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  • in GNOME
  • 4 min read

A Peek Under the Covers

It’s been two months since I was appointed to the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors to replace Behdad. (And those are some pretty big shoes to fill!)

With Foundation Board elections quickly approaching, we discussed at the last Board meeting this past Thursday sharing some of our experiences on the Board. We would like to encourage anyone with an interest in running for the Board to do so and I thought I’d share some of my experiences over the last 2 months and I believe other Board members will be sharing theirs as well.

Being the newest member of the Board, I have to say the experience has been eye opening and humbling. I do not consider myself a developer or progammer and I enjoy the other aspects of being involved with free software projects, including project management. I thought this would help prepare me for being on the Board, especially as the Board does not set technical direction for GNOME, but I am constantly amazed at the number of things the Board is involved in.

These things range from little things such as registering or transferring a domain to following up with a booth organizer on how a conference went to big things like GNOME’s finances, GUADEC planning or the hiring and payroll of GNOME’s employees and everything in-between.

There is a lot of work around GNOME’s finances. German, as Treasurer, has a huge task in helping managing and tracking GNOME’s income and expenses. Stormy and Rosanna also spend a significant amount of time in dealing with the administrative side of this in managing the bank accounts, wire transfers and more.

A lot of what we do is interacting with the various project teams. Things like getting an update from the Release Team on how the next release is coming or the challenges ahead or asking the Marketing team to help with fundraising ideas. And there is the follow-up – being a free software project powered by developers there can be a lot of follow-up in both just getting a response or update as well as progress on any given project or task. I don’t know how we’d do it without Brian’s (as Secretary) attention to detail in keeping the meeting minutes. (You are reading the meeting minutes after Brian sends them to the Foundation list every two weeks, aren’t you?)

There is also a focus on events. From planning GUADEC (did you know we’re aleady working on the Desktop Summit for 2011 to be co-hosted with KDE?) to hackfests we are constantly working on planning future events and following-up to see how past events went and what their accomplishments were.

We also work with external partners. Examples include companies or organizations who want to work together, journalists, government organizations or our Advisory Board partners. We meet with the Advisory Board monthly and have a two-way discussion on how we can work together better. This past Tuesday’s meeting Stormy and German gave an update on GNOME’s finances as we are half way through our fiscal year.

Doing a very, very rough estimate, I would say we average about 50 emails a week (just doing a quick count over the past few weeks). Some of it is conversation between Board members to make a decision, some of it just votes on a decision (+1, 0 or -1) and some it is discussions with projects or partners. Everyone on the Board has a voice and we have a good discussion and dialog as we build consensus. If you think about it, it’s only 5-10 emails per day – not as many as you think!

If you are good at communication, have knowlege about GNOME, are comfortable in taking on action items and following through, have some time you can donate each week, and most importantly, want to see the GNOME Foundation grow and succeed, you should consider running for the Board.

This blog post isn’t supposed to scare you off – if you’re choosing to run you should be aware of the administrative tasks and time involved but the work is deeply rewarding. Being a part of the Board has given me a broader vision to all the great things GNOME does around the world and I am thankful for the opportunity.

With that said, the elections process kicked off a week ago. I’ll be the first to put my hand up this election cycle and announce my candidacy. I’ve sent in my email to the Foundation-Announce and Elections lists and it should be moderated and appear soon. I would be honored and humbled to serve the GNOME community on the Board for the next year.

You should run too. Help make GNOME better. Yes, you.

Quack – An update on GNOME 3.0 Help

One of the big improvements for GNOME 3.0 is new user help.  The Documentation Team is using Mallard to re-write the GNOME User Guide and a number of applications help files as well.

In GNOME today, most help files are written in a very linear structure by chapter using Docbook XML.  If you’re a user looking for help, it’s not always easy to find the right chapter that contains the topic you’re looking for help with.

Topic based help aims to fix that.  And to write topic based help, the GNOME Docs team will be using Mallard, a new XML language written by Shaun McCance aka the GNOME Documentation Project’s Fearless Leader.

The hardest part about writing good help (in any markup) is planning, planning, planning.  What feature might the user need help with? Where will they get stuck? How should the topics be organized?

From there, you write help that’s in the second person in a conversational tone to help the user.  (And choosing the right words is important as well to help the localization teams out, too).

Let’s use Tomboy’s help to compare.

Tomboy help in GNOME 2.30 using Docbook:

Tomboy 2.30 Help

Tomboy help re-written into topic based help for GNOME 3.0:

Tomboy Help for GNOME 3.0

Tomboy help re-written in Mallard

(And there are a number of topics you can’t see in the screenshot such as Common Problems, Advanced Actions and What’s New.)

The goal is to help users get to the help they need fast.  There’s always been a bit of an in-joke that users don’t read the help.  We’re aiming to change that.  When they need help, we need to present it quickly and easily.  (Which also ties in to the work Shaun is doing in Yelp 3.0).

For GNOME 3.0, we are going to re-write the GNOME User Guide.  This will be a difficult challenge due to the amount of information currently in the guide as well as GNOME Shell and the user interface being in development and we need for it to stabilize before writing the docs.  Shaun, Milo and Phil did a lot of planning around the user guide at the Desktop Help Summit this past April in Chicago.

In addition to this herculean task, a number of applications are in process of getting new help or replacing their old help with topic based help, including:

  • Banshee
  • Brasero
  • Cheese
  • F-Spot
  • gLabels
  • Rhythmbox
  • Tomboy

On a personal note, I finished Tomboy’s help and started Banshee’s help this weekend on the plane coming back from the Marketing hackfest.  I’d also like to thank Harold Schreckengost who just joined the docs team last month and has already started, if not finished, topic based help for Brasero and F-Spot.  (I committed the F-Spot help tonight on his behalf in a new branch – docs).

If you’re an application developer and you know of your help being written or re-written in Mallard, please add it to the list on the wiki.  App maintainers also may need to re-work the way help is called from the menu and help the doc writers review any new documentation for accuracy.  (Thanks in advance!)

If you’re a documentation writer, please visit the page above as well for examples on how we plan our writing for help and the Docs wiki has a lot of other great information for getting started too.  Take it from me, writing in Mallard is much easier than Docbook, and now is a great time to get involved with the Docs team and writing new user help as we’re all learning the new language and we can make a big impact on GNOME 3.0.

Marketing Hackfest – Participating and Interacting in Communities

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A handful of us are waiting in the hotel lobby to catch a cab to the train station as the Marketing Hackfest has come to an end. Andreas has inspired me to stop procrastinating and write another blog post (hopefully it’s not the last one about the hackfest!)

Our trip here was sponsored and organized by multiple groups including ASOLIF, Technological Institute of Aragón, CESLA, the city of Zaragosa and the regional government Aragón.  (See the Hackfest page for more details under organizers).  I would personally like to thank Agustin for taking such good care of us and making sure we got from one place to another.

Our days were very structured – start hacking at 9 until 2:00 when we would break for lunch, then start again at 4:00 (or at least that’s when we were supposed to start – Spain is very relaxed and have long lunches) and then hack some more until 8:30 or so when the facility closed.  Walk back to the hotel and then meet for dinner and walk to a location around 9:30.  Agustin was kind enough to explain some of the cultural significance in why this is and it was a good learning experience.

Being your typical American this took some getting used to!

We spent our time hacking in the “Water Library” or Bibliotecha de Agua (I hope I got that right as I don’t speak Spanish).  The library was converted from a convent (if I remember correctly) and the picture above is the room just outside our conference room.    Walking through the library some rooms had display cases explaining the history of the building and the city.

Each day after lunch Stormy, Vincent and myself would meet with officials from the local or regional government, the university or businesses in Spain who are using free software and are interested in growing their community and giving back.  The city of Zaragoza is marketing itself as an Open Source City and is building infrastructure to retain and attract technology companies and startups as well as helping its citizens through things like free Wifi.  (More on Zaragoza in another post – it deserves it’s own blog post for all the cool things they’re doing).

Some of the business leaders we met with traveled hours by train to meet with us and we were honored to learn about what they’re doing in and with free software and how they want to give back to the community.  We were able to share our knowledge of working within free software communities and I’m excited to see these companies grow and expand.

One local example is eBox.  From their website:

eBox Platform can act as a Gateway, Infrastructure Manager, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Unified Communication Server or a combination of them. One single, easy-to-use platform to manage all your network services.

Ignacio, eBox’s CEO, spent a significant amount of time with us joining us for lunch and dinner every single day.  We were also able to get a tour of their offices after the session on Friday.  Heidi, their Chief Marketing Officer also joined us for dinner one night and on Friday.

On Friday, the government hosted a day of talks that included local businesses and other free software speakers, including Rodrigo Moya from GNOME Hispano, and Stormy, Vincent and myself each gave talks.  It was a fantastic opportunity to participate with such a diverse group and being able to represent GNOME.

Thank you to everyone in and around Zaragoza for spending time us and sharing the exciting things you’re doing and the goals you have in building free software and communities.  It was definitely a learning experience and one I’m thankful for.

Sponsored by GNOME

GNOME Marketing Hackfest Day 1

Ten brave souls have gathered in windy Zaragoza, Spain for a GNOME Marketing Hackfest to work on a marketing plan and materials for the upcoming GNOME 3.0 launch.

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Day one is already done and we’re well on our way into day two and we’re getting a lot of stuff done.

Sumana has done a great job at summarizing our first day and she’s jumped in and volunteered to act as our project manager.  She’s making sure we’re staying on topic and focused.  (Thanks Sumana!)

We’re working on a GNOME 3 website where we can host some cool videos showing the features and benefits of GNOME 3 as well as making it easy to represent GNOME at events.  We’re working on presentations and templates you could use to give a talk about GNOME, materials to host a booth at a conference such as SCALE or Ohio Linux Fest and more.

Even Vincent is surprised how much we are getting done:

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We have two more days of work ahead of us and Friday we will be meeting and giving talks with a number of local government and business community members about free software in the community, business and education. (More photos here too, will be updated throughout the week).

Sponsored by GNOME

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

GNOME Developers – We need your help!

The Marketing Hackfest kicked off a few hours ago and we need your help.

As we build the marketing plan for the GNOME 3.0 release one of the focus areas we want to talk to users about is GNOME apps.

Do you work on a GNOME application and have some cool features planned?  Updated user interface?  Something cool to tell GNOME users that you’d like to see included in the the GNOME 3.0 marketing?  Tell us!  Leave a comment here, add to the Roadmap on the wiki or email the marketing list.

Being an avid reader of Planet GNOME I’ve heard about Tomboy Online (in Beta hopefully for 3.0), collaboration in gedit and more.  Now is a great time to let the Marketing team know with what’s going on with the apps you work on and where they’re going so we can include that information as we work on our marketing plans.

We need your help!  And thank you in advance.

Hobbyists & Hackers

Dave Neary wrote an interesting blog post yesterday commenting that the recruitment of new developers appears to be slowing.

I’ve had similar a similar thought on my mind for a while but coming from a different angle.

First though, revisiting Dave’s thought, he writes:

But it was a learning experience. Installing Linux was the period in my life where I learned the most about how computers worked, hardware and software. Back then, if you wanted to try out an application you heard about, there was only one way to do it – download the source code and compile it.

I had a conversation with Jono Bacon and Opportunistic Development (more on this in a different post) at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit two weeks ago that comes to mind.  Jono and I were talking about how kids in the 80’s had a chance to learn to program through BASIC, LOGO or other languages.  I remember using my first computer and buying magazines that had the machine code you’d program in by hand to create a game.  (Ok, I’m old).

But it leads me to an interesting thought about the evolution of younger users and how they are introduced to computers, becoming programmers and ultimately hackers or makers.

  • In the early 80’s we had the TRS-80, Commodore or Apple II (and later the Atari ST or IBM PC) computers and were encouraged to learn Basic or LOGO
  • In the 90’s we saw the beginning of Linux and other free software tools that raised a different generation of hackers.  We had the World Wide Web explode creating a generation of Web programmers.
  • And in the first decade of the 21st century, especially the second half, we saw the rise of the smartphone and the app store.

Dave asks the question:

Is it any wonder that recruitment of developers appears to be slowing, that prominent older projects are suffering something of a demographic crisis, with hoary old 30 year olds holding down the fort, with no young fiery whippersnappers coming up to relieve them?

(And I encourage you to read the comments on his blog as well).  I don’t know if that’s the right question – I think the fiery whippersnappers have more choices today for development – web apps, iPhone or Android apps, Linux and more.

For the GNOME community specifically, I wonder if we could make it easier for new developers or projects.  As an upstream project, I understand we don’t want to make it too easy and have a wasteland of abandoned projects hosted on our infrastructure, but I also see innovative new projects like Zeitgeist or Getting Things GNOME! using Launchpad instead.  I think the recent Zeitgeist proposal highlights both the benefits and challenges of using one or the other platforms for development.  I don’t know what the answer is, but I’d be curious to hear the communities opinion on it, whether it’s opening a GNOME branch on Gitorious or other ideas.

From whatever direction you come at these questions, it is an interesting challenge to have.

  • in GNOME
  • 1 min read

GNOME Foundation Board Affiliations Update

With the recent additions to the Board in the last couple of months and some job changes (including myself last week) since the elections last year, we wanted to provide a quick update on current Board affiliations:

  • Brian Cameron (Oracle)
  • Jorge Castro (Canonical)
  • Paul Cutler (Novell)
  • Diego Escalante Urrelo (Igalia – Internship)
  • Germán Póo-Caamaño (No affiliation)
  • Srinivasa Ragavan (Intel)
  • Vincent Untz (Novell)

The Foundation Board election process started in May last year – if you haven’t renewed your Foundation membership or wish to become a Foundation member now is a great time to apply (and save the Membership committee some work!)

GNOME Journal Issue #19 is out!

The latest GNOME Journal is out!

We have six articles in this issue:

  • Will Kahn-Greene writes his first article for GNOME Journal about the GNOME Miro Community. Want to watch videos about GNOME? Will has all the information you need.
  • GNOME Bugzilla was upgraded late last year. Sumana Harihareswara writes up the case study on the partnership between the GNOME Foundation, Canonical and Everything Solved, a consultancy focused on Bugzilla.
  • Stormy Peters interviews Juan José Sánchez Penas, who works at Igalia and sits on the GNOME Advisory Board.
  • Jono Bacon writes about a topic I’m personally passionate about – tools for opportunistic developers who want to write small, focused and fun applications for GNOME.
  • And another topic I’m passionate about – Shaun McCance introduces Mallard, the new XML schema we’re using to write help and documentation in GNOME.
  • And last, but not certainly not least – Jim Hodapp writes a Letter from the Editor – thank you Jim for all your hard work on GNOME Journal as Editor in Chief and your kind words.

Thank you to all our writers and editors for this release. Want to write an article or get involved? Join the mailing list here.

Go read it!

  • in GNOME
  • 2 min read

GNOME Fundraising

Thank you to everyone who has worked, and more importantly, donated to to the GNOME Sysadmin campaign that was launched this week. Special thanks to Vinicius, Lucas, Stormy and everyone who has helped develop the ruler that is displayed on the family of GNOME websites.

It’s been almost a year since J5 blogged about the GNOME Foundation needing help – and since then we saw a lift in donations via Friends of GNOME. Thanks to Jaap Haitsma and the marketing team (I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody) we also launched Friends of GNOME buttons for blogs and Amazon referrals to help raise money for GNOME.

While we’ve seen a slight dip in Friends of GNOME subscriptions in the last couple of months with subscribers who have reached the one year mark, we should all be proud and thankful for the money raised over the last year. We raised more money in 2009 than the last couple of years combined.

We’ll be launching a GNOME store soon to also help raise money (and help you get cool GNOME stuff!) and we have some ideas for 3.0 as well.

The Sysadmin campaign has been a great success and we want to be careful with specific fundraising campaigns going forward. There’s no question that marketing and promoting a fundraising campaign does have an effect based on this success!

Again, I’d like to thank everyone who has helped support GNOME financially. This is important to help fund hackfests around the globe which helps GNOME develop new features, applications and provide a better experience for all of our users. Thank you again.

(And check out Roberto Galoppini’s blog too about the ruler).

Upcoming GNOME Marketing Hackfest

Stormy was kind enough to announce our next Marketing hackfest this week while I was out sick. (I’m such a slacker, always have an excuse!)

This hackfest is all about GNOME 3.0 marketing planning, preparation and execution. GNOME 3.0 coming this fall is a huge milestone for GNOME and our role as a marketing team is to have marketing and promotion materials ready to introduce our users to what GNOME 3.0 is and what it means.

The regional governments of Zaragoza and Aragon had previously reached out to GNOME as they are deploying free software within their governments and have kindly offered to help with hosting. Part of our role will also be to discuss GNOME and free software with them.

The hackfest is scheduled May 5th through the 7th and the details are on the hackfest wiki page. You will also find the agenda, hackfest goals and travel information.

If you are interested in coming, please add your name to the wiki page and please review the GNOME Travel policies if you would like to request a travel sponsorship / subsidy.

The first Marketing hackfest late last year was a success and we learned a lot doing it. I’ll be working over the next week or two to make sure all of the previous hackfest work and information is updated and shared. (One thing I learned I could do better!)