J5’s Blog

It’s happening all over again!!! Let us know you are coming. There may be some exciting announcements, good fun and who knows…another beer summit, tack on conference may present itself again. So, come on up (or down or sideways depending on your latitude and longitude) to Boston for some good friends, good hacking and good times.

Since I know not many people read the board meeting notes even though Luis slaves tirelessly over them after each meeting I though I would write up a short, what’s happening to get people in the loop.

•  First and foremost, the Foundation is changing in very good ways.  We hired Stormy Peters as our Executive Director and she has gotten off to a flying start, posting on the board list faster than the board can respond and generally keeping us part timers on our toes.  This brings up a good point that members should start participating more in Foundation activities and teams such as with GNOME Marketing, or helping organize hackfests.  With Stormy on board there are more opportunities the Foundation can pursue but we will need people to oversee these initiatives and make sure they are a success.
• As people should know the next Boston GNOME Summit is happening at the MIT Slone building (map):
  DATES:             October 11, 12 & 13, 2008
  TIME:                7:00 AM – 11:59 PM
  ROOMS:            E51-315, E51-325, E51-335, E51-34
• We are also holding the GLib Introspection and User Experience hackfests around the same time frame in Boston.  Hackfests are small invite only gathering (around 5-20 people) focused on moving specific parts of the GNOME stack forward.  I encourage people running these hackfests to blog about them and the work that was accomplished once the hackfest is over.
• The GNOME Asia summit is also set to kick off in Beijing on the 18 and 19th of October.  That is only 25 days left until our first Foundation sponsored Asian event.  It looks like it is going ot be a hit already and something we want to continue to sponsor annually.
• Budgeting changes – as treasurer I have had my head filled with budgets for the last few months.  With the hire of Stormy and the feedback she has been getting from members of our Advisory Board we have started to move budget planning for the whole year instead of adding budget items and asking for money as we need it (like we did for the hackfests this past year).  We want to grow GNOME and the Foundation and in order to do that in a responsible way we need to plan further ahead than we have traditionally done.  A draft budget for 2009 went out to the Advisory Board yesterday to make sure we hit companies budgeting schedule.  In the future I hope to start budgeting talks at GUADEC and get all foundation members involved in figuring out how to best utilize the resources we are given every year.  This also means I will expect more participation in board activities from members as we move forward.
• As many have noticed while we get a healthy amount of donations from individuals from the Friends of GNOME program it pales in comparison to the corporate sponsorships.  While it may always lag behind since a large part of our community may not have the money to donate, whether they are in school or times are getting a bit tougher we still think we can do much better.  Because of this Friends of GNOME is going through some changes to make it easier for individuals to donate throughout the year.  While I don’t want to spill the beans before we launch, sufficed to say,it tears down a lot of the barriers that can make donating to GNOME a bit of a pain.

Well, that is all the exciting bits, to some degree of exciting.  I’m going to try and post regularly but most of the time the week to week running of the Foundation isn’t all that exciting (if it were more people would read the meeting notes).  The exciting bits happen around the stuff that the Board enables through its work.  While we make sure resources are procured and allocated for the various projects and conferences it is the people on the ground, hacking, organizing and making these things happen which make the Foundation run smoothly and GNOME get better from year to year.  This is something seven board members and two staff members can not do on their own.  Consider getting more involved in our different teams, offering to help with a local event or donating your expertise in various areas that the board deals with (e.g. read the meeting notes on foundation-announce to see what we are working on and see if there is an action item you may be able to help out with).