Re: internal engagement
Hi Emmanuele, First at all, thanks to everybody for clarify the issue. However, I would like to go to the point I was trying to make: On Wed, 2014-03-05 at 10:38 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: [...] How is that none of the directors noticed this to fix it? I was honestly convinced that Karen did send an email (I do remember the discussions at various meetings quite vividly), but it's probably the result of me discussing this stuff off and on in various venues (IRC, email, social networks) that I may just have been confused. I apologise for that. This is kind of my point: when a person participates in many channels and some of them are private, it is not hard to think that everybody are in the loop, specially when in part of some private discussions something public is mentioned. We are human beings after all. If Sri blames apathy on this list in order to do (or not do) something, then I would say: maybe it is just people out of the loop and you cannot see that because of the circumstances you are in. So, if any of you want to change the status, go ahead and don't think in apathy. Otherwise we won't get anywhere. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Announcing GUADEC 2015 bid
On Sun, 2014-03-09 at 12:57 +0100, Oliver Propst wrote: On behalf of the Gothenburg GUADEC 2015 organizing committee I'm pleased to announce our bid* for GUADEC 2015 to the GNOME foundation Board of Directors. https://cloud.gnome.org/public.php?service=filest=77f8afe4300651a3f1d2bfcda545acaf Hi Oliver, Nice bid. I have some doubts regarding to some prices in page 7. The prices to get to Kasttrup Airport, Copenhagen seems extremely low. For example: * Beijing, China: €290 Euro (12+ hours) * Boston, USA: €145 Euro (13+ hours) * Montreal, Canada: €364 Euro (12+ hours) I tried to get some prices with kayak.com, but all of them where more than US$1,000. I know that some cheap airlines does not appear there, like AirBerlin or AirTransat. But one gets to Berlin and the another to Amsterdam. Where did you get these prices? Which Airline? Are they round-trip tickets with airfares? Are these prices part of a Swedish conspiracy? ;-) -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes for the Board meeting of February 25th, 2014
On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 10:15 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20140225 = Minutes for Tuesday, February 25th, 2014, 17:00 UTC = == Next Meeting == * Monday, March 3rd, 2014, 16:00 UTC [...] * Should we set aside funding for a South American event box? * '''ACTION''': Kat to ask South American events organisers for the Foundation to sponsor an event box * Expected cost: USD 1000 to USD 2500 * https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Grants/EventsBox This can turn out very expensive and inconvenient for people there. Have in mind that South America is bigger than appears in the map. Just for a reference, Ecuador -that tiny country in the map- looks smaller than France, but it is ~70,000 square kms bigger, it doubles size UK. So, sending the event box from Lima to Santiago is equivalent in distance to Oslo-Lisbon, and Lima-Sao Paulo is equivalent in distance than Moscow-Lisbon. That is without considering the distances to other places within each country. The countries are not as well connected as in Europe. Sending an event box two or three times between countries could become as expensive as having two event boxes (courier, insurance, customs, etc.), something that might not be affordable by local people. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: internal engagement
On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 00:55 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 11:11 AM, Fabiana Simões fabianapsim...@gmail.com wrote: [...] To a large extent, I always expected this to be an active communication channel between Foundation members and the board. The meeting notes and agenda are great, but they give very little insight about the milestones and major accomplishments we're hitting (and aiming to hit) as a Foundation. Unfortunately, previous boards have many attempts to have IRC meetings and it's been poorly attended. So I'm not sure what would generate interest in talking to the board? What about status reports from the other teams? People cannot get engaged is they are unaware of the board whereabouts. Without engagement you are not going to generate interesting discussions. Just an example after reading the minutes recently sent: = Minutes for Tuesday, December 10th, 2013, 16:00 UTC = [...] * We should also ask on foundation-list for ideas * '''ACTION''': ... to reach out to foundation-list for ideas from the foundation members regarding the privacy campaign funds = Minutes for Tuesday, January 21th, 2013, 15:00 UTC = [...] * Status and plan for the security and privacy campaign's money * ... asked around generally for ideas * Not much feedback I don't see in the archives (December 2013-March 2014) a mail to foundation-list asking for ideas for the privacy campaign (please, correct me if I am wrong). So, it should not be strange that there was Not much feedback. How is that none of the directors noticed this to fix it? -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes for the Board meeting of February 25th, 2014
On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 20:03 +0100, Luc Pionchon wrote: On 4 March 2014 19:51, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 10:15 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20140225 = Minutes for Tuesday, February 25th, 2014, 17:00 UTC = == Next Meeting == * Monday, March 3rd, 2014, 16:00 UTC [...] * Should we set aside funding for a South American event box? * '''ACTION''': Kat to ask South American events organisers for the Foundation to sponsor an event box * Expected cost: USD 1000 to USD 2500 * https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Grants/EventsBox This can turn out very expensive and inconvenient for people there. Have in mind that South America is bigger than appears in the map. Just for a reference, Ecuador -that tiny country in the map- looks smaller than France, but it is ~70,000 square kms bigger, it doubles size UK. interesting. France is about 550.000 km2, Ecuador seems to be 280.000 km2 and UK 240.000 km2 Yeah, that happens when you get some information in metric and some in imperial and your brain is trained only for metric. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes for the Board meeting of February 18th, 2014
On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 10:15 +, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20140218 = Minutes for Tuesday, February 18th, 2014, 16:00 UTC = == Next Meeting == * Tuesday, February 25th, 2014, 16:00 UTC [...] * The Board discussed the direction of the GNOME Foundation and possibilities for the future May any of the directors elaborate more about the outcome of this discussion? PS: Thanks Emmanuele for the minutes -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Updates from the GNOME Sysadmin Team
On Thu, 2013-11-21 at 22:23 +0100, Andrea Veri wrote: 2013/11/21 Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com [...] When you document how to lock down individual pages to prevent random people from from editing them, please send the link to the mailing lists as it is moderately complicated if one has not done it before. Sure, that can be done this way: 1. Create a page with the following syntax: 'SysadminGroup' 2. add a list of wiki usernames like https://wiki.gnome.org/SysadminGroup 3. add the ACL at the beginning of the wiki page you want to lock down: #acl WikiPageName/SysadminGroup:read,write,delete,admin,revert All:read Beware that the group wiki page name *must* end in 'Group'. Otherwise, you can get an immutable wiki page that nobody can edit [1] (only a sysadmin, Andrea: it would be great if you could delete it :-). Tip from someone who learned that in the hard way (of course, I followed the standard procedure of reading the documentation [2,3] afterwards :-) [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Travel/CurrentCommittee [2] http://moinmo.in/HelpOnAccessControlLists [3] http://moinmo.in/HelpOnGroups -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of July 31st, 2013
On Wed, 2013-08-14 at 22:06 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: * The travel committee is currently verifying the travel requests * The event's local team should take over this role * The travel committee needs more resources * Three potential volunteers * Streamline the process * '''ACTION''': Joanie, Kat, Tobi, Rosanna, Karen will hold a work group at GUADEC about the travel committee process Any news about the outcome of this work group? PS: Thanks Emmanuele for the timing of these minutes. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADEC 2015 intent to bid for Oxford
On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 19:49 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: [...] On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 10:48:32AM -0700, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: I wonder what are the odds of getting the venue for free. It seems the venue could make the difference between having some profit, no profit or a major loss. The venues are negotiated with each college or department. Whether we can negotiate for a free venue will very much depend on the attendee numbers and which venue we want. The higher the expected number of attendees, the fewer choices we will have as Oxford is a college university with few students per year, so there are few large lecture halls. On the plus side, with GUADEC attendance falling in recent years[1], we are likely to have more options. Even if we have to pay the maximum for the venue, the spending is on a par with recent years. The bigger question is whether we will be able to get the same amount of sponsorship as we normally do[2], which still remains to be seen. (I am assuming that it will be similar to this year for the budget.) I think that we will be better placed to assess whether paying for the venue is a viable option after GUADEC this year and if it is not, then I expect the bid to be rejected. We will try our best to acquire a venue for free or to negotiate a discount. IIRC, we have paid €40,000 as maximum (~£34,500). If you also make the match for travel sponsorships, that would be £25,800. Combined, that would lower the proposal costs in about £10,000. In addition, you can make the sponsorship dependant of the venue costs. It is not the ideal, but tighten our belts could be an option. Thanks for the updates. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADEC 2015 intent to bid for Oxford
On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 12:48 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: Hi all, I am planning to submit a bid on behalf of a small team of users, contributors and other FOSS people to host GUADEC in Oxford, UK, in 2015. I and a few of the other local team members will be available during the core GUADEC days next week, in case you want to come talk to us about the bid. If you are not planning to be at GUADEC, please feel free to email me with any questions. You can see our draft bid at https://wiki.gnome.org/EkaterinaGerasimova/GUADEC2015Bid as we put it together. Anyone wishing to join the local team is very welcome to add themselves to the list. Hi Ekaterina, First at all, thanks for working on a bid for GUADEC. I have some comments and questions. It might be good to add some reference prices for meals and such in Oxford. reasonable could have different meanings depending where people come from. I wonder what are the odds of getting the venue for free. It seems the venue could make the difference between having some profit, no profit or a major loss. Regards, -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates
On Thu, 2013-06-06 at 01:29 +0200, Tobias Mueller wrote: Hi Gil, everyone. On 26.05.2013 22:17, Gil Forcada wrote: but what about relations with companies and GNOME's ecosystem. GNOME has a large advisory board and there are lots of companies and interests around it. Do you feel comfortable and up to the task for that too? Yes I do. And I think it is necessary for us to keep current advisory board members happy and to try to find new ones. I wouldn't necessarily actively engage with them though, as I think Karen is better suited for that. But I would if it becomes necessary. Are the current advisory members happy? How do we measure that? By *we* I mean GNOME Foundation represented by you, the board of directors. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Travel assistance applications to attend to GUADEC
The GNOME Foundation provides travel sponsorships to individuals that want to attend GUADEC and need financial assistance. We are happy to announce that the Travel Committee is ready to receive applications for sponsorships to attend to GUADEC 2013. The instructions are detailed at http://live.gnome.org/Travel Please read them carefully. Deadline: May 31, 2013, 19:00 UTC. You can start sending your applications now! Some additional comments: * Any information you send to the Travel Committee will be private. * Asking for sponsorship *does not* guarantee you will get sponsored. * A good application with good information will be processed faster. * If you need help with accommodation, the Travel Committee will book the hotel or hostel for you. This enables us to get group rates and provide accommodation assistance to as many people as possible. You should state that you need accommodation, and leave the cost blank. * Always choose the most economical option whenever possible. People who need travel sponsorship, should look for the best price (i.e. through a service like kayak.com). If the Travel Committee finds a cheaper price, that will be the price considered during the evaluation. * There are direct flights to Brno available through budget airlines. These are considerably cheaper and take 30 minutes to get to the the city centre instead of a few hours. Other close airports are Prague and Vienna. * If you are in the Google Summer of Code program (as student or mentor) you should mention it in your application. Preference will be given to students and mentors participating in the Google Summer of Code or the Outreach Program for Women. GSoC students usually get a percentage of their GUADEC expenses covered. * If your abstract was accepted to be presented at GUADEC, you should mention it in your application. Preference will be given to people giving presentations at GUADEC. * The Travel committee should confirm that we have received your application within 2-3 days. After that we would accumulate all the sponsorship requests and process them together. So please do not panic (and have any butterflies in your stomach) if we take some time to respond with the status. Regardless of whether your application is accepted or rejected, you will always receive a response. * No personal emails. Please keep travel-committee Cced on all of your replies. You can find us in the #travel channel at irc.gnome.org. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to GNOME Foundation Board candidates
On Fri, 2013-05-24 at 22:49 +0800, Max wrote: 2013/5/22 上午3:17 於 Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com 寫道： My question to the candidates: For all candidates, how do you see being on the board will enhance or facilitate the volunteer work you already do in the commutity? It might be enhance for GNOME.Asia organize, cause we could get response more quickly and runing at the same time. How many hours per week do you expect you will be able to dedicate to working on the board on a regular basis? I have no idea about that, cause I am not board member now. I think this is about time management, not if you have been already in the board. Having been in the board could give some advantage for planning, but you need to allocate time anyway, that is, stop doing other things. If you have planned to accomplish some goals in the board, then you should have some idea of how much time you would need to do them. That is, besides other duties that you can find in https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard as well as getting an idea from the action items in the minutes. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Questions for candidates
Hello, I also thanks people running for the board. I would like to know: In order to be in the board, what are you going to do *less*? In other words, what would the trade-off be for you? Are you going to spend less time in other GNOME activities (which ones?), family, work, etc.? If you are already in the board, what have you done less? Regards, -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Extending the call for candidates (was Re: Withdrawal of board of idrectors candidacy)
On Sat, 2013-05-25 at 15:23 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: My point about the candidates this time being really strong is that I think there were a few people who were thinking of running but who decided not to run against the people who had already put themselves forward. That is unfortunate. The members ought to have the choice. I used to have the same concern. Even more, the first time I ran was for this specific reason; which now seems unreasonable to me. I think it is nice to have a choice for this specific purpose, but it is not mandatory. Delaying the process is not going to make people more exciting to participate, and people already running have enough interest to participate that it is ok for me. [...] How can we encourage people to nominate themselves earlier? IMHO, for many people is not clear what the board of directors does and its limitations. Neither what it should be expected for a director nor what could be done that would be impossible otherwise. To give you an idea: among the proposals, I think there are several of them that could be done without being a director. I bet some candidates think the same. IMHO, for contributors who have not been in the board is hard to run for the first time and have a solid proposal (or even have a proposal at all). -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: DNS change irc.gnome.org becomes A record and irc.gimpnet.org starts getting phased out.
On Sat, 2013-05-11 at 12:49 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: [...] However, I see that Michael Hill also interpreted this as if the point were about the word gimp. Why was that? Maybe because this is closer to the topic in discussion (which is not to change the application name, but a DNS record). -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Proposal: DNS change irc.gnome.org becomes A record and irc.gimpnet.org starts getting phased out.
On Wed, 2013-05-08 at 10:02 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: We are looking into changing our irc server name from irc.gimpnet.org to irc.gnome.org and looking for feedback. I think you mean irc.gimp.org or irc.gimp.net. Essentially, it's become problematic to have 'gimp' in the name of our server. To many, 'gimp' is an offensive term an given our dedication to a11y it seems counter-intuitive to have this name in our infrastructure. Although, GIMP is an acronym I was not aware that connotation of gimp (as a non-English speaker I am not aware of many words either). With due respect, I think it is a coincidence. Bad coincidence. The proposal is to make irc.gnome.org be an DNS A record and we will continue to honor irc.gimpnet.org as a CNAME for one year in which case we will then remove it altogether. Other than the name of the server being changed and possibly any associated certs I do not forsee any other impact. Folks will have to change the name of the server they connect to, software like XChat will need to update their config files of default IRC servers to reflect the change. I think we can promote irc.gnome.org, but I do not think it is our call to remove any domain or subdomain associated with GIMP project. Did you ask to GIMP folks what do they think? Anyway, if you make the change, you should change irc.ca.gimp.org, irc.us.gimp.org and irc.au.gimp.org as well. Also, the change would be meaningless if the network name and the welcome message does not change. At the end of the day, in XChat you choose the network you want to join, not the domain name. That is the visible part most of the days. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boston Summit 2013?
On Fri, 2013-05-03 at 17:00 +0100, Jeff Fortin wrote: Hi all, I just wanted to let you know that I'm currently trying to organize this in Montréal, it would be lovely to have you folks here again. As far as I see, there are 3 different people working on this (or at least 2 plus another one interested in). It might be a good idea if you could coordinate between yourselves if you have not done that yet. Regards, -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boston Summit 2013?
On Tue, 2013-04-30 at 19:03 +0200, Piñeiro wrote: [...] What is the point of that long previous paragraph? Sincerely, for me, taking into account that we are talking about a small event, just starting to move to a different city for the sake of moving is an overkill. AFAIU, the idea of doing it in different city is because of last incident in Boston. It is not for the sake of moving it. And as Benjamin opened the can of Europe is far far away from Portland, this is even worse for people living in small cities. In my case I assisted the Boston summit twice (2009, 2012). And it was a Coruña-Madrid-Boston. In the hypothetical case of repeating this year, that extra hop would mean Coruña-Madrid-Amsterdam-Portland or Coruña-Madrid-Seattle-Boston. But I'm under no illusion that for some that this might be harder to get to. I'm still working the venue and hopefully I'll have something by next week. Although working for the venue is appreciated, imho, is irrelevant. It is relevant. Without venue or people organizing the event there is no event. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boston Summit 2013?
On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 14:38 -0400, Colin Walters wrote: On Fri, 2013-04-26 at 11:31 -0700, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: One of the benefits of Boston is that MIT traditionally had lent the venue for free during Columbus Day. Historically there was also the presence of Novell and Red Hat, among others. It's certainly the case that this presence is not as strong now. But at least Montreal is drivable from Boston (and that's what several of us did in 2011). And hotels are not too expensive there (compared to Cambridge). [...] Maybe because of the same reason, Boston Summit was almost (if not) zero-cost for the foundation. It has been during the last ~2-3 editions that the foundation started to sponsor some people to attend. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boston Summit 2013?
On Tue, 2013-04-23 at 13:43 -0700, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: Portland! It's just like Boston, but on the other side of the coast! :D People whine a lot there. It could either an opportunity or a problem. Where would it be? Would you take care of the logistic there? -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Changes to the GNOME Foundation Bylaws from 2002
On Tue, 2012-10-02 at 12:08 -0400, john palmieri wrote: On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:11 AM, Behdad Esfahbod beh...@behdad.org wrote: [...] I was on that board and I can back up Behdad's statement here. The change in wording from 1 year to a range between 1 and 2 years has already been done unchallenged (though someone could have rightfully challenged it at the time) and this change is simply putting into effect wording in our bylaws that would allow it without a vote. It allows the board to be more flexible based on issues we have dealt with in the past but in practice we would rarely go beyond a 1 year term. I believe pursuant to the document any member who can get 10% support can always challenge the extension of the term period before the elections if they wish. Also being that this is a per election decision that can't be amended without a vote during the term, there is little chance for abuse. [...] Thanks Behdad and John for the clarifications. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few observations about GIMPNET
On Thu, 2012-10-04 at 19:00 -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote: On 4 October 2012 17:09, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: I had the idea that most bots are there for awareness. That is, to check the backlog later when a discussion (or the result) is not brought to a mailing list. In GNOME we do not have public records of IRC, so one way to address the awareness issue (specially with timezone clash) is having a bot there. I find more value in a log of public channels. So, we can link them in case a discussion did not hit a mailing list or the wiki (something like http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/). Some people might have privacy concerns, though. If people are already running logging bots, I fail to see how someone could use privacy as a reason to not have official IRC logs. Some people never log out and have de facto logging too. It just means that a bunch of people have to duplicate the work of recording what's being discussed when they aren't signed in to IRC. Considering that Privacy != secret and public channel != public record, I can see some differences: The cases you mention are, in general, for personal use. It is different making those logs public. The language used in IRC is more relaxed, it can be professional (like in an office) or casual (like in a pub). That is the way we understand it, but outsiders could have a different perception (a job recruiter, future employer, immigration officer, police officer, etc.). Those outsiders are not going to set a bot, but they will find your information on the web. FWIW, I would like us to have public IRC logs. But if a hacker (or group of them) have privacy concern, we should not dismiss it because IRC is already public. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Changes to the GNOME Foundation Bylaws from 2002
On Mon, 2012-10-01 at 03:07 +0200, Tobias Mueller wrote: Dear Foundation, I propose to change the current bylaws to the document attached. If you object these changes, please raise your voice until 2012-10-31. If 5% of the membership (20 members) object, we will have a vote. Otherwise, the changes will be accepted. Hi Tobias, I wonder what is the rationale behind the following change: @@ -458,7 +522,7 @@ Election and Term of Office of Directors - -1. Each of the directors shall hold office for one (1) year. +1. Each of the directors shall hold office for one (1) year, or a period of up to two (2) years as determined by the Board and announced prior to an election being called. 2. Directors shall be elected by the membership in accordance with the rules set forth on http://foundation.gnome.org/electionrules.html. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting - September 9, 2012
On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 16:23 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: [...] * Karen to communicate to Federico that the Observation hackfest was approved by the board Hi, An email to the Travel Committee would be appreciated. I missed in the last meeting minutes there was a travel budget approved for this hackfest. Also, nobody sent a request to the travel committee asking for sponsorship. So, how should we proceed with the reimbursements? -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board meeting minutes - was (Re: A question for the candidates)
On Mon, 2012-05-28 at 06:06 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: On 28 May 2012 05:03, Frederic Muller fr...@gnome.org wrote: On 05/28/2012 07:29 AM, Tobias Mueller wrote: ne doesn't know what is happening and thus being able to take influence. So I would try to have the minutes sent around ASAP. But as far as I could see, nobody was suffering enough yet to publicly ask whether it'd be possible to make things more (timely) public. Again I guess we were spoiled by former board secretary in the previous years who was automatically emailing the meeting notes 2 weeks after the meeting. This year (2011-2012) minutes were published as follows: - Meeting of July 26, 2011 - publish on August 23rd : 1 month later - Meeting of August 9th, 2011 - published on October 18th: 2+ month later (publish together with 4 other meeting minutes). yes, this is my definite fault. [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). 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. :-) Indeed. That is the reason I blamed myself for not pestering for making them public (and not you). It was also your first term as director and secretary. If you become re-elected and keep the role as secretary, I will set a recurrent activity in my calendar to pester you every other week :-) -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the board election candidates
On Thu, 2012-05-24 at 20:24 -0300, gnomeu...@gmail.com wrote: 2012/5/22 Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org: [...] Thus, my question: how does each candidate propose to make use of GNOME and its communication to build support in the user community for free software and the freedom it provides? In short, I have no plans to use GNOME as a platform to spread support for Free Software. It is clear you have no empathy with Free Software. It is your opinion and that is ok. In practical matters, if you were elected as director: would you block any activity that involves working with FSF? or would you be indifferent? Similarly, would you avoid sponsoring activities/people whose goal is to spread GNOME and Free Software? -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question for the candidates
On Fri, 2012-05-25 at 18:33 +0100, Allan Day wrote: Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: ... Sometimes it can feel like the Board of Directors is a bit divorced from the rest of the GNOME project. I don't quite understand the question. The Board is not where technical decisions are made, it's not where applications or new dependencies are made. Yet it is still a governance body, and it is the only democratic one within GNOME. Only the Board can actually claim to represent the GNOME community. What were your expectations of the Board doing, and that they don't deliver on? My question was not guided by personal expectations. I'm interested in how the Board can enhance our community. Why do you think the Board of Directors is divorced from the project? I personally don't hear or see very much of what the board gets up to, and I don't feel like Foundation membership provides me with much in the way of additional influence. As a member of the board, you might be in a position to change that. On one hand, the meeting minutes should be a good way to know to be aware of what the board is doing (or not doing). In my first year, I pestered to make them public as soon as possible (3 or 4 days after the meeting). IMO, late minutes are meaningless. I blame myself for having the time and energy in the last year to pester the new secretary, but definitively that is something that any member can do and influence. The meetings are every two weeks and any member can add topics the agenda. On the other hand, in the last years the board has been trying to empower teams and people rather than centralizing power. For instance, the hackfest organization process is straightforward and it does not have be an activity proposed/organized by the board anymore. The board acts as helper of the contributors who want to do more and a bridge with companies when needed. I think there is room for improvement, but I will not spoil the candidates :-) -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Travel assistance applications to attend to GUADEC
Dear hackers, As you may know, the GNOME Foundation provides travel sponsorships to individuals who want to attend GUADEC and need financial assistance. We are happy to announce the Travel Committee is ready to receive applications for sponsorships to attend to GUADEC 2012. This year, GUADEC is being held in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A Coruña, in the beautiful city of A Coruña (Spain), from Thursday 26th July until Wednesday 1st August. The instructions are detailed at http://live.gnome.org/Travel Please read them carefully. Deadline: May 16, 2012, 23:59 UTC. You can start sending your applications now! Some additional comments: * Any information you send to the Travel Committee will be private. * Asking for sponsorship *does not* guarantee you will get sponsored. * A good application with good information will be processed faster. * If you need help with accommodation, the Travel Committee will handle it directly with the organization. You should state that you need accommodation, and leave the cost blank. * Always choose the most economical option whenever possible. People who need travel sponsorship, should look for the best price (e.g. through a service like kayak.com). If the Travel Committee finds a cheaper price, that will be the price considered during the evaluation. * If you are applying to a Google Summer of Code program (as student or mentor) you should mention it in your application. * GSoC students usually get a percentage of their GUADEC expenses covered. * If you submitted an abstract to be presented at GUADEC, you should mention it in your application. Preference will be given to people giving presentations at GUADEC. * The travel committee will cross check with the GUADEC paper committee the talks that have been accepted, so as long as you let us know you submitted one, there is no need to follow up. * The Travel committee should reply back about receiving your application within 2-3 days. After that we would accumulate all the sponsorship requests and process them together. So please do not panic if we take some time to reply on the status. Affirmative/Negative you would surely get a response. * If you need an invitation letter, you must clearly state your contributions and name at least two fellow hackers that can directly support your requirement. * No personal emails. Please keep travel-committee Cc'ed on all your replies. You can find us in the #travel channel at irc.gnome.org. Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Boston Summit?
On Sat, 2012-04-28 at 13:44 -0500, meg ford wrote: On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.comwrote: I'm also considering going to Grace Hopper, especially if the panel proposal I'm a part of gets accepted. The speaker notifications for Grace Hopper will happen May 17th. I know there might be just a few of us for whom it will matter, but if Joanie was brave enough to ask, I'd like to second her interest in considering a different weekend because of this overlap. After all, if we do go to Grace Hopper, all we'll be talking to people and presenting about will be GNOME, and it would be disappointing to be missing an important GNOME conference at the same time. Also GSoC mentors summit will be October 19-21, and it would be nice if the GNOME Summit (wherever it is :) doesn't conflict with it either. I agree. I think that it would be good for GNOME to make as strong a showing as possible at Grace Hopper. I understand that scheduling conflicts are unavoidable in some cases, but I think that re-scheduling the North American GNOME Summit should be strongly considered. It would be best for members of GNOME to not have to choose between the two events. I was really pleased that Joanie brought this up. A bit of context: The reason the Boston Summit is on Columbus day is because we could get the venue for free, plus being during a long weekend because of no university activities. Last year there were issues to book the venue, so we got alternatively Montréal just on September, which was not free but cheap ($200/day in holidays). However, the date was not changed. This year we booked the MIT in advance to avoid the same issue (as Karen already said). That said, the main driving force is who organize it keeping the costs as low as possible, being the 'who' the hardest part to get involved (it has to be a local person). -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Next board elections and candidacies
I am *not* running for the next board elections; maybe you should. Why I am saying this? Because if I was one of your candidates in any of the previous elections, I think it is good you know in advance that I am not running. I encourage you to run for the next board elections if you have not thought in that already. In particular, if you would like to see something fixed or improved (as it was my case when I ran the first time I became elected). You should be aware that as in patches, your ideas might be well received and approved, or they might need some extra work or they could be rejected (the decisions are taken by 7 directors). However, the discussions help to bring food for thoughts and awareness. Do not be afraid if you think you are not 'popular', the board of directors is not a popularity contest (I was elected even though I am low profile). If you have any question, plan or idea you would like to discuss before sending your candidacy, do not hesitate to bring them here or directly to me (or the current/former board member you feel more comfortable to talk with). As you, I want the best for our project. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: European bank account for donations
On Sat, 2012-03-10 at 21:48 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote: On 03/10/2012 03:41 PM, Frederic Crozat wrote: Le 9 mars 2012 23:51, Luc Pionchon pionchon@gmail.com mailto:pionchon@gmail.com a écrit : On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 22:36, Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com mailto:brian.came...@oracle.com wrote: Are any of GNOME's 3 sister organizations that have bank accounts in Europe a tax free charity currently? About French associations tax law, in a nutshell: GNOME-FR is a non-profit organization, so called association loi 1901. As a non-profit organization, it is tax free. I am not sure what you mean by charity and how it translates into French fiscal system. Charity is mean in the sense donations are deductible from your own tax. GNOME-fr is not a charity in that sense, it would need to become a association reconnue d'utilité publique, which is a lot of paper work and budget . [...] Couldn't you guys hold the fund for a while and then do a 'group' wire transfer to the GNOME Foundation: at least that would lessen the individual donation cost by quite a lot. Another way would be to keep those funds to be spent on GNOME Foundation expenses during GUADEC for example (or some GNOME Foundation sponsored hackfests in Europe). Does this make sense? It might need necessary to figure out the way to do it properly (I think that is what Baptiste is trying to figure out). Otherwise, for the tax office this sort of operation can look as money laundry or tax evasion. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - January 10, 2012
On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 14:12 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote: On 01/25/2012 01:54 AM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote: * 2011: we spent $14,450 (USD), and received $12,766. I am very surprised by those figures. I remember very well raising over $21,000 (USD) from Google, Novell, Mozilla and Oracle (in no specific order) and offering help several times on this list to help recover the funds. So is it a simple typo or have we failed to claim our sponsorship fees? The funds mentioned there are the ones that we effectively received until September 2011. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Desktop Summit Planning
On Thu, 2011-12-15 at 16:41 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote: What did the previous MIT contact do? Maybe I can get it done. We used to get free rooms (~4) at MIT on Columbus day long weekend. It would be great if you can get done it. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Desktop Summit Planning
On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 17:08 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote: [...] 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. [...] Regarding to Boston Summit, there was also another problem: we lost our contact at MIT. Colin Walters tried to get rooms there with no luck, but it was not for lack of interest. Perhaps we (the board) failed to find a replacement for J5 _earlier_. However, back then (January?) we did not have ED and 5/7 board members were new. Even though we tried to split ED's work among all of us, it was not easy and we could not do all the work we wanted to do. 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. FWIW, the problem with social events was not the lack of interest in sponsor them. It was too expensive for some companies. If you look at the brochure[1] (page 6), in order to sponsor a social event it was required to be a Gold sponsor (€20,000, plus the cost of the event). This requirement immediately narrows the potential sponsors for social events. Previous events did not have this requirement. However, social events get very high exposure and it was a bit(?) unfair that some companies gets less exposure when paying for a higher sponsor level. Also, the organization wanted to limit the number of social events. Certainly there were issues, like the registration process for Desktop Summit. KDE had a single-sign on system working and we did not have one. If we wanted to use a different thing, we had to jump in and bring something better or equal. So, for some tasks we had people working, but for other we did not have (even thought those that were controversial). 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)? Maybe the energy (or the availability) is located in different places that we were used to, and perhaps we should consider it when organizing the events. For instance, there was interest in organizing an event (like Boston Summit) in Portland. Portland could be a good chance to convert those half-converted (and yet popular) hackers that besides their rants still use GNOME 3, and live in the area :-) Joke asides, I do not like the idea of hiring an event manager. It can create friction and the issues at this time are specific to some events. For instance, hackfests are almost self-organized and have worked better than any expectation when we started to encourage them. [1] https://www.desktopsummit.org/sponsors -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Readability publisher sign-up for *.gnome.org
On Fri, 2011-08-26 at 14:22 -0500, Jason D. Clinton wrote: On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 13:45, Alan Cox a...@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk wrote: People asked to have their blogs included on it and placed them on it by choice. It's under CC-NC licensing (*). So they've agreed to NC use but the foundation exploiting it commercially (or indeed any site reformatting it and making money from doing so) would appear to be a breach of copyright. We have agreed to an grant a copy of our blogs under no license whatsoever; it's a one-time grant of copy, non-transferable as long as we agree to continue to be aggregated. We are not implicitly licensing anything. The Foundation cannot grant a license to anyone else because it has none. IIUC, the proposal did not say anything about granting any license, neither the terms of conditions of Readibility. However, IANAL. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-July 2011)
Foundation members, I have uploaded an updated budget for the current fiscal year. It includes the our income and expenses from October 2010 to July 2011 and the expectations from August to September. You will the information available at: http://foundation.gnome.org/finance/gnome-foundation-budget-2011-july.ods Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-June 2011)
On Wed, 2011-08-03 at 13:45 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote: Ping? From http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=135008,00.html An exempt organization must make available for public inspection its exemption application. An exemption application includes the Form 1023 [...]. In addition, an exempt organization must make available for public inspection and copying its annual return. Such returns include Form 990 [...]. Form 1023 page 10 clearly stipulates 'Cash' among other lines in the Asset sections, so does Form 990 (in a different page). I've been looking at the foundation website and can't find any of this information available. I think something like this http://www.councilofnonprofits.org/financials would bring a lot more transparency and compliance to the GNOME Foundation. So can someone in the know point me to the right place or will answer my question? As I said previously, in the short term we will be able to add that information to the budget. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-June 2011)
On Wed, 2011-08-03 at 14:50 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote:
On 08/03/2011 02:24 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote:
On Wed, 2011-08-03 at 13:45 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote:
Ping?
snip
would bring a lot more transparency and compliance to the GNOME Foundation.
So can someone in the know point me to the right place or will answer
my question?
As I said previously, in the short term we will be able to add that
information to the budget.
Why is it difficult to just give a rough number at end of our financial
period ('09 or '10) and be done with it for now?
The GNOME Foundation obviously hasn't complied to state laws for years
(by not making the required form available to the public) and you seem
to enjoy not answering foundation members as well. What about the
statement on our financial page:
For comments or questions on the data, please contact the GNOME
Foundation Board of Directors.
I apologize for my behavior, but I hope you can understand I am
volunteer, the desktop summit is going to start in some days, there are
people with problems getting their visa, I am finishing a lot of things
before flying, I need to pack to fly in some hours, our administrative
assistant is traveling, too.
Personally, I think the tone of your inquiries looks unfair to me
considering I have provided more financial information than ever before.
During the Desktop Summit the board will decide who will be the next
treasure, I hope he or she will be able to accomplish with your
inquiries and demanding time.
--
Germán Póo-Caamaño
http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/
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GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-June 2011)
Foundation members, I have uploaded an updated budget for the current fiscal year. It includes the our income and expenses from October 2010 to June 2011 and the expectations from July to September. You will the information available at: http://foundation.gnome.org/finance/gnome-foundation-budget-2011-june.ods Please remember this is a good moment for teams and local groups to plan activities (hackfests, events, infrastructure, etc.) for the next fiscal year (that start next October). Send us the information before the Annual General Meeting, so we can discuss it during the Desktop Summit. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-June 2011)
On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 23:09 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote: Hi! Thank you for the detailed updated report. I see a lot a red but can't find the balance from 2010. Is the situation very worrying (-$107K or -$105K end of September) or do we have a lot of cash? Hi Fred, The original plan (Proposed budget) includes some expenditures we did not do last year and that were moved to this fiscal year. For instance, $50,000 on Mobile, ~$30,000 on Women's Outreach Program, ~$10,000 on Marketing, ~$5,000 on a11y. So, that explains the plan for the current year to be negative (that you can see on the sheets 'Budget' and 'Real +Proj'). You can compare it against the final budget for the last year http://foundation.gnome.org/finance/gnome-foundation-budget-2010-final.ods On the other hand, there are some red figures in the 'Waterfall' sheet. In the case of 'Expenses' a red number means we have spent more planed until June. In the case of 'Income', a red number means we have received less than expected until June. The 'Real+Proj' sheet shows what we have spent and what we expect for the following months per item. That said, we need to work on Friends of GNOME. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-June 2011)
On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 13:09 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote: Hi Fred, Is your question, do we have enough money in the bank? If so, the answer is yes. :) We always keep a reserve, a nonprofit best practice. We also try to spend what we bring in each year towards supporting our mission and goals. So as Germán says, the overspend is money that was already budgeted for those things from money we raised last year. FWIW, in the short term we should be adding that kind of information (as suggested by Jonathan Blandford last GUADEC). -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Fish pedicure logo (yes, this is not spam!)
On Sun, 2011-07-10 at 17:39 +0100, Marco Barisione wrote: Hi, I'm not sure if the GNOME Foundation cares and if this is the proper place where to report it, but I saw a fish pedicure stall (yes...) in the centre of Cambridge using a logo based on the GNOME one. The company name seems to be “My Fish Spa Ltd.”, I uploaded a copy of the logo to http://www.barisione.org/tmp/gnome-fish-pedicure.jpg Yes, we care (in fact, we must). Do you have more information, such as url, contact information, etc. The one I found is: http://www.gumtree.com/p/jobs/presentable-sales-staff-urgently-required-in-cambridge/80648797 Thanks, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-May 2011)
On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 13:38 +0200, Piñeiro wrote: On 07/04/2011 05:32 AM, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: Foundation members, I have uploaded an updated budget for the current fiscal year. It includes the our income and expenses from October 2010 to May 2011 and the expectations from June to September. You will the information available at: http://foundation.gnome.org/finance/gnome-foundation-budget-2011-may.ods I noticed that at the real tab, on expenses, it is not listed anything related to a11y hackfests. But we organized a atk hackfest on May, and although we reduced the costs as much as possible (food were payed by local LUGS, etc), some people asked to the travel committee in order to assist there. Were those costs assigned to a different month? Yes and no. Even though the hackfest was on May and the funds were earmarked for May, the expense are assigned to the month where the reimbursement finally takes place. In this case, the reimbursement was done on June. The same happens with the income, it is assigned once we get the funds not when we invoice them. On the other hand, I realized I wrote the amount in the wrong place (Hackfest instead of Ally) on June. Now, I have uploaded an updated spreadsheet with the fix. The amount requested was $2,454. Thanks for catching this one. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation budget (Oct 2010-May 2011)
On Mon, 2011-07-04 at 11:53 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote: Hi Rosanna and German! I see that only U$12766 has been collected out of the ~U$23K+ (forgot the exact amount). Do you need help collecting what's missing or is it just not in the spreadsheet yet? I think you mean GNOME Asia. In 'Real' you will see what we actually received, not what we have invoiced. In the particular case of GNOME Asia, in 'Real+Proj' you will see an expected income (we invoiced them, and we expect to receive the funds by then) and a different total. Also, the spreadsheet does not include the transactions of June. Once I have them, we will see. Thanks for keeping an eye on it. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
that, he should not demand to apply it because he says so. Not every other day. So, I would say there has been problem in both sides. Managing external accounts that gets bigger and bigger are also an issue to our non-profit status, because they increases artificially the funds we carry from one fiscal year to the next one. We can not earmark those funds. In the future, it should not happen with external accounts according to the minutes https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110412 : The board decided to no longer manage funds for external organizations. It is too much work, especially now that there is more of an interest for GNOME projects to get more involved with fund raising. Personally, I would make an exception for projects that need to handle GSoC funds. But, if they become big enough, that should be re-evaluated then. 3 years ago we did not have 10 or 12 hackfests a year and/or FoG campaigns, and so on. I do think our effort must be concentrated in GNOME. It does not make happy to delay GNOME tasks (which I had to) because of working on external accounts. 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? When extra input is needed, I do not see a big problem in requesting the information. I could promise to keep everybody involved informed, but I am afraid the situation is not that simple. For instance, a process could be stalled because is required that board members vote, a legal review, a verification with the accountant, any other external variable. When there is a delay, keeping saying still waiting for votes, still waiting for review, and so on do not help to deal with people's frustration; specially when they have put a lot of effort to get their part of the work done as fast as possible. For this situation keeping people informed might not be enough; making the votes public, might not be enough. Assigning roles for communicating with external parties have helped to improve part of the issue, also contacting facilitators. I think it is important to have an Executive Director and a balanced (old/experienced and new) board of directors. 6. Board members are ambassadors for the foundation. I think it's important that board members be social, and be nice. Are you nice? This is a subjective question. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
On Tue, 2011-05-31 at 11:41 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Hi German, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: On Mon, 2011-05-30 at 16:11 +0200, Dave Neary wrote: Jeff Schroeder already did this question, my answer is here: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2011-May/msg00147.html Not *quite* the same thing - you talk about open meetings and recording what happens in meetings. I'm specifically asking for accountability on email discussions, which you don't really address. The minutes include the email discussions/decisions. So, I think I already addressed your question with: Considering the way Brian (secretary) works with minutes, I do not foresee any problem with adding details such as who voted, how directors voted, and who did not. It would be more work for the secretary and the board should take care that controversial issues have comments to avoid misunderstanding, but it could be done. Is there anything else you would like me to add? 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 think the budgeting process is not a one-person task. Teams need to think ahead. For instance, the accessibility team has done a great job planning their activities 1.5 years ahead. The same I could say from the Women Outreach Program, where Marina is already thinking in the next editions of WOP. Do you have any ideas on how the budgeting process can be improved over previous years? I offered to help draft the initial budget in previous years, but in the end discovered the budget when it was announced on foundation-list. Do you think it would be a good idea to have a small group of people like the ED hiring committee or GUADEC organising committee working on a shared file to come to the initial draft? I think working with teams is the way to go. Later, discussing the draft in this list. However, I have the perception that the draft has been taken as it were written on stone. [...] There are two aspects to financial transparency: the budget, and the actual expenditures. Publishing a draft budget and revising it based on feedback is one thing, but it's also important to publish regular updates on what has actually been spent, so as to foresee any budget over-runs or to show when allocated funds have not been used. KDE eV, for example, includes a small section in every report with the expenditures and income since the last report. In https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/FinancialStatus you can find the initial budget and the revisited budget (final) in 2010 (Oct 2009-Sep 2010). In the final budget, you can compare both, what was allocated and what was actually spent. I think you are asking for something that already exists. True, it exists only for one year, but that was my first term as a board member. I notice that you have also done this for the quarterly reports - and this is good and useful. However, the last report was in Q2 2010, as far as I can see, a year ago. I know this is kind of a pain to do, so perhaps there's a way to improve the process to make it easier? You missed the final budget. In order to make regular updates, first we had to solve other issues. Several of them has been solved or partially solved, such as automating or semi-automating tasks, among other things. Also, one thing I'm missing is the actual relationship between income expenditures and the budget. We don't see the balance forward for the foundation, and we don't see whether expenditures came in under or over budget. See my comment above. Managing external accounts that gets bigger and bigger are also an issue to our non-profit status, because they increases artificially the funds we carry from one fiscal year to the next one. We can not earmark those funds. I don't believe that this is a big problem - especially not for LGM, which has only had a surplus of a few thousand dollars (which is not a lot for an organisation with an annual budget over $300,000). Our previous accountant raised the issue of holding too much funds from one fiscal year to another. AFAIK, even before I became the treasure. Carrying, for instance LGM + GIMP, from one year to another is more than $70,000. This is not like a few dollars. In the future, it should not happen with external accounts according to the minutes https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110412 : The board decided to no longer manage funds for external organizations. It is too much work, especially now that there is more of an interest for GNOME projects to get more involved with fund raising. I'm actually really disappointed
Re: Questions for candidates - board processes significance
On Tue, 2011-05-31 at 07:59 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote: On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: [...] In the light of these continued difficulties, Louis (lead organiser for the past 5 years of LGM) proposed that the Quebecois LUG of which he's president could take over the management of the funds. And finalising the transfer of funds from the GNOME Foundation took several months of over back with the board the lawyers. There's more to this story than this. Rosanna would be the one to fill us in. However, I do know that in many cases they did not send receipts and information. When we asked for it, they didn't have it and had to go back to those who were being reimbursed. They blamed that time on GNOME. They also expected immediate action every time and Rosanna has a process she uses to process all expenses. I would say they *demanded* immediate action. IMO, something that really undermined our communication was the double discourse such as sending a nice email to the board and -at the same time- a harsh email to me (and I bet I was not the only one). That said, I do not think we handled it well either. GNOME needs an easier way to track finances if we are going to track for different groups. We should not handle external accounts. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Two Questions for the Board Candidates
On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 10:38 -0700, Lefty wrote: First: Since the issue of divisive attitude[s] such as Richard sometimes seems to [promote?] when he talks about 'GNU/Linux' came up, 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. 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? In spite of assuming people mean well, communication problem happens. In my experience, the board of directors has acted as mediator in the past. This usually had not happened in public because the main purpose is to fix the communication problem, not to blame people publicly. I think keeping a healthy communication channel is a task of our whole community, respecting and reminding the Code of Conduct. For instance, Olav and André have taken a very active role on this. Nevertheless, board members who start a discussion, should follow it up to avoid the discussion goes out of control. Second: Do candidates have any view as to how the disastrous attempts at engagement by GNOME with the mobile space might be improved on? The GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative went nowhere, and arguably handed the mobile device space to Google and Android by forfeit. Since that time, there have been various attempts to get community-based, mainstream open source onto mobile devices, all of which have pretty much died. The sole remaining effort seems to be MeeGo, and GNOME has no apparent direct involvement there. IMVHO, never was a consensus and/or vision in what it was supposed to be. At least there were two divergent opinions: 1. Be just a convergence point on different interested parties on using part of the stack on building mobile products. 2. Build/define a set of libraries (or minimalistic) version of GNOME stack ready to be used to build applications/products on top of that (aka SDK to download and relatively easy to get something done). In the absence of definition, the lowest common denominator prevails. I would expect more involvement in upstream from all the interested parties, not a couple (more than telling us you should do this or that.) Do candidates have any thoughts on the future of GNOME with respect to the mobile space? It's the fastest-growing portion of the general computing device market, and the main platform choices are proprietary or as good as. One of the issues raised by Canonical with respect to the GNOME 3 shell for Ubuntu was that it wasn't felt to be as appropriate for tablets and the like as Unity... I do think different with this last statement. I do think GNOME Shell might fit very well with a tablet experience, we are not that far (no more than Unity, at least) and there is some work on that. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 11:10 -0700, 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? Don't forget OpenSuse. It is just a matter of time for everybody else. And how would you facilitate collaborations with Ubuntu, especially, despite the different viewpoints of developers on issues like GNOME Shell vs. Unity? The collaboration could happen in the platform, Unity is a consumer of our stack (as Sugar or MeeGo). I agree with Stormy that relationships are built by spending time together, also by acknowledgement of our weaknesses and strengths, and communicating better our stance with respect to the future of our platform. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for all board candidates
On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 05:43 -0700, 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? My board meeting attendance record is: In my first term (2009--2010) I missed 4 of 24 board meetings. Why? I had a couple of busy weeks at work and university, there was an earthquake where I was living and my own confusion with the meeting time. In my second term (2010--) I have missed 5 of 30 meetings. Why? A couple of times I was traveling to do legal paperwork, another couple happened in a busy month at university and, also I had not sleep enough (aka. I could not wake up on time). I think it is not a bad record considering the meeting time has not been the best one for me in my 2 years as director. The meetings have been mostly at 7:00am, with some cases at 6:00am and a couple at 08:00am in my local time (I envy those rock stars who can start working at 10:00am or 11:00am! ;-) However, attending to phone meetings is not enough if you would like to know how much time we have spent in board stuffs. Meetings help to take decisions on topics that have not been voted or discussed in the mailing list, update the status of pending issues, and raise new ones that came just before the meeting, etc. As in every team, there are plenty of other interactions in the mailing lists, as well as contacting other people, etc. As I have discussed at some point with Paul, Stormy and Diego, the difference with respect to other teams is: the board requires voting for taking actions, this means that responsiveness to discuss topics and/or vote matters. 2.) Other open source / free software projects run their meetings in the open via IRC (such as Fedora's FESCO I believe). Would you consider that, and if not, what about recording how board members vote on a given topic. This includes +1 / -1 / abstains and perhaps give a small comment on any -1 or abstain. In my opinion, as an open foundation, the transparency of the board is absolutely critical _where possible_. Leaders should always set the example for members. Several topics are temporarily private/confidential, and some other can not be disclosed at all. For instance, when hiring a new employee, some people would not apply for a position if their names would be disclosed unless they were hired. Other situation is a press release, where you would not want the media publishes a draft which might contain errors, or when there is a negotiation with a potential partner who asks for disclosing the information after an specific day, etc. Or even a negotiation where the board is requesting that a company drops a Copyright Assignment Agreement. Sooner or later, the information will be disclosed. But, they can not be discussed openly beforehand because a negotiation could fail, or there is a risk of misinterpretation. So, in order to run open meetings, eventually the board would require to run extra meetings for private/confidential/controversial topics. It could be a hassle, though. Considering the way Brian (secretary) works with minutes, I do not foresee any problem with adding details such as who voted, how directors voted, and who did not. It would be more work for the secretary and the board should take care that controversial issues have comments to avoid misunderstanding, but it could be done. With respect to transparency I can say that one of the first things I pushed when I became a board director was to make the minutes public during the next two weeks after a meeting. And it was easy because the minutes were always ready (Brian is good on this), but not the votes to approve them. Without enough votes the minutes could wait for weeks or months. The change was the way of voting the minutes. Since then, the board has a period of time to review the minutes, if there is no comments, the minutes are automatically approved. The real work is writing the minutes. Publishing the minutes on time gives them value. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidates question: Contributor agreement
On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 16:33 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: Copyright assignments to one organization put that organization in a strong position to enforce the GPL in court, because it can claim copyright over the whole work. The FSF's lawyers advised us to get copyright assignments for contributions to our packages saying it would reduce uncertainty in enforcing the GPL. GNOME does not have to do this, but it might be a good idea for the GNOME Foundation to ask for copyright assignments for certain components. Maybe there has been little GPL violation for GNOME, but that might change if mobile devices start using it. IMHO, BusyBox is a good counter-example. They do not require copyright assignment, they have multiple copyright holders and they have successfully defended GPL on lawsuits. BusyBox is used in embedded systems. The FSF copyright assignments put binding requirements of good conduct on the FSF. For instance, we must provide source code and allow redistribution. We designed these requirements to give contributorsd a basis to trust us in addition to knowing we act on principle. The GNOME Foundation could do likewise. When companies ask for copyright assignments, they may be seeking to use your code in proprietary software. Here's an article that suggests what to look for when thinking about that question. http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright. There are some disadvantages of having one copyright holder, for instance, a single copyright holder is a single point of failure, as is described in https://live.gnome.org/CopyrightAssignment/Guidelines -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Germán Póo-Caamaño
Name: Germán Póo-Caamaño Mail: g...@gnome.org Nick: gpoo Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/~gpoo/ http://calcifer.org/blog/ (for Spanish speakers) Affiliation: None Summary I am a contributor since 2000 and I am running for re-election for the Foundation Board because I am confident there is plenty of room where I can help to GNOME and its community, as in the two previous years, bringing a different perspective and an independent voice. My involvement in GNOME I have been involved in GNOME since the beginning of the current century, and I have been working with Unix since 1991 and Linux since 1995. I have attended GUADEC since 2002. I also have attended to other GNOME events, such as GUADEC-ES (Hispanic Guadec), Forum do GNOME (Brazil), GNOME Day (Chile), Involucrate (Peru). When I was young I was coordinator of Spanish translation team and I wrote gnome-nettool. Since then, I helped here and there. Since July 2009, I have served to the board as treasure. Promotion of GNOME and Free Software I have spent a lot of my spare time promoting GNOME and FLOSS in conferences, I have given more than 60 talks on GNOME and related topics. I have been involved in local communities since its beginnings, such as GNOME Hispano and GNOME Chile. I founded and organized the biggest Linux (as the kernel) conference in Chile, but also I organized other events related with Free Software and GNOME. I have helped and encouraged several developers to get involved in GNOME. I feel I am accessible to many people of our community, which in some way or another, I can help to get their ideas discussed openly in the board. Motivations: I think I have had an acceptable role as director in my two terms where I have served as treasure. Since I started, I have worked in improving the way the financial information is presented in order to take better decisions based in promptly and good quality information. I have promoted to spend GNOME funds wisely as much as possible. As the previous year, I think there is plenty of room to improve in this and other areas and I plan to continue working on this as treasure or mentoring the future treasure. On the other hand, we have new challenges we must approach in order to succeed as platform for developing applications to make our desktop appealing for third parties, improving our infrastructure to attract new developers, and so on. I have had the experience of working in a board with and without an Executive Director, and I can say there is a difference in the workload and how many directors can perform, in particular because directors are volunteers at the end of the day. I think I can help the new Executive Director productive and getting the best of the elected directors in order to accomplish our goals as community. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Finance-related documents on two pages
On Fri, 2011-02-25 at 00:33 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: Le jeudi 24 février 2011, à 12:35 -0600, Paul Cutler a écrit : Hi Vincent, This seems like a good idea. Help is always is appreciated. ;) Any preference from the board (well, from Germán, I guess, since he's likely the one who's going to update the future unique) for one of the two pages? I'd think having all this on our website instead of the wiki would be better, but I do understand it's much easier to update the wiki... After reading an insightful comment, I think the foundation website is better place for those documents :-) -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: [Fwd: GNOME Developer Survey]
On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 15:07 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: +1. We already have survey infrastructures setup for foundation use. Maybe next time someone comes along we can use their time to run a survey that the board approved and is conducted on our own infrastructure, under our own terms. Definitively. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ 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
On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 14:47 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote: On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 13:03 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: I also have the training material I used from the GNOME developer training at GUADEC last year, which included an overview of the GNOME platform from Fernando Herrera How is this different from the upstream Platform Overview we have in gnome-devel-docs? I'm working on revamping that for Gnome 3.0. It would be nice not to duplicate efforts. I think this one is what you are looking for: http://forja.cenatic.es/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/gnome-modules/?diff_format=uroot=desktopsl The blog post is http://people.gnome.org/~fherrera/blog/gnomekdecourse.html -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME community survey
FYI, A group of researchers leaded by Jim Herbsleb got in contact with GNOME Foundation some months ago in order to research how communities works, how a volunteer become an active contributor, among others. In the following days, developers (committers) will receive and invitation to complete a survey that would not take more than 20 minutes (or even less). However, the participation in the study is completely voluntary. It worth to mention that the results will be shared with the community, and we will insist on that. At last but not least, the original plan included a joint survey to help set the Foundation goals, which will not be the case. However, we are looking forward to receive help from this team of researchers in the near future. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME community survey
On Fri, 2011-01-07 at 04:57 -0800, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: FYI, A group of researchers leaded by Jim Herbsleb got in contact with GNOME Foundation some months ago in order to research how communities works, how a volunteer become an active contributor, among others. In the following days, developers (committers) will receive and invitation to complete a survey that would not take more than 20 minutes (or even less). However, the participation in the study is completely voluntary. It worth to mention that the results will be shared with the community, and we will insist on that. At last but not least, the original plan included a joint survey to help set the Foundation goals, which will not be the case. However, we are looking forward to receive help from this team of researchers in the near future. I have received complains about specific questions, which only affect developers who have selected the option: Most of my income comes from doing software development for a company. For some miscommunication problem, I was not aware that option would lead to extra questions related to the employer. Hence, I could not review them and I can not endorse them. The most problematic questions are employer's name and the 4 questions related to intentions of moving to another company/job. I apologize for any inconvenience this issue might have produced. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME @ FODEM 2011
On Sun, 2010-11-07 at 00:34 +0100, Tobias Mueller wrote: Hey folks, I just came across http://fosdem.org/2011/call_for_stands which reads: Key Dates: 2010-12-06: Deadline for stand requests Assuming that GNOME wants to represent itself there: Does anybody feel like registering (and organising) GNOME @ FOSDEM? Thanks for offering yourself ;-) IMVHO, we definitively must be there with a good booth. We must promote GNOME (and GNOME 3) harder than ever, in every corner. It would be great if you can come with a rouge plan, recruit volunteers who have participated in previous years and that are willing to help during the next edition, and let us know what would be missing to have a solid stand (or if the event box is good enough). Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - August 19, 2010
On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 11:07 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: On 09/03/10 04:48, Dave Neary wrote: 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. 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). There was a reorganization of the wiki page on March 2010, several things were made public. Did you take a look at http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources ? Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Budget for the next fiscal year
Dear foundation members, The board has starting to prepare the budget for the next fiscal year (from October 2010 to September 2011). If your team or local group have planed activities to be held the next year and might require budget then it is a good opportunity to let the board aware of them. Let us know and send us the URL with the information of the activity is being organized/planned, dates, goals, agenda, people involved, budget required, etc. Nothing should be set on stone, but it is much better when there is a clear plan. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://people.gnome.org/~gpoo/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: How about creating addons.gnome.org
On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 03:00 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote: On Fri, 2010-08-13 at 19:21 +0200, Johannes Schmid wrote: [...] Why not open-source software? So far, I'm all but convinced that free software is good enough to be the only possible option. Making this the only possible option is quite a heavy philosophic requirement. Based on what philosophy is open source not good enough? And please take your time and be elaborate. I think that this decision is, by far, heavy enough for philosophy to be put into action. GNOME is a Free Software project. That should be enough. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Q: Motivation to run [WAS: Re: GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections Spring 2010 - The candidates]
On Wed, 2010-05-26 at 15:28 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote: Tobias Mueller wrote: You are invited to ask questions by sending them to foundation-list. But please try to avoid duplicates and bear in mind, that the candidates invest a lot of time answering questions, thus please be reasonable with the amount and scope of the questions. A question addressed to late runners... As I expect you didn't know in advance the deadline for announcing candidacies would be delayed, what in those two extra days finally convinced you to run? In my case, the timing was not good. I am moving to another country next Friday, until one week before I was not sure when I would move or if I would able to do it or not. So, I have been busy with all the paperwork related to that, selling things, closing accounts, stopping services, everybody want to say goodbye, etc. Also, I had to accomplish with some deadlines in order to have my master's dissertation today (in 3 hours more). When I had a bit of time, I spent it with pending stuffs that these days requires more attention (i.e. with the travel committe for GUADEC) and to take a break. Yesterday at 18:00 (22:00 UTC) I could sat down to think about it quietly and write my statement. Now you know the reason if I can not reply questions promptly during the next days. Be sure I am trying my best. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Germán Póo-Caamaño
Name: Germán Póo-Caamaño Mail: g...@gnome.org Nick: gpoo Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/~gpoo/ http://calcifer.org/blog/ (for Spanish speakers) Affiliation: None Summary I am a contributor since 2000 and I am running for re-election for the Foundation Board because I am confident there is plenty of room where I can help to Gnome and its community, as in the last year, bringing a different perspective and an independent voice. My involvement in Gnome I have been involved in Gnome since the beginning of the current century, and I have been working with Unix since 1991 and Linux since 1995. I have attended GUADEC since 2002. I also have attended to other Gnome events, such as GUADEC-ES (Hispanic Guadec), Forum do Gnome (Brazil), Gnome Day (Chile), Involucrate (Peru). When I was young I was coordinator of Spanish translation team and I wrote gnome-nettool. Since then, I helped here and there. Since last July, I have served to the board as treasure. Promotion of Gnome and Free Software I have spent a lot of my spare time promoting Gnome and FLOSS in conferences, I have given more than 60 talks on Gnome and related topics. I have been involved in local communities since its beginnings, such as Gnome Hispano and Gnome Chile. I founded and organized the biggest Linux (as the kernel) conference in Chile, but also I organized other events related with Free Software and Gnome. I have helped and encouraged several developers to get involved in Gnome. Motivations: I think I have had a more than acceptable role as director in my first term where I have served as treasure. I have worked in improving the way the financial information is presented in order to take better decisions based in promptly and good quality information. There is plenty of room to improve in this area and I plan to continue working on this as treasure or mentoring the future treasure. I have pushed and encouraged contributors with good ideas to make them happen, such as the Webkit hackfest. Also, I have worked as facilitator for people getting involved in upstream (for instance, pushing a quick and depth contact between Gnome Foundation and companies in Andalucía working in accesibility). On the other hand, we have new challenges we must approach in order to succeed as platform for developing application, in particular in the mobile world where we need to be more proactive. I think the board can have an active role on this matter. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GnuCash and CLI Ledger (was Re: Meeting Minutes Published - April 29, 2010)
On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 08:20 -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: Brian Cameron wrote at 19:33 (EDT) on Tuesday: * 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. I haven't been following the stuff with regard to GnuCash automation issues in previous Board minutes, but I thought I'd share a suggestion. For Software Freedom Conservancy, we used GnuCash for the first few years, but found, as perhaps you all are, that getting the needed reports out of it required a lot of work coding up new reports in Guile. The automation required is not for reports, it is for importing PayPal data. This involves discriminate between Friends of GNOME donations (one-time payments, subscriptions), other donations (LGM, GIMP, etc.) and reimbursements. Also, it is required to add extra transactions with the fees we ask for handling other transactions (5% of each transaction). It can touch the GnuCash file, but it would be needed to check the consistency of the data (avoid duplicated entries), or it could be used an intermediate file that GnuCash can understand and let the tool verify/warn for duplicate entries. I decided ultimately to switch to a tool called Ledger: http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/ It's ASCII and command line based, and the 2.x series versions of it can actually read in GnuCash data. This might be able to help your automation: even if you stick with GnuCash itself, using a version of Ledger that supports I/O on GnuCash files might be able to generate the reports and spreadsheet import you need more easily. As far as I read, it is only for reading. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
[Reminder] Deadline for GUADEC travel assistance applications is due on April 27th
Dear hackers, The deadline for sending your GUADEC travel assistance application is due on April 27th, 19:00 UTC, that is in 14½ hours from now. The instructions are detailed at http://live.gnome.org/Travel Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Travel assistance applications to attend to GUADEC
Dear hackers, The GNOME Foundation provides travel sponsorships to individuals that want to attend GUADEC and need financial assistance. We are happy to announce the Travel Committee is ready to receive applications for sponsorships to attend to GUADEC 2010. This year, GUADEC is being held in the The Hague University, in The Hague, Netherlands, from Monday 26th July, until Friday 30th July. The instructions are detailed at http://live.gnome.org/Travel Please read them carefully. Deadline: April 27, 2009, 19:00 UTC. You can start sending your applications now! Some additional comments: * Any information you send to the Travel Committee will be private. * Asking for sponsorship *does not* guarantee you will get sponsored. * A good application with good information will be processed faster. * If you need help with accommodation, the Travel Committee will book the hotel or hostel for you. This enables us to get group rates and provide accommodation assistance to the most people possible. You should state that you need accommodation, and leave the cost blank. * Always choose the most economical option whenever possible. People who need travel sponsorship, should look for the best price (i.e. through a service like kayak.com). If the Travel Committee finds a cheaper price, that will be the price considered during the evaluation. * If you are applying to a Google Summer of Code program (as student or mentor) you should mention it in your application. Preference will be given to students and mentors participating in the Google Summer of Code or the Outreach Program for Women. GSoC students usually get a percentage of their GUADEC expenses covered. * If you submitted an abstract to be presented at GUADEC, you should mention it in your application. Preference will be given to people giving presentations at GUADEC. The GUADEC paper committee will let the travel committee know which talks have been accepted, so as long as you let us know you submitted one, there is no need to follow up. * The Travel committee should reply back about receiving your application within 2-3 days. After that we would accumulate all the sponsorship requests and process them together. So please do not panic (have any butterflies in your stomach) if we take some time to reply on the status. Affirmative/Negative you would surely get a response. * No personal emails. Please keep travel-committee Cc'ed on all your replies. You can find us in the #travel channel at irc.gnome.org. Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: New GNOME Foundation Members
On Sat, 2010-02-13 at 00:26 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: Not to mention it would be very interesting to me at least; to know why new members have taken an interest in GNOME. Yes, to me too. Again, as I said before, clarity isn't a bad thing. If this is a matter of clarity, the archives are public. You can always check who is applying, renewing, supporting, being approved, etc. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/ -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Oracle takeover and GNOME accessibility
On Sun, 2010-02-07 at 18:14 +0100, Fernando Herrera wrote: As you all probably know, Oracle recently bought Sun. Sun has been one of the largest contributors to the GNOME project during the last years. Probably is too early to know how this is going to affect GNOME project. However this last week we have seen some relevant events: Oracle laid off two members of the Sun's Accessibility Program Office. If you have been following GNOME a11y development, probably you can agree with me that: - SUN APO contributions have been critical for GNOME success - SUN a11y developers have not only done a great and impressive work, but also have been deeply involved with the community. - Accessibility is a critical component for GNOME 3.0 - The accesibility framework changes for GNOME 3.0 are huge (new at-spi, dbus migration, etc...) and should be properly tested for a successful relase. - Although in the last years we have seen new companies joining the a11y development effort (like for example igalia), the number of people woking in a11y is critically low. So, I would like to ask the board to take this issue very seriously and try to contact SUN/Oracle representatives in the advisory board regarding this issue. Hello Fernando, Certainly, this is a very serious issue. I am aware Stormy have been contacting Sun/Oracle to get a clear picture about the future of them with GNOME, which includes this issue. Some references: * An Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility by Joanmarie Diggs: http://blog.grain-of-salt.com/index.php?itemid=394 * Some threads at orca's mailing list: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2010-February/msg00055.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2010-February/msg00092.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2010-February/msg00078.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2010-February/msg00112.html I could not find any relation with the topic with respect to the last link. But I got the idea. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
New Travel Policy
Dear Foundation members, The Travel Committee and the Board of Directors have been working in a travel policy for sponsoring contributors to attend to GNOME related events. You can read it at http://live.gnome.org/Travel/Policy If you have any comment, suggestion or question, just let us know. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Survey and next GUADEC
Dear Foundation members, In order to get feedback to organize the next GUADEC, there is a survey available at http://www.gnome.org/~behdad/survey/index.php?sid=94926lang=en Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: About the unpublished board meeting minutes
On Thu, 2009-06-04 at 00:04 +0200, Anne Østergaard wrote: [...] Can the candidates all confirm that they have read the Foundation bylaws? I read it. I have some concerns, it seems longer than is needed (it defines roles as president, vice-president, agents and things that does not seem to fit with our Foundation. However, IANAL). Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Guadec, and it will be done with the next events. Scheduling with months of anticipation saves a lot of money, and I think is the right direction. 19. Do you think the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME projects get enough representation at events? If not, how would you fix that? I am biased, but in those events I have knowledge in SouthAmerica, Gnome has a good representation. Could it be better? for sure. Sometimes we are not enough to attend to several simultaneous events that we are required. But in big places/countries like United States, Europe and even Brazil, there are so many people involved in so many projects, that requires an extra effort to get the attention. I think we need to approach both kind of places: the ones to 'conquer' (and help to settle down a strong local community, such as Asia, SouthAmerica, Africa) and make a strong representation where there is more competition (NorthAmerica Europe). It must be talked with Marketing's people. They are getting very active lastly and I am sure they have something to say. 20. Do you think GNOME has a good relationship with the distributions? If not, how would you change it? Yes, I do. This is a personal view as an outsider. 21. Do you think GNOME has enough events (hackfests, GUADEC and local events)? If not, how would you get funding and volunteers to have more? I do think hackfests have proved to be good for projects. My appreciation is hackfests have a target to get the things done (accelerate a project, as it was conceived Guadec once), Guadec it is more social with global interaction, and local events is about branding, spreading Gnome FLOSS, teaching our technologies and getting new users and contributors. As far as we grow as a project, we never will have enough events. And instead of asking about new funds (that I am user we will get as soon as the economy gets healthier), I would approach other aspects, such as organizing our events in less expensive places or at least where we can compensate costs. 22. It is the nature of Board(s) to be seen by the members as an overlord figure for strategy whereas the tactical aspect comes across from a number of voices - do you have any plans to address this situation ? It is a matter of communication and empowering people. 23. What, in your view, are the top 5 requirements (from a strategic perspective) for the GNOME communities world-wide ? * Empowering local GNOME communities. * Having a good and consistent marketing plan, encouraging an unified message of the project and its role as Free Software. * Strengthening the working teams * Good communication. * Transparency. and * Having patience to answer (and read) a lot of questions :-) 24. Is there anything else you think is important to tell us but which you feel has not been covered by the previous questions? If you have reached this question one by one, you are amazing! -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
. Could it be better? for sure. Sometimes we are not enough to attend to several simultaneous events that we are required. But in big places/countries like United States, Europe and even Brazil, there are so many people involved in so many projects, that requires an extra effort to get the attention. I think we need to approach both kind of places: the ones to 'conquer' (and help to settle down a strong local community, such as Asia, SouthAmerica, Africa) and make a strong representation where there is more competition (NorthAmerica Europe). It must be talked with Marketing's people. They are getting very active lastly and I am sure they have something to say. 9. What, in your view, are the top 5 requirements (from a strategic perspective) for the GNOME communities world-wide ? * Empowering local GNOME communities. * Having a good and consistent marketing plan, encouraging an unified message of the project and its role as Free Software. * Strengthening the working teams * Good communication. * Transparency. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Germán Póo-Caamaño
Name: Germán Póo-Caamaño Mail: gpoo gnome org Nick: gpoo Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/~gpoo/ http://www.calcifer.org/~gpoo/ (for Spanish speakers) Affiliation: None Summary I am a contributor since 2000 and I am running for the Foundation Board because I want to help Gnome and its community from a different perspective and bringing an independent voice. I want to see the communication from Foundation Board's to its community improved. I will work to empower contributors, work groups and local communities. My involvement in Gnome I have been involved in Gnome since the beginning of the current century, and I have been working with Unix since 1991 and Linux since 1995. I have attended GUADEC from 2002 to 2008, but also to other Gnome events, such as GUADEC-ES (Hispanic Guadec), Forum do Gnome (Brazil), Gnome Day (Chile), Involucrate (Peru). When I was young I was coordinator of Spanish translation team and I wrote gnome-nettool. Since then, I helped here and there. I usually give a hand whenever I am asked for. Promotion of Gnome and Free Software I have spent a lot of my spare time promoting Gnome and FLOSS in conferences, I have given more than 60 talks on Gnome and related topics. I have been involved in local communities since its beginnings, such as Gnome Hispano and Gnome Chile. I founded and organized the biggest Linux[1] conference in Chile, but also I organized other events related with Free Software and Gnome. I have helped and encouraged several developers to get involved in Gnome. Motivations: I want to be on the Foundation's board because I want to improve the communication from the board to its community. I think It has improved trough the years, but I am confident it could be better. I want to help to getting things done as quick as possible whenever its related to conferences, hackfest and events from local communities, in order to improve the use of foundation's budget and communication. [1] Yes, the kernel. Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Extended deadline for GUADEC's travel sponsorship applications
Dear hackers, The deadline to apply for travel sponsorship in order to attend to GUADEC has been extended. Applications will be received until April 30, 2009, 19:00 UTC. Instructions about the process can be read at http://live.gnome.org/Travel Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Extended deadline for GUADEC's travel sponsorship applications
On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 15:55 -0700, Sandy Armstrong wrote: On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño g...@gnome.org wrote: Dear hackers, The deadline to apply for travel sponsorship in order to attend to GUADEC has been extended. Applications will be received until April 30, 2009, 19:00 UTC. Instructions about the process can be read at http://live.gnome.org/Travel Summer of Code students have started inquiring about GUADEC travel sponsorship, though very very few of them are Foundation members. Since I won't be attending GUADEC, I wasn't really on top of the deadlines. :-/ Should they follow the same process to apply for sponsorship, with the same deadlines? The community bonding period has just started and we're still getting them all rounded up on the list, etc. They should follow the same process and deadlines. And they should mention they are GSoC students in their applications (as some of them already did it). Be aware that processing applications later means sponsoring more expensive tickets and probably less people. However, nothing is written in stone. Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Reminder: Travel assistance applications to attend to GUADEC
Dear hackers, The Travel Committee is receiving applications for travel sponsorship requests for the next GUADEC which will be held in Gran Canaria, Spain. The deadline is April 27, 2009, 19:00 UTC. Do no wait until the very last minute. Read carefully the instructions and the process' explanation at http://live.gnome.org/Travel Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Travel Committee Travel Policy: A proposal for consideration and feedback
On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 11:20 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: [..] I think, nevertheless, that it is essential that the board not push the entire responsibility for reimbursement policy to a nominated travel committee - it's the board's role to guide the travel committee on how they should make choices, when choices are to be make, and to suggest sensible defaults for when someone contacts the foundation for a travel subsidy. Shirking that responsibility is setting the travel committee up to fail, as they will have an very difficult job.. I think there is a rule/policy missing here. Who will review the sponsorship applications coming from members of that committee? In such case, I suggest the committee receives the application, ask for the information missing and put everything in order to finally send it to the board for a final review/decision. I would be willing to volunteer if this issue were clear and if there is is no room for misunderstanding about sponsorships requested by the committee itself (specially if the committee would formed by people who live so far that their requests could be high also). On the other hand, for newcomers and/or contributors who works in Gnome but still doesn't feel part of Gnome, I think it could be added a statement like: Having the support of a Gnome developer for your application is a plus. I -personally- expect the real improvements and savings to be in the enhanced speed of the process (hence earlier bookings of tickets), having all the tickets bought with enough anticipation should save us a considerable amount already. Personally, I expect the biggest improvement to be the community being much more aware of how our money is being spent, and encouraging greater use of our resources outside of just GUADEC. In that matter, having a committee doesn't make it clear, it just increase the perception of transparency. To really make it clear, at least it is necessary to make public the detail of the sponsorship (by item) in each event. Personally, I don't have any concern about transparency or how the funds are spent. IMVHO, the main concerns are the delay and having a good estimation of cash-flow :-) -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.calcifer.org/ -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: New Friends of GNOME program launched!
On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 17:36 -0700, Stormy Peters wrote: Hi GNOME fans, We are excited to tell you that today we launch our new Friends of GNOME program. Now supporters can sign up to help the GNOME Foundation with recurring $10/month donations. Friends of GNOME is a way for individuals to support the GNOME project's mission of providing a free and open source desktop for everyone regardless of ability. With no advertising or outreach, we've raised anywhere from $6,000 to $20,000 a year from generous individuals.That money has contributed to the funds for hackfests, local events and programs which in turn have enabled the GNOME project to create an internationalized, accessible and easy to use desktop software for both traditional desktops and for mobile devices. People have requested an easier, more consistent way to donate and we hope our $10/month program will fill that need. We will use the additional funds raised to continue to support our volunteer community in accomplishing our mission of a free and open source desktop for everyone regardless of abilities. The GNOME project depends on volunteer support from corporations and individuals. Support of both time and money. Please consider signing up for Friends of GNOME today and spreading the word! http://www.gnome.org/friends. Hi Stormy, I wonder if the t-shirts are only for men or women. The webpage doesn't say anything, but I tend to think they are for men. However, are we expecting the supporters comes from one gender only? Regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
I need to fix a mistake that I made because a misunderstanding in my review. On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 04:44 +0200, Germán Póo-Caamaño wrote: [...] Expenses for participants: Lunch: Tampere : Between €5 - €25/day = Between €35 - €175/week. A Coruña: Between €8 - €18/day = Between €56 - €126/week. Canarias: €196/week. Accommodations (the minimal cost provided): Tampere : €71/day = €497/week A Coruña: €15/day = €105/week Canarias: Not given (yet?). The lower cost in Tampere certainly is €71, however this is for a shared room (1-4 beds). So, it will be: Accommodations (the minimal cost provided): Tampere : €17,75/day = €122,5/week A Coruña: €15/day = €105/week Canarias: Not given (yet?). Summary cost per person: Tampere : Between €157,5 - €297,5/week. A Coruña: Between €161 - €231/week. Canarias: It can't be calculated. That is with the costs. There are other points to be taken, but I will pointed out in a next email. -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Akademy+GUADEC *2009* Hosting Proposals
On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 22:18 +0300, Zeeshan Ali Khattak wrote: Hi guys! On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 6:30 PM, Lennart Poettering [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are there even any direct flights to Tampere, except from HEL? You are kidding me right? :) You haven't heard of the wonders of Ryanair and you are against Tampere bid? :) Regarding food and beer, Quim said it better than I could have but just wanted to remind you that you have to *buy* your water in Spain and when it's warm you drink lots of it and when you are hung-over everyday you must drink even more. :) In Finland you can just drink from the tap and save the money for the beer, which as Quim pointed out will not be expensive. The price of the water is irrelevant if we see the large numbers. Using the information given in the bids (not biased): Taking out the social event costs, we have: How much money is required by external sources (aka sponsors)?: Venue: Tampere : € 21,000 + part of € 70,000 (labour. how much?) Canarias: € 0 A Coruña: € 0 Travel grants: How much money has been invested in this GUADEC for travel grants this year? (US$ 60,000?). For GUADEC+Akademy we should expect to move more people (double?) and having less money for that matter will be a big deal. Still is necessary to leave a part of that budget for keynotes. Will the common sponsors (for both GUADEC and Akademy) gives the double amount of money? According to the costs of Tampere: They will have assigned a travel grant of €25,000 (US$39,215). Canarias and A Coruña: They doesn't give any number here, but because they can invest (if they want to) almost all the money received by sponsors for travel grants. Expenses for participants: Lunch: Tampere : Between €5 - €25/day = Between €35 - €175/week. A Coruña: Between €8 - €18/day = Between €56 - €126/week. Canarias: €196/week. Accommodations (the minimal cost provided): Tampere : €71/day = €497/week A Coruña: €15/day = €105/week Canarias: Not given (yet?). Summary cost per person: Tampere : Between €532 - €672/week. A Coruña: Between €161 - €231/week. Canarias: It can't be calculated. Random notes: 1. If accommodation would be sponsored, with the same amount of money, A Coruña could sponsor 3 participants, while Tampere could sponsor only 1. 2. It is reasonable to think, in this issue, that with the same amount of money, both Canarias and A Coruña, will have more than €30,000 extras than Tampere for travel grants. 3. It would be nice to know how much of €70,000 in labour costs in Tampere will be covered by local organization. For (2.) I considered €63,000 which is extremely conservative. 4. Canarias will pay by them self €60,000 moving international journalists and African technological chairmans. This could be a good media coverage (if they do it). 5. Moving people inside Europe shouldn't be a big deal. The three cities have connections with main cities in Europe. 6. Moving people coming from outside of Europe will not be cheap because is summertime. It is high season, anyway. 7. It would be nice having Canarias accommodation costs. At last, if the water is a real problem, then A Coruña should be the best option here (cheaper than Tampere and good water). However, for travelers almost always is recommended not to drink water from the tap, not because is polluted; because the bacterial flora is different. Kind regards, -- Germán Póo-Caamaño Concepción - Chile http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
