GNOME Marketing, Usability, legal, and the new developing world mailing lists. 3) What is your opinion on the co-location of Akademy and GUADEC in 2011? And if you think it was not the best choice, will you still be able to help it happen? I think that free software communities should work together to battle our true competition, those proprietary desktops. I think co-located events helps with fostering this attitude and cross-platform solutions. 4) How much free time per week do you think you will be able to allocate for the board? (I'm very well aware that this could be 0 for some weeks, and 100% of your time for other weeks; I'm just asking in general) I currently spend about 8-12 hours per week working on Foundation activities. I anticipate this will continue. 5) Are you okay giving up some of your current GNOME responsabilities/activities to join the board? (give up a maintainer hat, or hack less, or participate less in a specific team) Or do you think it won't be necessary and why? (I know it's a bit related to the previous question :-)) I have found that I hack less since serving on the board, but I still find time to co-maintain GDM, work on multimedia, and work in other areas on the desktop. 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? If elected, I anticipate I will serve as secretary again. Though I would consider a different position if someone else really wants to be secretary. 7) What do you think of the current GNOME Foundation budget? Had you read it at least once before reading this mail? (it's okay if you didn't look at it before, btw) Last year there was a real concern about the budget and how The GNOME Foundation would be able to continue covering costs associated with having Stormy as an employee. I think the work done over the past year to raise funds by doubling the advisory board fees, improving Friends of GNOME, and the great work done to find sponsors for various events and projects has put The GNOME Foundation in a good position moving forward. 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) I think The GNOME Foundation should do a Friends of GNOME outreach program to GNOME users. Statistics show that most people who donate are users, not developers. However, we have never effectively done a marketing campaign directed towards our usres. 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) Yes, I plan to be there. 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression? Tu n'as rien de mieux à faire? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
Richard: To advance to the goal of freedom for software users, we need to develop good free software, and we need to teach people to value and demand the freedom that free software offers them. We need to advance at the practical level and at the philosophical level. GNOME is good free software, and thus contributes at the practical level. How will candidates use the user community's awareness of GNOME to contribute to educating the communityn about freedom? Free software is a core value of the GNOME Foundation, and over the past few years I have worked directly with you on several occasions to improve how the GNOME Foundation presents itself as a part of the free software community. The GNOME community has many resources for reaching out to the public, but these are maintained by hundreds of volunteers who are unfortunately sometimes not always focused on communicating the message of free software. Fortunately, there are a core group of free software lovers in the GNOME community who review things and push for the message of free software to be more front and center, where it belongs, and I consider myself part of this team. I am sure that I miss opportunities as I am human, but fortunately I am not the only person on the lookout for more ways to educate people and focus people's attention about the benefits of free software. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - May 13, 2010
Sorry, you caught another error. I updated the Wiki minutes to say 2011 Desktop Summit instead of GCDS 2010. Thanks, Brian On 05/25/10 02:32 AM, Patryk Zawadzki wrote: On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 9:21 AM,csaave...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 10:19:17PM -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: Note that the deadline for GCDS 2010 Call for Hosts will be extended to June 9th, not June 15th. The Wiki has been corrected so it now more correctly says: * Cornelius Schumacher sent an email to the board proposing that the deadline for GCDS 2011 Call for Hosts be extended. It was agreed to extend the deadline to June 9th. Didn't GCDS stand for Gran Canaria Desktop Summit? Maybe now it became the Grand Combined Desktop Summit? ;) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - May 13, 2010
The meeting minutes for the May 13th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100513 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of May 13th, 2010 Next Meeting * May 27, 2010 Attendance * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante Urrelo * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets * Srinivasa Ragavan Missing * Jorge Castro (at UDS?) Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Stormy's bonus review o All board members have provided feedback and some final decisions are being made. o Plan to have the bonus approved within the next week. * GNOME Foundation elections o Nobody on the board has yet announced their candidacy for the next term. o Germán suggests board members should write/blog about their tasks, what they do, the work involved, what people who are considering to run should expect (i.e. the amount of work per week involved with emails/discussions, etc.) o ACTION: Everyone needs to encourage appropriate people to consider running for the board. o ACTION: Everyone on the board who plans to run for the next term needs to announce their candidacy. * Making the bid for GUADEC public? o Germán hopes that this will be done by next week. o Getting this completed within the next week would be good. There will be good timing with the extension of the deadline for the 2011 Desktop Summit. * Sysadmin job o An Interview Team has been established + The Interview Team is composed of 3 people: Jonathan Blandford, Bradley Kuhn and Brad Taylor + Once hired, the sysadmin will report to Stormy. + Paul had an action to touch base with legal. The email has been sent, but no response yet. + ACTION: Stormy will contact legal. * Andalucia Accessibility Bid o Stormy asked the people from Andalucia to introduce themselves on the foundation-list. o There was a requirement in the bid that they must work with upstream. o Should we do a press release? Stormy highlights that if we decide to do another a11y hackfest that we could combine these. o ACTION: Vincent will talk to Juan Jesús Ojeda (Juanje) from Andalucia and ask them to blog about the project. * Finances o Annual Report update + ACTION: Paul will send an Annual Report update by May 16th. + ACTION: Paul will follow up with Germán about the financial data for the Annual Report. o ACTION: Germán will share the financial data that was provided to the advisory board to foundation-list. o Update about what has been done with the GNOME Foundation bank account since we discovered someone tried to cash a fraudulent check. + The GNOME Foundation now has a new checking account. + The old account is still available for receiving money, but money cannot be withdrawn from that account. To transfer money out, Rosanna needs to call them to unlock it temporarily. + The checks for the new account have been received. + There is still work to do. Rosanna still needs to set up the new account to accept wire transfers, for example. This work is underway. o Acquiring a GNOME Foundation credit card. + We need this for mobile donations and for setting up Orbitz. + Vincent, Brian, Paul, Diego, and Germán all approved. + ACTION: Rosanna will apply for credit cards for herself and Stormy. o GnuCash automation + Germán received the GnuCash automation information from Rosanna and hopes to have some progress by the next week. + We will do a call for volunteers to get the GnuCash automation work done. Stormy recommends hiring someone to do this work
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - May 13, 2010
Note that the deadline for GCDS 2010 Call for Hosts will be extended to June 9th, not June 15th. The Wiki has been corrected so it now more correctly says: * Cornelius Schumacher sent an email to the board proposing that the deadline for GCDS 2011 Call for Hosts be extended. It was agreed to extend the deadline to June 9th. Brian On 05/24/10 09:53 PM, Brian Cameron wrote: The meeting minutes for the May 13th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100513 [...] * Cornelius Schumacher sent an email to the board proposing that the deadline for GCDS 2011 Call for Hosts be extended to June 15th. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Announcing the GNOME Developing World List
GNOME Community: I have the pleasure of announcing the GNOME Developing World list. One of the GNOME Foundation's high level goals is to work harder to increase the visibility, promotion and usage of GNOME in the developing world. This mailing list will provide a forum for people with an interest in developing a stronger GNOME presence in the developing world. Topics will likely include ways to reach out and promote GNOME in regions with limited access to technology, solving particular needs in the developing world, and promoting more humanitarian efforts within the GNOME community. If you have an interest in participating, please subscribe and join the discussions! Refer here for more information: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/developing-world-list Thanks, Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Announcing the GNOME Developing World List
GNOME Community: I have the pleasure of announcing the GNOME Developing World list. One of the GNOME Foundation's high level goals is to work harder to increase the visibility, promotion and usage of GNOME in the developing world. This mailing list will provide a forum for people with an interest in developing a stronger GNOME presence in the developing world. Topics will likely include ways to reach out and promote GNOME in regions with limited access to technology, solving particular needs in the developing world, and promoting more humanitarian efforts within the GNOME community. If you have an interest in participating, please subscribe and join the discussions! Refer here for more information: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/developing-world-list Thanks, Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Brian Cameron
Name:Brian Cameron Email: brian.came...@oracle.com Nick:yippi Blog:http://blogs.sun.com/yippi/ Affiliation: Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems, Inc.) I think it is important for more people to consider running for the GNOME Foundation board. It is a great way to contribute to the GNOME community. The GNOME Foundation does a lot of work helping to organize and promote GNOME-related events, so I would especially recommend people to run who have this sort of experience. Summary I am running for re-election for a third term on the board. I am running not just because I love GNOME, the GNOME community, and free software; but also because I have experience working on the board and a good track record of getting things done. Who? * I have been a part of the GNOME community since January, 2001 (almost 10 years!) * I have over 18 years of experience as a UNIX programmer and technical documentation writer. * I am affiliated with Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems) where I work as a senior engineer on the OpenSolaris Desktop team. * I have served on the GNOME Foundation board since December, 2008 and acted as secretary in the last term. * I have been the maintainer/co-maintainer of GDM since 2005. * I have regularly attended GUADEC and Boston Summit conferences since 2002. * I live in Chicago in the United States. Why? I am highly motivated and have time to invest to make the Board successful. I have passion for working with the GNOME community, and I have a good working relationship with many people in the GNOME and free software communities. I am especially proud of the following accomplishments over the past term on the board: * In the past term on the board I have acted as secretary. I believe the quality and regularity of meeting minutes have improved a great deal, and this work has made the GNOME Foundation considerably more transparent to GNOME Foundation members. I have also invested a lot of time better organizing the GNOME Foundation Wiki (both public and private) so that the board can be more effective. I plan to again serve as an officer on the board in the next term. * I act as Stormy's manager and have bi-weekly meetings with her to discuss progress and future direction. I am also responsible for managing Stormy's bi-annual bonus review. * I organized the GNOME Usability hackfest in London this past February and I continue to do work to help organize the GNOME.Asia Summit. I also participated at the 1st GNOME Marketing hackfest and the GNOME Documentation Hackfest. * I tend to get involved with legal issues. For example, I am currently working with the GNOME Foundation's legal advisors to help improve the agreements GNOME uses to allow usage of the GNOME brand. * I have been active on the gnome-marketing, a11y, and usability mailing lists to help keep things moving in a positive direction. For example, I am currently working to arrange a Free Agent t-shirt on the marketing list at the moment. Looking to the future: With GNOME 3.0 around the corner, the next term promises to be very busy and exciting. I anticipate that the GNOME Foundation will need to play an active role in helping to make sure that GNOME 3 is successful by marketing, getting the word out, and organizing events to get the right people together to make things happen. I also personally have a particular focus on promoting GNOME accessibility and plan to work and help ensure that the GNOME free desktop is made available to all people, regardless of income, location, gender, or level of ability. Also, GNOME rocks. Thank you for considering me, Brian Cameron ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Meeting Minutes Published - April 29, 2010
The meeting minutes for the April 29th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100429 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- = Minutes for Meeting of April 29th, 2010 = == Next Meeting == May 13th, 2010 == Attendance == * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante * Jorge Castro (late) * Paul Cutler * Rosanna Yuen * Srinivasa Ragavan * Stormy Peters == Regrets == * Vincent Untz == Missing == * Germán Póo-Caamaño === Recurring Items === * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. == New Items == * Now that we are using the new Intel teleconferencing system, the GNOME Foundation private wiki needs to be updated with the new dial-in information. * ACTION: Srini to update the GNOME Foundation private Wiki with new Intel dial-in information. * Stormy's bonus. * The board started the review process on April 28th and plans to come to a decision by the next board meeting. * ACTION: Everyone to review Stormy's report and provide feedback on Stormy's bonus. * Transfering the guadec.org domain to the GNOME Foundation. * The GNOME Foundation is happy to report that this has been completed. Thanks to the sysadmin team for doing the needful. * The GNOME Foundation still needs to acquire SSL a certificate for guadec.org in order to support managing registration for GUADEC. * ACTION: Paul will follow up with Germán to ensure the SSL certificate for guadec.org is acquired. * LiMo * ACTION: Stormy has been talking to LiMo about how we can work together. Waiting on LiMo at this point. * The board is discussing the possibility of using a service like Orbitz to pre-purchase tickets for some travel subsidy requests. Stormy has been having ongoing discussions with Orbitz to find out if arrangements can be made. * ACTION: Stormy to finish following up with Orbitz to find out if the GNOME Foundation can pre-purchase travel tickets. * GnuCash automation. * Paul already has an action item to work with Germán to find a solution for GnuCash automation. * ACTION: Rosanna will send emails about the state of GnuCash automation to Paul so that he is in the loop about the state of affairs. * Ronaldo Padula (Loja Geek Depto Comercial) made a request to the GNOME Foundation to make an exclusive relationship to sell GNOME- branded merchandise in Brazil. * The board agreed that it is not desirable to set up an exclusive relationship, though the board would be interested in a non-exclusive one. * ACTION: Diego will respond to Ronaldo Padula to let him know that the GNOME Foundation is interested in negotiating merchandising agreements, but only if they are non-exclusive. * Putting together a team to hire a sysadmin. * ACTION: Paul will follow up with Vincent and see if he needs help putting together a team to hire a sysadmin. * Annual Report. * No update. Paul needs to follow-up with the authors and to ensure the work gets done by the end of June. * Need to make sure that Annual Reports get sent to all advisory board members. * ACTION: Paul will lead putting together the GNOME Annual Report. * Nokia Mobile Donation. * Nokia has generously provided the GNOME Foundation with $50,000 to be spent on encouraging more GNOME Mobile applications on Maemo 6 and MeeGo. * The GNOME Foundation thanks Nokia for this generous donation. * The board discussed the idea of running a program similar to Google Summer of Code, but open to all developers and not just students. * ACTION: Stormy will discuss the opportunity to fund Mobile projects on the GNOME mobile mailing list to determine the best way to coordinate and make use of these resources. * Board Performance. * Diego is leading a 360° review process for the GNOME Foundation board members work over the past 2 months. * ACTION: Everyone who has been asked to fill out the survey should fill it out no later than Wednesday the 5th. * ACTION: Stormy will provide Diego with information about the results from the survey that each board member was responsible for filling out. * Events. * The Python Bindings and GSettings hackfests went really well. * http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/Python2010 * http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/GSettings2010 * The first ever Texas Linux Fest went well and GNOME was represented with a booth
Meeting Minutes Published - April 15, 2010
The meeting minutes for the April 15th GNOME Foundation board meeting is now published. Refer here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20100415 Other past board meetings are archived here: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes -- text of the latest minutes follows -- Minutes for Meeting of April 15th, 2010 Next Meeting * April 29th, 2010 Attendance * Brian Cameron * Diego Escalante * Germán Póo-Caamaño * Paul Cutler * Srinivasa Ragavan * Stormy Peters * Vincent Untz Regrets * Rosanna Yuen * Jorge Castro Missing Recurring Items * Review past action items. * Did each person with action items send their status reports to the board list before the meeting? * Approve and make sure that minutes of last meeting were published to foundation-announce and foundation-list. * Make sure to start up the gobby server for better note taking. * Update foundation.gnome.org website. New Items * Stormy's status report o Still working on it. * LWN.net o The GNOME Foundation is talking with LWN.net about a possible partnership. * Transfer of the guadec.org domain to the GNOME Foundation - status o Hope to have progress by next week. o ACTION: Germán is tracking the transfer of the guadec.org domain to the GNOME Foundation. * Making the bid for GUADEC public o ACTION: Germán will do the needful to make the bid for GUADEC public. * Accessibility contract from Andalucia o ACTION: Germain - Regarding the Accessibility contract from Adalucia, Check if Emergy and/or Yaco can attend at least one day at Zaragoza. If not possible, Stormy may have a meeting with them in Seville. * Health insurance for Foundation employees o Right now the GNOME Foundation does not need health insurance since all employees currently have it via other options, but this is something we will need to consider in the future if and when the GNOME Foundation has employees with a need. * Request from Loja Geek Depto Comercial to sell GNOME branded projects in Brazil - status o ACTION - Diego will follow up with Loja Geek Depto Comercial and let them know we do not do exclusive arrangements. * Friends of GNOME - sysadmin announcement update o The GNOME Foundation is forming a hiring committee (3 people) o The GNOME Foundation will announce the job position soon, and the interview process should take place not long afterwards. * Annual Report o The Annual Report is in progress, though a bit behind. o The Annual Report will be ready before GUADEC. o ACTION: Paul will provide the board update in a week to the Board with a list of articles and percentage completed for the Annual Report. * Nokia arrangement and plans to coordinate with consulting firms. o ACTION - Stormy - there is activity and discussion about the Nokia consulting arrangement on the mobile list, and this needs to be reworked into a more formal proposal. * Co-located GNOME.Asia/COSCUP event in Taiwan o The board thinks a co-located GNOME.Asia/COSCUP event is a good idea, but needs to see a more detailed budget to make more concrete decisions. o ACTION - Brian will track progress of GNOME.Asia event organization. * Co-locating in 2011 o ACTION - Srini will follow up with potential sponsors for the co-located summit in 2011. * FOSS Nigeria in Kano, Nigeria (April 23-25) o ACTION - Stormy will send an email to the FOSS Nigeria organizers and let them know that the GNOME Foundation will likely not send anyone. o ACTION - Brian will send an email to the foundation-list and let people know about the fact that the GNOME Foundation is not likely going to be represented at this event. * Brazilian events request from Jonh Wendell o ACTION - Brian will follow up with Jonh Wendell about the budget for events in Brazil. * Much thanks Joe Zonker Brockmeier and Ubuntu volunteers for agreeing to help organize the GNOME booth at the Texas Linux Fest. Completed Actions * Brian - To review the proposals for the TI Zoom2 project and start discussion with the board to make a decision. o Zack Frey will receive the immediately available unit, and Marcus Bauer will receive the unit that Steve Sakoman is currently using, which he should be done with in a week or two. * Brian - The minutes for 8 board meetings
