Stormy's update: Week of August 3, 2009

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

http://blogs.gnome.org/foundation/2009/08/08/stormys-update-week-of-august-3rd/

Worked on the quarterly report.Got 11 updates out of the 15 we’d like to include. (And if I forgot a team, please let me know!!) Working on two more with the team leads. Waiting on two additional ones. Editing them and working with Paul Cutler and Vinicius Depizzol on the layout.

Wrote final draft of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit press release. Vincent and Cornelius released it.

Met with the GNOME Asia Summit planning committee. Good stuff happening there but I’ll wait for them to announce …

Recruited Denise Walters to help with GNOME marketing, in particular the customer success stories. I know Denise from HP where she worked on Linux and open source marketing.

Summarized the information I got while interviewing all the advisory board members and sent it out to the advisory board members. Will send out to the GNOME Foundation list on Tuesday.

Created a very rough place holder of a wiki page for the new GNOME press team we’d like to create. (I realized I didn’t really know what to put in the page - hopefully people will ask questions which will make it obvious to me what’s missing.)

Had a short interview with Todd Wiess, a free lance reporter for an article he was writing about whether the economy is affecting free software projects. What was interesting is that he thought laid off people would have less time to work on free software while they looked for a job whereas I would have thought they’d have more until they found a job. (While looking for a job is a full time job, few people who like coding like all the stuff involved with finding a job, so I’d think they’d need a coding break!)

Finalized 401K plan! Sent signed documents off to SocialK folks.

Booked travel for Grace Hopper Women in Computing conference and Utah Open Source Conference - both events are covering my travel.

Sent a thank you note to all the Desktop Summit sponsors with links to press about the Desktop Summit. (Press links compiled by Dave Neary.)

Got the Zoom2’s from Texas Instruments for our usability study! Talking to folks about how to move forward.

Sent thank you notes to those that donated through Friends of GNOME. Personalized them where I could.

What I’m planning on doing this week:

This week I’ll be at OpenSource World, running the desktop track, moderating a panel and giving a talk the Desktop or the Browser: Is the Netbook Escalating the Issue? (Plus I still have to create the talk and slides.)

The following week (August 17th) between a camping trip and my parents coming into town, I will probably take some time off.

Here’s my list of things I’ll work on in between those events: (Things that are missing from the list have been passed on to somebody else or are in progress.)

• Get the 2009 Q2 Quarterly report published!
• Advisory board/sponsors work:
  • get feedback from advisory board members on advisory board meeting at GUADEC (I think I’m going to need to ping them individually.)
  • get agreement signed by GNOME folks for the work Canonical is funding on bugzilla for GNOME (Missing one signature - from the sys admin team.)
  • Amazon mp3 download uses GTK - contact them about sponsorship
  • send finance update out to advisory board (I’ll be doing this once a month.)
• Marketing team stuff
  • Start marketing list thread about raising advisory board fees and the communication around that
  • Update GNOME marketing wiki pages with Paul Cutler
  • Get the press team created and started
  • find someone to help create a GNOME slideset template
  • write up blurbs about why companies sponsor GNOME (or find people to help) - for our website (Maybe someone would like to help with sponsors?)GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan like premium sponsorship - put in wiki
• blog about travel committee - they did an excellent job with the Desktop Summit
• Partnerships:
  • Talk to Jim Zemlin about Moblin & Linux Foundation and relationship to GNOME Foundation
  • follow up with OIN - they list GNOME as a partner
• Recruit others to help:
  • Figure out how to get a team started to get GNOME working more closely with governments.
  • find someone who can help create a list of recommended desktop apps that OpenLogic would put in their library for enterprise customers
  • Follow up with someone who had ideas for a GNOME project and wanted to know how to go about it
  • Automate things. In past lives I’ve found the best way to get tedious tasks automated is to give them to someone who (a) finds them tedious and (b) has the skills to automate them. Tasks that I think could be improved somehow by automation: (Let me know if you fit (a) and (b) and would like to give them a try.
    • Getting Friends of GNOME names onto the website.
    • Sending thank you notes to Friends of GNOME. (Could be done by CRM.)
    • Getting Friends of GNOME data into gnucash. (One of the board members is looking at this.)
    • Scrubbing confidential Friends of GNOME data from gnucash so we can publish the gnucash file.
    • Reimbursing contributors whose travel we pay. (While the travel committee is helping with receipts and reminders, it still takes Rosanna 20 minutes per wire transfer to transfer money to someone. That means it takes her several weeks of work time to reimburse everyone for GUADEC travel. Every year.)
    • Putting feedback we get through Friends of GNOME onto a website.
• follow up with sys admin team about installing a CRM system for the GNOME Foundation (It would really help the board, Rosanna, myself and others working on contacts, sponsors and finances.) Dave Neary offered to install a CRM for us, so this might be more about picking the right one now.
• follow up with the sys admin team on setting up better analytics for gnome.org so marketing can make better plans. (They are working on this one.)
• follow up with International Cooperation group from the university where the Desktop Summit was housed (They’d like to work with us to promote free software in developing countries.)
• Create policies for the GNOME Foundation to comply with new US nonprofit regulations. (Things like conflict of interest, travel, whistle blower, compensation and records retention.)