Re: Changes in Membership Committee
Thanks for the great work Bruno! --lucasr 2010/3/23 Bruno Boaventura brunoboavent...@gmail.com: Hello! It was a pleasure for me hold the chairman position of Membership Committee in the last two years. Recently we had a meeting to resolve some issues. One of these things were to elect another chairman to the committee. I'm in the committee yet, but the chairman now is Andrea Veri. The new Membership Committee is: Bruno Boaventura (that's me!!!) Tobias Mueller Susana Pereira Pedro Villavicencio Andrea Veri (chairman) If you want to know better the Committee, please visit our wiki page [1]. At your service, Bruno Boaventura GNOME Foundation Membership Committee [1] http://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Resigning from the Board
Hi all, I've been thinking a lot about what to do about my participation on GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors in face of the fact that my wife and I are expecting our first baby in February. After careful consideration, I decided to resign. I want to be fully focused on my family (especially in the first few months) without feeling bad for doing Board stuff while I could be with my family or not doing Board stuff while I'm spending time with my family. So, considering my priorities now, I feel that I would be more useful to the Board by stepping down and letting another person with a lot of energy to take my position on Board for the rest of this mandate. The Board has decided to appoint Jorge Castro to replace me. He's highly motivated and I'm sure he'll give good contributions as a member of the Board. I've had a great time in my two and a half years on Foundation Board. It was a great way to support the community in several ways and to work with some very nice people. The GNOME Foundation is getting better everyday and I feel very proud to be part of it. Cheers! --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Code of Conduct and Foundation membership (Summary)
Hi all, It's quite obvious that the original thread ended up branching into several separate topics. I thought it would be useful to summarize some of the key points on each topic in an attempt to bring a more practical perspective to the whole discussion. This is not an official message from the Board. It's just me trying to make some sense out of the tons of messages in the thread and, maybe, bring a more useful (or at least more clear) closure to the discussed topics. -- The original topic: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership The message I sent to start discussion was quite specific: we, the board, wanted to know the opinion of the community on having the Code of Conduct[1] as an official document that current/new Foundation members would have to agree with in order to gain membership. It was strange to see that several people framed the discussion in the context of Planet GNOME only. Actually, the intention was to have a broader discussion on how useful it would be to have CoC as an official guideline for members, independently on where/how they are communicating (planet, mailing lists, irc, etc) with the community. Here's what I could summarize in terms of most interesting points: - Effectiveness: some questioned the actual effectiveness of having an official CoC in dealing with conflict situations. A point was made that more rules doesn't necessarily result in a healthier community. - Enforcement mechanism: some people think it wouldn't make sense require all Foundation members to sign the CoC if there's no clear enforcement mechanism. - Who enforces the CoC: opinions are a bit mixed regarding who would be responsible for enforcing CoC. Some people think the Board should do it. Others are absolutely against this idea. My impression is that the topic has not been discussed properly. The discussion deviated to parallel (indirectly related) topics. Maybe it's because it's a very tricky topic (quite hard to reach consensus). Or perhaps we haven't come up with a good enough solution yet. Maybe that's something the Board should discuss a bit further and come up with a more concrete proposal for discussion. Another possibility is to have a focused group of Foundation members and Board members interested in the topic to work on a proposal. Opinions? -- Code of Conduct suggestions At some point the thread shifted more specifically towards Code of Conduct itself. Behdad made a suggestion to add two more points to CoC: - Learn to agree to disagree. - Criticize ideas, not people presenting them. Pierre suggested that both items are added to the list of example behaviours under Be respectful and considerate. This is something that should be officially proposed for general consideration. Behdad, maybe you could do that? :-) -- Planet GNOME suggestions And then the discussion moved to Planet GNOME. I could find some concrete suggestions to improve Planet GNOME in different ways: - Rating system on posts Planet. It would be some sort of Digg-like Planet. Readers would be able to rate posts down or up. Posts with general positive rating would be appear up on the page. Some people raised concerns that readers using feed reads would not be able to quickly rate posts. - Annual reminder asking people if they still want to be aggregated on Planet. This would allow editors to remove blogs from people not willing to be on Planet anymore. Those are topics that editors (me, Vincent and Jeff) will definitely be discussing soon. I'm personally in favor of the annual reminder idea. Not sure about the rating system. Hope to have news about those ideas soon. -- GNOME as part of GNU In response to Stallman's statement that Planet GNOME should not aggregate content about non-free software (because GNOME is part of GNU), Philip informally proposed a vote to decide on GNOME's membership to the GNU project. The idea of the vote have some support. Concerns were raised about the negative impact that such vote could cause in the community. It seems to me that this topic deserves a more careful discussion before moving forward in any new direction. This is not the kind of topic that should be decided on in the middle of a long thread that was supposed to be discussing something totally different. Especially considering that there is no official call from FSF or GNU maintainers to remove GNOME as part of GNU project. So, there's no hurry really. Also, someone would have to officially propose the vote to members, which hasn't actually happened. It would be useful to know how generally interested the Foundation members are in this topic. That's all I guess. Feel free to add stuff I missed in this quick summary. Cheers! --lucasr [1] http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Code of Conduct and Foundation membership
Hi all, The Board has recently received some complaints from members of the community about certain the inappropriate behaviors. In the context of GNOME Foundation, it's really hard to argue about how we expect our members to behave if there is no official guidelines that members are supposed to comply with. The GNOME Code of Conduct[1] has been serving very well as an informal guideline for the community but we'd like to make it an official document that new Foundation members are expected to explicitly agree[2] with before being accepted. This way we'll have a common ground for dealing with certain conflict situations and avoid trying to base our discussions on guidelines that certain members haven't explicitly agreed on. Before deciding on this, we thought it would be useful to get some feedback from the community. Thanks, --lucasr on behalf of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors [1] http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct [2] http://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/Signatures ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Meeting Minutes Published - October 29, 2009
Hi, 2009/11/24 Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org: Le mardi 24 novembre 2009, à 23:53 +0100, Andy Wingo a écrit : Hi Brian, Thanks for the detailed and readable notes! On Fri 13 Nov 2009 22:27, Brian Cameron brian.came...@sun.com writes: Minutes for Meeting of October 29th, 2009 [...] More generally, we need to make sure that GNOME Foundation members sign the GNOME Code of Conduct, and perhaps make it a requirement for new members to sign. Also need to update the GNOME blog and planet so that it is more clear that people should follow the GNOME Code of Conduct. A couple of thoughts: First, the planet has always been under editorial control; it has a maintainer, like any other module -- actually a few of them. Therefore, what is or is not on the planet may fairly be seen to be under the purview of the maintainer(s), who are there due to their respected position in the field of their module, in this case in the public discourse of GNOME. So they can promote or censure certain kinds of speech as they see fit. Yep. And it is expected by the current editors that blog posts that appear on Planet GNOME respect the Code of Conduct :-) It's mentioned in the guidelines for Planet GNOME in the wiki, but it's not mentioned in the current footer. Secondly, binding or pseudo-binding resolutions on the Foundation membership should probably be ratified by the Foundation membership itself via some more formal process. As it is I don't think a majority have signed the CoC. (FWIW, I have.) Nod. Actually, I think there was an action item about starting a discussion here on this topic... I guess the mail is in the draft folder somewhere, it should hopefully arrive soon ;-) I've just created a new thread for the official discussion on this topic. Please, continue there. --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME leadership [was Re: So what do people *except* me want from the foundation?]
Hi, 2009/6/8 Luis Villa l...@tieguy.org: 2009/6/5 Luis Villa luis.vi...@gmail.com: At any rate, I agree completely that we need some strong leaders to develop in GNOME. But the Foundation is not the place for it. I think the right question is 'why have leaders not come from other sources? what can the Foundation do, if anything, to help other leaders emerge and get the support they need to do their work?' I have no easy answers to either of these, though. Or to put it more bluntly, now that I think of it: why don't we have a BDFL? Why have we chewed up and spit out all the potential candidates for the title? Another important question is: leader of what? BDFL of what? I honestly don't see how only one leader could alone set the direction for desktop, platform, mobile, web, marketing, release management, etc. We're just too big today. I've commented before[1] that we should definitely consider having more clear/official leadership on specific domains of the project. --lucasr [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/lucasr/2008/06/15/notes-on-the-future-of-gnome-problems-and-questions/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: What do you think of the foundation?
Hi Dave, 2009/6/2 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Hi, john palmieri wrote: I'm of the same mind here. There are a number of people who I don't like to read on blogs and whatnot but I would rather us as a community figure out productive ways of dealing with it as opposed to lording our own views over those who don't have as much pull in the community. Red tape and draconian censorship measures is not the way to handle the issue. If our blogs and mailing lists are no longer exciting and informative then there is something more fundamentally wrong than who we give a voice to. Who talked about red tape and draconian censorship? I commend Philip for succeeding in framing this debate around the punishments rather than around the reasons why they might happen. Let me be as clear as possible: There are people in our community who are losing faith in the community's ability to have reasoned technical debate and design discussions because of vacuous 100 mail threads, and IRC being dominated by half a dozen people whose principal contribution to GNOME is to be on IRC all the time. Others are being driven away from the community for our tolerance of he who shouts loudest politics, flame wars and provocative and offensive blog posts. I believe that these people should have a group that they can turn to, argue their points, and ask for that group to do something about it. I believe that the task is the role of the foundation, and the board is well placed to assume that role now. When I say do something about it, that may be simply to point out to the people involved that they're not being productive. It may be to publicly shame people for antisocial behaviour. It may be to tell the complainer that they're making a big deal about nothing. But right now if you are being driven away from GNOME forums or from the GNOME project in general, you have no-where to turn. How is that red tape? How is it draconian censorship? IMO, there's a big difference between counterproductive behavior and disrespectful behavior. People can be very counterproductive without being disrespectful (moving focus of discussion to irrelevant technical details, being against a proposal for personal reasons, etc). For example, I agree with Olav that d-d-l became too noisy and counterproductive too many times lately. And I guess some highly relevant contributors didn't participate on certain discussions simply because the discussion was too noisy (dozens of messages from people just giving random opinions) and lacking focus (someone picking on something irrelevant, etc). In general, people are not being disrespectful IMO. This kind of problem can be solved with stronger moderation and well-defined guidelines on mailing lists (which I guess depends on the type of discussion, dunno) which is just not happening on d-d-l for instance. IMO, disrespectful behavior includes being sarcastic or ironic, making personal accusations in public, making pejorative comments about a proposal instead of disagreeing with counter-arguments, etc. I see this kind of behavior sometimes on our mailing lists but they are exceptions, not the common behavior. Maybe what I'm trying to say is: I think we're being counterproductive too often, not necessarily disrespectful. And yes, this is a problem that needs a solution. My opinion is that we just need stronger and consistent moderation depending on the context. Some examples (a bit stretched for clarity) Example 1: - Person A proposes a new module for GNOME 3.2 on d-d-l - Person B replies with This module is crap, ridiculous - Release team members (who are responsible for organizing the module propositions) reply (in private?) to Person B with Please, try to keep discussion productive with actual arguments for/against the module. Example 2: - Person A proposes a new i18n guideline on gnome-i18n mailing list - Person B replies with You proposal is total shit - GNOME i18n coordinators (who are responsible for the team coordination) reply (in private?) to Person B with Please, try to keep discussion productive with actual arguments for/against the i18n proposal. Cheers! --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
New Affiliation
Hi all, As you probably know, I left Nokia in the end of March. I now work for LiTL (www.litl.com), a startup company developing a consumer product that involves hardware, software, and online services. I'm the only Board member affiliated to this company so no issues here. Thanks, --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME @ Google Summer of Code 2008
Hi all, As you probably know, Google is organizing one more edition of their Summer of Code (GSoC) program. More information about the program can be found here: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/ GNOME has participated in all GSoC editions as a mentoring organization with some nice results in terms of contributions and new contributors. So, we want to participate this year too! Our first organization kickoff meeting will happen on March 6 at 18h UTC in the #soc-admin channel (irc.gnome.org). We're looking for volunteers to help us to organize GNOME's participation in GSoC 2008. So, if you want to help in any way, join us! Cheers! --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility - List of tasks published!
Hi all, For those interested in participating in the GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility, you probably want to have a look at the list of tasks that has just been published in the program's website: http://www.gnome.org/projects/outreach/a11y/ So, now what? Read the program rules very carefully and claim one of the available tasks. Proposals acceptance is open now! --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
GNOME Foundation Meeting Minutes :: 2nd January 2008
GNOME Foundation Meeting Minutes :: 2nd January 2008 Members of current board and previous attending. Present * Behdad Esfahbod * Anne Oestergard * John Palmieri * Vincent Untz * Jeff Waugh * Brian Cameron * Lucas Rocha Missing * Quim Gil * Glynn Foster Regrets * Luis Villa Minutes 1) Conference Calls The new Board needs to find a way to proceed with the conference calls for the meetings. So far, Sun has been provinding the infrastructure. ACTION: Brian to check with Sun about conference calls infra for Board meetings 2) Summer Event in Peru Diego Escalante requested sponsorship from GNOME Foundation to bring latin american GNOME contributors to a summer FLOSS event in Peru. The Board has aproved a $3000,00 sponsor for this event. Diego is also discussing with GNOME Chile about a Latin American tour of some key GNOME contributors from Europe and/or US. A request related to that will come as soon as they have more concrete information. ACTION: Vincent to send a confirmation to Diego about this sponsorship request 3) Sysadmin Hiring Vincent sent a message to sysadmins asking their opinion before going on with the hiring process. Jeff thinks that, because of lack of structure and leadership in the sysadmin group, it's really hard to get a collective opinion from them, only individual opinions. For Jeff, we should guess the best we can and go ahead and start the hiring process. Vincent suggested to wait some more time before going ahead. 4) Annual Report 2007 Lucas said the design work starts on January 15th. The content is mostly done. The idea is to release the Annual Report in the beginning of February. The printing service to be used is still undefined. Anne suggested asking Advisory Board members about potential printing services. Jeff suggested asking Andreas Nilsson about local printing services in Sweden (as they might be cheaper than in Australia). ACTION: Lucas to ask Andreas Nilsson about printing services in Sweden ACTION: Lucas to send a message to AB members about printing services 5) GTK+ Hackfest Behdad said everything is going fine. He should follow up with Mathias Hasselmann to find and book the venue. 6) Planet GNOME Maintainership Jeff talked with Lucas and Vincent about co-maintaining Planet GNOME. The guidelines are being worked out by Jeff. Andreas and Tuomas worked on the guidelines for the hackergotchis, which is good. 7) GNOME @ FOSDEM FOSDEM is in good hands. Some people from GNOME-NL are taking care of the GNOME booth. A call for talks is about to be sent by Christophe Fergeau. ACTION: Vincent to check with KDE guys about meeting them at FOSDEM to talk about joint activities 8) Bostom Summit 2008 Jeff said is good time to make the booking of the venue. The expected date is Columbus Day holiday's weekend. ACTION: John to talk with Jonathan and Zana about the Summit venue booking 9) GUADEC 2008 GUADEC dates were officially announced. Lucas said it would be nice to have a press release for GUADEC in Istambul. There is a proposal to use a proprietary system for handling GUADEC 2008 registrations and billing. John said he only feels it's ok if we publish a major plan to use free software in the future editions of the conference. It seems that None of the current FLOSS systems help on the billing part. Jeff said there's no option for FLOSS systems for what we want. In his opinion, the current Drupal at guadec.org is badly deployed which makes things more complicated. Jeff suggests to host the guadec.org website in a GNOME's Wordpress MU and make it the conference web frontend. The payment and agenda systems would be separate from the CMS. John thinks any solution we choose now should be reusable for next editions. The final decision is up to GUADEC organizers. On the GUADEC financial management side, Anne suggests to take all payments to GNOME Foundation's office in Boston and then transfer to the GUADEC organizers as they need. Anne suggests to ask Zana to contact our Bank to know our options. ACTION: John to contact Zana about financial handling between GNOME Foundation and GUADEC organizers ACTION: John to ask Baris about their timeline around the website, registration, and billing systems ACTION: Behdad to work on the initial version of the GUADEC press release ACTION: Lucas to suggest Baris to prepare some flyers to promote GUADEC in Istambul 10) Membership Committee situation According to Lucas, the MC is not in a good situation. For some reason, the new volunteers are not processing the membership applications and handling daily requests. ACTION: Lucas to check with new volunteers if they need any help ACTION: Jeff to make sure the new MC volunteers have their accounts, in case this is blocking their work 11) Thanks to parting directors This was the last meeting with the 2007 board. Big thanks for the parting
Re: two questions for candidates
Hi, 2007/11/26, Richard Stallman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 1. Would you change anything in the GNOME Foundation statement about OOXML? I would change the date it was released. :-) I think the most serious problem about GNOME Foundation participation on ECMA TC45-M was that it wasn't properly explained and clarified to the community at the time it started. The statement came after a lot of noise. About the content, no, I wouldn't change the core message. Anyway, I've already given my opinion about OOXML on the previous set of questions. 2. How do you think the GNOME Foundation should support the Free Software Movement in general? - By supporting the GNOME community on bringing outstanding user experience 100% based on Free Software - By promoting the GNOME Project around the world so that universities, NGO's, governments, social movements, private companies, and other organizations know that they can perform their daily tasks with Free Software - By promoting the GNOME Project around the world so that we can bring more contributors to our (and other) communities --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Hi, 2007/11/23, Vincent Untz [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Le vendredi 23 novembre 2007, à 14:42 +0100, Murray Cumming a écrit : On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 01:18 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: [snip] Taking too much time to decide: it sometimes happen that we wait for a meeting or for another event to take a decision, while the decision is pretty trivial. It might be related to my first item, since pinging people so they say +1/-1 could be enough. [snip] This is generally caused by the habit of only making decisions in meetings, instead of making decisions on the mailing list. And a tendency to think that all decisions must be unanimous. It works like this. Something is discussed. It becomes an unstructured debate and the meeting runs out of time. Someone says Well, let's make a decision at the next meeting. But everyone knows that nothing will be done in the meantime to make that more likely, and half the meetings are postponed (or don't have the relevant people attending). As Jeff mentioned, this year, we had quite a lot of decisions on the mailing list. But while it could have been done in 1-2 days, it sometimes take one week. This is what we can improve. Thanks Vincent and Jeff for clarifying this (saved me the time to write an explanation). That's exactly what I meant. :-) --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Hi Dave, I did send these to the membership committee, but voting's nearly open, and I think they're important, so I guess I'll just ask... Ok. The foundation's role is essentially to facilitate the enthusiasm of the GNOME project, as Andrew Cowie blogged earlier [1]. This consists of two major elements - managing/improving the finances that the foundation has, and identifying areas where those finances can help remove roadblocks or encourage productive contribution. After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2]. What do you see as the best way to spend this money? In terms of hiring, do you prefer hiring a sysadmin, or an executive director? What other priorities do you have for expenditure this year, outside of our usual cost centers (GUADEC + salaries + travel sponsorship)? I think the best way to spend this money in 2008/2009 is: - To support (presential) activities that will facilitate contributors to move the desktop and platform forward. - To support activities that will streghten the local user groups around the world. About the hiring, it really depends. At first sight, I would prefer to hire an executive director because it would have more impact on GNOME Foundation actions (marketing, business partnerships, conferences, etc). However, if we can't find a really good person for the position, I would prefer to hire a sysadmin. Of course, one thing doesn't necessarely exclude the other. A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points? Weak points: - Sometimes certain things get stalled because we (Board) don't get enough feedback (+1's or -1's) among us. We should have more effective ways of making those daily micro-decisions and getting things done more quickly. - We could delegate more often. When delegation is possible, the Board should have some sort of list of potential volunteers for certain types of actions. For example: business partnerships (Dave, Quim, Jonathan, ...), Artwork (Andreas, Jakub, Vinicius, ...), user group contacts, etc. Actually, I think I'll start doing this straight away. :-) - We could be more pro-active on proposing actions to the community. You solve this by proposing actions. :-P I'm planning to propose some small developers summits to some maintainers. Cheers! --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!
Hi, 2007/11/19, Bruno Boaventura [EMAIL PROTECTED]: With the final list of candidates announced, it's time to submit questions about the GNOME Foundation and GNOME Project to this years prospective Board of Directors. The list, a summary of each candidate's statement and a link to each candidate's candidacy can be found at: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2007/candidates.html Here we'll go: [1] How much impact would being a member of the GNOME Foundation Board have on your current contributions to GNOME ? As I already mentioned in my candidacy announcement, I've been trying to help the GNOME community to find its own direction and as a Board member I expect to pro-actively organize or just facilitate face-to-face meetings for boosting different aspects of our software stack. Also, after my participation on the Board for some months, I think I can be really helpful on getting the daily Foundation tasks done which involves mostly replying different kind of requests (from community and other organizations) and properly communicating our activities. [2] Online Desktop and Services are being talked about as the next large step in GNOME - what is your vision for Online Desktop and Services and how would you measure them ? I think the Online Desktop initiative is a great opportunity for us to enwide the scope of GNOME project from a specific desktop environment to a broader user experiences set. This means taking advantage of this huge amount of funny, socially powerful, useful information and services available on the Web. Embracing Online Desktop also means trying to bring a new set of goals to GNOME which are related to a more social and entertaining user experience, something that, in my opinion, has been lacking in GNOME for a long time. Currently, GNOME achieves very well the goal of proving a desktop environment that just works in most of the cases. However, there's still a long way until we're cool, sexy and atractive enough to catch the attention of home/domestic users who just want to have fun and share stuff with their friends. Online Desktop can help a lot in this regard. IMO, we should always keep a platform thinking about Online Desktop. This means that it's really important to provide as many platform enablers as possible so that companies, FLOSS communities and other organizations can create their own services and easily link them to our desktop. I would be really happy if in 2009 (?) I see something like Click here to Install the WEB_SERVICE_NAME plugin for GNOME in Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Jaiku, etc. I think the GNOME Foundation (and the Board) can help the Online Desktop initiative by bringing this topic for discussion to the Advisory Board members, promoting cooperation among companies. FLOSS projects and other organizations, and making sure that hackers have the necessary infrastructure available. Also, there's a lot to discuss about the wider topic of free (as in freedom) web services (something that Luis is already investigating?). [3] What are the SMART goals that you desire to set for yourself should you be elected to the Board ? I've already mentioned those in my candidacy announcement. I'll just copy here to avoid linking to another page. As I said, some of them are about keeping the good current work, others are proposed improvements and others are both. Reactive perspective: - Respond quickly to requests about sponsorships, partnerships, general questions, etc. Proactive perspective: - Incremental production of annual report to make it easier to have something in the end of the year; - Take care of transparency, provide useful information about current Board activities, and bring topics for discussion to membership when applicable; - Organize and/or facilitate topic-based summits with relevant contributors for boosting, hacking, setting direction of diffents parts/aspects of our desktop and platform. Those summits could be self-contained or take place on existing FLOSS conferences. The topics could be things like: real-time communication, panels and applets, GNOME mobile, eye candy, online desktop, python bindings, multimedia experience, etc. - Keep in touch with user groups to know what they need for their local activities. [4] If you were part of the GNOME Board last year and a candidate again, what would you like to put as your achievements as a Board member ? In my 4 months as a Board member, it took sometime for me to understand how the Board works and to be confortable for getting real tasks. In the last couple months I've been replying the requests that came in, coodinating the annual report and actively participating on Board discussions. I would say that now I feel like a Board member. :-P [5] Do you think it is important to mentor and coach potential leaders in the GNOME community ? If yes, what do you think the role of the Board be in this task ? If no, what are your thoughts on this ? I
Annual Report Kickoff
Hi all, It's time to start working on our 2007 annual report! Last year we had a very nice report. So, let's make it even better this year! I've created a wiki page to organize the work: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/AnnualReport2007 Any kind of contribution is welcome! There are several ways to help: - Assign yourself to write one of the sections - Add links, references and other information sources to help writers to produce the content - Add new ideas, suggest, review the content - Anything else! :-) If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Annual Report Team (Silvia, Sayamindu and me). Cheers! --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?)
Hi all, Could you please move this discussion to d-d-l and/or gnome-infrastructure? This mailing list is definitely not the place to discuss SCM in GNOME. Thanks, --lucasr 2007/9/10, Olav Vitters [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 08:29:35AM +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote: 2007/9/8, Olav Vitters [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Sat, Sep 08, 2007 at 04:47:31PM +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote: And this all is naturally from the developer/maintainer POV, as translators and documentors do not benefit from this as much. But as the general opinion seems to be, they shouldn't be forced to use SCM:s directly anyway. That is a theoretical discussion. Ideally GNOME has a D-SCM now and all translators use a websystem that automatically translators. It doesn't exist. Of course it is theoretical since there's no hope (nor sense) in switching over to anything before there are tools. As is pointed out, it would make things worse for non-developres. D-SCM systems exist. Such a translator tool does not. Especially as someone has to write that tool, I do not like discussions that involve a tool 'someone will write' (well, unless one of the damned-lies people shows a clear proposal; including authentication bits). But that doesn't mean the discussion needs to be punted indefinetly, and statements like I don't want to learn a new SCM are really not contributing to a discussion of the benefits a new tool would give to developers. At least I thought we were discussing exactly that. I disagree. It translates to easy of use. Why should I have to care how a SCM works? A tool should either warn me strongly before doing something wrong, or prevent it outright. It should have a --help that is understandable. The man pages should have the most common usages, etc. I'm all for some D-SCM tool that provides benefits to people who understand (D-)SCM inout, but I need to use it as well. Perhaps git now is good enough, no idea. But just discussing benefits of some tool without discussing ease of use is ignoring part of the users. Although there is now some progress towards D-SCM, I don't see such a websystem happening. Also am not sure if a websystem is the most appropriate way. I'd much rather see something like SCM support for gtranslate which would give a comfortable tool to translate and send changes to the server. -- Regards, Olav ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Git vs SVN (was: Can we improve things?)
Hi, I hate to do this but... again... please move this discussion to a more appropriate mailing list like d-d-l or gnome-infrastructure. Thanks, --lucasr 2007/9/11, Sanford Armstrong [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 9/8/07, Jeff Waugh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: quote who=Sanford Armstrong I simply meant that less people are familiar with D-SCM tools and that they are somewhat harder for a newbie to learn than C-SCM tools. This is an unfortunate cultural relic created by arch/tla, and hilariously promulgated by git. Sure, fewer people are familiar with them, but the good ones are not harder to learn. I'm not really talking about the UI of the D-SCM tool, but about some fundamentals of the distributed model. Getting code and pushing code seems to always require an additonal step. Users have to learn about branching and merging up front, whereas in SVN this would come later in their education. If I were a newbie developer I would find this confusing. As I've stated, I don't have much experience with D-SCM, but these are the instructions to get started hacking on one project using bzr... $ bzr init-repo --trees some-project $ cd some-project $ bzr checkout http://url/to/some-project $ bzr branch mainline working $ cd working $ ./configure $ make ...compared to the same steps using svn... $ svn co http://url/to/some-project/trunk some-project $ cd some-project $ ./configure $ make There's just a higher cognitive investment for a newbie getting started with D-SCM. As bzr/git/etc become more common in the FLOSS communities, this won't be as much of an issue, though. And the advantages of the distributed model have been well covered here. :-) Sandy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07
Hi all, There's a *big* difference between willing to increase collaboration between GNOME and KDE and merging their main conferences in one. I think this merge would bring really bad effects on our community. - Our conference would lose GNOMEsh identity. This is a subtle but essential aspect of GUADEC: it's where/when we meet the GNOME community. We cannot lose that. - Not everyone in GNOME community is interested in KDE. I understand that we, as a free desktop project, should be interested in KDE but we can't expect/enforce everyone in GNOME to think like this. Because we have similar goals than KDE, this does not mean we should meet at the same time and place in a generic/big free desktop conference. There are better places and times for putting both projects together and the really interested people will be there for sure. - If we're having problems on organizing our conference, let's try to solve them in the best possible way in our own boundaries. IMO, merging with KDE will bring more problems than solving from the communities point of view. Specially on defining the agenda. Just my 0,2 cents. --lucasr 2007/6/11, Lucas Rocha [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi, 4) GNOME and KDE Conference There has been some discussion about a possible merge of GNOME and KDE conferences. This has been discussed at the advisory board level, along with the KDE e.v. members list. If there is considerable opposition from both sides, then it isn't worth exploring further. Jeff mentioned that it's likely to come up at DAM4. ACTION: Jeff to follow up about a possible GNOME and KDE conference merge at DAM4. Does this mean that your're proposing a new merged KDE/GNOME conference? Or is this a matter of scheduling GUADEC and aKademy at the same time and place? Or is this a GUADEC replacement with this merged conference? This is not clear in the minutes. I think it would make sense to have both conferences scheduled in way that it would be easier for us, GNOMErs, to attend both. But I don't think we should have only one merged KDE/GNOME conference. Even though we aim to increase the collaboration with KDE, we're still different projects, with different development and organization aproaches. My 2 cents, --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Minutes of SoC meeting - 2007/Mar/06
Hi all, Here are the minutes I took from the meeting we had today on irc in #soc. Further discussion about GNOME SoC should happen in gnome-soc-list from now on. = Present: Behdad Esfahbod Vincent Untz Shaun McCance Danilo Segan Clare So Sandy Armstrong Tristan Van Berkom Olav Vitters Ryan Lortie Lucas Rocha Christian Kellner Mads Chr. Olesen (Other inactive attendees were there too) 1) Actions from previous meeting * ACTION: Vincent to talk with sysadmins about getting a sandbox repository or main repository access for students (DONE) Vincent started a thread on gnome-infrastructure about it and will ensure that the infrastructure is ready before May. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-infrastructure/2007-March/msg4.html * ACTION: Behdad to ask mizmo about a poster (DONE) Two proposals: 1. http://people.redhat.com/duffy/gnome-brand/soc2007/soc2007-poster_a4.png 2. http://desrt.mcmaster.ca/random/poster-draft.png DECISION: Use proposal 1 with Google Summer of Code on it, and mentioning more explicitly the money involved. * ACTION: Lucas to ping web people about putting SoC on the front page (NOT DONE) SoC announcement should be added to p.g.o front page ASAP. * ACTION: Vincent to send a mail to know who would like to be in the selection committee (DONE) Vincent and Behdad will choose a mixed list of volunteers and invited people for the selection committee. Volunteers from the meeting: Lucas, Christian, Ryan, Tristan and Vincent. * ACTION: Vincent to create the mentors mailing list (DONE) Waiting response from sysadmins. 2) New Actions * ACTION: Vincent to ask if it will be possible to merge back with full history from the separated directory * ACTION: Vincent to ask sysadmins to reset gnome-soc-list password (DONE during meeting) * ACTION: Behdah to subscribe GNOME as a mentoring organization (DONE during meeting) 3) Organization of the SoC promotion from a GNOME perspective The proposed promotion plan comprises: - banner and test on w.g.o frontpage ASAP - banner on p.g.o - blogs with poster - poster translations - posters everywhere where it makes sense - announcement in mailing lists (gnome-announce-list, gugmasters-list) Ryan created a wiki page to coordinate the GNOME SoC ad campaign effort in universities: - http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2007/UniversityAdvertisement * ACTION: Vincent to make a call for translations on the GNOME SoC poster * ACTION: Behdad to ping p.g.o people to put a banner about SoC * ACTION: Ryan to blog about university campaign page (DONE during meeting) 4) Collect ideas on SoC/WSOP-like programmes that could be proposed to the board E-mail ideas to Vincent, Behdad and/or the board. 5) Review of the instructions we've put online for students * ACTION: everyone should take some time to review the wiki SoC2007 page: http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2007 6) AOB fun-moment According to Christian, Danilo stinks and isn't at all as handsome as some pictures of him *MIGHT* indicate! * ACTION: Christian to find pictures of Danilo where he exposures his real not-that-good-looking face ;-) /fun-moment ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board Meeting Minutes :: 15th February 2007
Hei, Membership Committee Baris had worked on renewals, but his laptop was recently stolen so he has to start again. There's a membership committee meeting next week where this will be discussed, along with other topics (like membership applications taking a long time to be processed, and new members for the committee). Vincent will again be the board representative for the membership commitee this year. I can/want help the membership commitee if needed. Just let me know. --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
