Stormy's Corner

Stormy's Update: Week of July 5th

Cross posted from the GNOME Foundation blog where you can find previous updates.

Spent the week at the Desktop Summit/GUADEC in Gran Canaria.

Met with a ton of people. Putting lots of faces to names. (Some people need new hackergotchis, identi.ca and twitter icons. Me included.) Managed to see a couple of talks too. I have to admit I was most interested in the questions and discussions that the presentations generated. I was very excited that many people reported interesting KDE/GNOME conversations.

Realized that while this year I don’t have several hundred GNOME people to meet for the first time, I suddenly have several hundred KDE people to meet … I met quite a few at the Nokia party as I was one of the first (if not the first) GNOME person to show up.

Igalia sponsored the GNOME party and didn’t forget our traditions: ice cream death match and jam session. It was a great time! (The whiskey thing happened another night. I decided it was wisest not to attend that party.)

The board of advisors meeting went well. We had a round table in the morning followed by a finance update and a call for help with hackfests. (Almost all the sponsors would very much like to see us do more hackfests we just have to figure out how to get the funding.) We also got some great commitments to help with Friends of GNOME, GNOME customer success stories and hackfests. After an excellent lunch in a Persian restaurant that Rosanna, Owen and Blizzard found, we returned for a discussion with the GNOME 3.0 projects. (All those projects involved in GNOME 3.0.)

I had breakfast with some local government and university officials. I sat next to Jose Miguel Santos Espino, the director of the computer science department, and I happened to tell him about the GNOME and KDE folks in Nigeria that couldn’t get visas to come. A couple of days later he contacted me with an excellent proposal. He suggested that we work with their International Cooperations Department to find ways to bring free software to countries in Africa as well as Latin America and Asia. We had a good conversation with Josefa de la Rosa Cantos and we will work with them during their next conference of Spanish and African universities.

I also got a chance to talk to Antonio Jose Saenz Albanes who is working a project to deploy 2 million laptops to students in Andalucia. His main problem is accessibility so I introduced him to the GNOME accessibility team.

The GNOME Mobile BOF started out the same way that so many GNOME Mobile BOFs do trying to define what is GNOME mobile but we actually progressed during this one which was awesome. GNOME Mobile is a place for people using GNOME Mobile technologies to collaborate. However, we’ll build on the GNOME brand, not the GNOME Mobile brand. We also brainstormed quite a few ideas, like inviting the maintainers for key GNOME technologies to join the GNOME Mobile mailing list.

AGM - the GNOME Foundation annual meeting. The AGM went really well even though we competed with many other attractions. All the teams gave an update. We’ll be posting minutes and slides but in the meantime you can check out the GNOME identi.ca feed where the AGM was broadcast live.

The marketing BOF was late Thursday afternoon in a really hot room but people had some great ideas. (We were hot!) We discussed things like marketing campaigns, audiences (existing GNOME users, not developers), having regional presence on the to-be-formed press team. and we decided we’d put together 4 case studies (GNOME success stories) by the end of the month. Anne Ostergaard suggested the Andalusian school project. Guy Lunardi provided a Novell customer story. I took notes and we’ be publishing soon.

Survey. If you are part of the GNOME community and you haven’t already filled out the survey, please take the co-locating survey. We’ll be deciding next week whether we are co-locating again or not next year. One thing I’ve noticed about the respondents so far is that of the people that collaborated with a KDE person, 95+% think the co-located Desktop Summit was a success. Among those that didn’t collaborate with a KDE person, only 35% think the Desktop Summit was a success.

Starting the 20+ hour trip home tomorrow at 4am. Looking forward to seeing the family!

The GNOME Foundation Is All About People

One of the most common questions I get asked, right after "What do you do?", is "What does the GNOME Foundation do?" I wrote an article explaining what the GNOME Foundation does in the current issue of OSBR, Women in Open Source, guest edited by Rikki Kite. (And there are some really good articles by some amazing women like Cathy Malmrose, Angela Byron, Cat Allman, Selena Deckelman, Amanda McPherson, Emma Jane Hogbin, Audrey Eschright and Melanie Groves VonFange.)

Open Source Business Review (OSBR) itself is edited by another amazing woman, Dru Lavigne. All of their articles are published under the CC-SA, so you can republish and use them to educate people on open source software as long as you give attribution.

Credit goes to Rikki and Dru for helping me write a much better article than I could have written on my own.

The GNOME Foundation Is All About People, by Stormy Peters originally published in OSBR

"Foundations offer a way to make open-source development more corporate (organized in such a way that commercial vendors can participate with fewer reservations) without becoming commercial, a turn-off for many would-be code contributors."

Matt Asay

As open source projects mature, they tend to join or create a foundation to manage the project's financial and software assets, provide a marketing and legal entity, and help to set the direction of the project. As non-profit organizations, foundations have a specific structure defined by the jurisdiction in which they were formed. This structure typically includes a volunteer board of directors and sometimes paid staff such as a secretary or executive director.

As Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I am often asked "what do you do?". This article will introduce the structure of the GNOME project and its Foundation, describe how the Foundation works to support the GNOME project, and discuss the roles of the people within the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME Structure

The GNOME project started out as an open source desktop. It has evolved into a complete, free and easy-to-use desktop environment which includes software for tasks like playing music, editing images, and working with documents. GNOME also provides a powerful application development framework for both desktop and mobile application developers. As part of the GNU Project, GNOME is free to use, modify, and distribute.

The GNOME Foundation exists to support the GNOME project's mission of creating a free and open source desktop accessible to all people regardless of their ability to pay, physical ability, or the language they speak. The Foundation acts as the official voice of the GNOME project, communicating with press and other other organizations, coordinating releases of GNOME, determining which projects are part of GNOME, and planning events that support GNOME and its developers.

The GNOME Foundation is a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with an elected Board of Directors, an appointed Board of Advisors, approximately 400 members, and two paid staff. The 400 members are all contributors to GNOME. A contributor is anyone who has made a significant contribution such as code, organizing a conference, writing documentation, or translating GNOME into other languages. GNOME contributors must renew their membership every two years.

The GNOME Foundation

The GNOME project is mostly self-managed by informally structured teams. The GNOME Foundation serves as the support or steward of the project. Any GNOME contributor can apply to the Foundation for membership. All members, 370 at current count, can vote. Typically there is one vote per year by the membership to see who serves on the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors is then authorized to make decisions on behalf of the entire body of GNOME Foundation members. The Board runs the Foundation's day-to-day business, voting internally on financial decisions, legal issues and general policy. The Board of Directors is also authorized to hire staff that reports to them.

In addition to the membership, the Board of Directors and the Foundation staff, the GNOME Foundation also has a Board of Advisors. The Board of Advisors is a group of representatives from companies and non-profit organizations that work closely with GNOME. Many donate annually to the GNOME project and provide sponsorship for hiring staff, hackfests, events, and outreach programs.

GNOME Teams

While the GNOME project doesn't provide an organizational chart, the project is definitely well organized. The project is run by contributors, loosely coupled into teams. Teams are rather informal and tend to be grouped around either projects, such as GTK+ or GStreamer, or around tasks like marketing, maintaining the website or providing system administration support. Teams meet in IRC and hold discussions on mailing lists. Each team often has its own wiki and web pages to use for collaboration.

There are teams that write code for each of the technologies in GNOME. Translation team members ensure that GNOME is available to people around the world in their native language from Tamil to Vietnamese to Finnish.

Many contributors begin their involvement by participating in the bug squad team, which tracks incoming bugs and ensures that major bugs get addressed quickly. Some dedicated hackers work on the release team, which makes sure a new release of GNOME goes out every six months. The release team decides which features will be included in the next release, works carefully with all of the projects to ensure their product is ready and tested, writes release notes, and keeps everyone moving towards the mutual goal of an on-time six month release cycle.

The accessibility team is one of GNOME's core strengths. This team makes sure that GNOME is easy to use by people with accessibility needs while supporting GNOME's core value to be accessible to all, regardless of physical ability or ability to pay. GNOME's accessibility solutions cost a fraction of the cost of its non-open source competitors. When speaking of cost, GNOME software is free, but hardware sometimes needs to be purchased.

While we usually focus on people working on the project directly, the community also includes the companies and developers using GNOME technologies in their product solutions. GNOME technologies can be found in traditional desktops, mobile phones, breast cancer scanners, and GPS devices. Some of these companies sponsor the GNOME Foundation. Others participate in GNOME Mobile and still others sponsor GNOME events.

A small group of GNOME contributors run the membership committee, verifying that all members are GNOME contributors. On the infrastructure team, people with system administration skills keep the GNOME infrastructure running, fixing all sorts of issues in their spare time. Most of the hosting and infrastructure is donated to the GNOME Foundation by supporting companies such as Red Hat.

There are others who spend evenings and weekends discussing how the website could best be redesigned to recruit more developers and enable more people to begin using GNOME. Others volunteer to set up and staff the GNOME booth at a conference. Those with artistic talent create artwork including logos, brochures, and tshirts. Some contributors, both those with marketing talent and those with a strong desire to learn more about marketing, write and design brochures for potential sponsors. Some volunteers organize major GNOME events like GUADEC or GNOME.Asia. Many users are happy to answer questions for the person sitting next to them at the coffee shop.

Role of Board and Executive Director

In addition to all of the people working directly on GNOME, seven contributors each year are elected to serve on the Board of Directors. The Board itself does not make technical decisions, although many of the Directors also hold technical leadership roles. Rather, the Board is responsible for the stewardship of GNOME's finances, trademark, press relations, staff, and legal issues. Board members ensure that the GNOME project is successful by organizing annual get-togethers from GUADEC to hackfests. They maintain relationships with corporate partners through the advisory board. The Board solicits corporate sponsorship and individual support, and prepares and manages the budget.

While the Board of Directors doesn't make technical decisions, the Board is elected by the community to represent the project and Board members often get asked by members of the GNOME community for advice and direction.

The Board of Directors in turn hires the staff they see as necessary to run the GNOME Foundation effectively and in a way that supports all of GNOME. We've had an administrative assistant, Rosanna Yuen, for several years. She maintains the financial books, invoices corporate sponsors, reimburses community members for sponsored travel, sends out Friends of GNOME gifts and generally keeps things running day-to-day.

Last year the board hired an Executive Director to help grow the Foundation. The Executive Director is expected to be the "eyes and ears of the GNOME Foundation." Many people approach me and say they are so glad there is an Executive Director as now they know who to ask a particular question about GNOME. I respond by connecting them to the right person in the project. It still surprises me when companies that use GNOME technologies have no idea when they do or do not understand what GNOME actually is. I assume it's because open source tends to be introduced into corporations from the bottom up. In these cases, I educate management and help them understand how working more closely with the GNOME community can help them.

As Executive Director, I assist in marketing by making sure the project is reaching out to the right people. Other job duties include:

• fundraising: for staff salaries, specific outreach projects, travel costs to bring developers together at conferences and hackfests, and a future paid system administrator

• business development: finding new ways to make money as well as bringing in companies that aren't traditionally seen as being part of the GNOME community

• general housekeeping: ensure projects are carried through to completion, potential business deals are followed up, and meeting companies interested in working with GNOME

One of the vital things I do that doesn't cost anything is saying "that's a good idea". GNOME has a great community of talented and motivated individuals. Often they bring an idea to me or to the Board and they just need confirmation or an introduction to the right person to start their plans.

How does GNOME Make Money?

A commonly asked question is "how does the GNOME project make money?". The GNOME Foundation is supported financially by donations. Donations come in several forms which include:

• regular donations from individuals who pledge $10/month to the GNOME Foundation through Friends of GNOME

• one time donations from individuals or companies through Friends of GNOME

• companies who pledge to support the GNOME Foundation with $10,000/year

• companies that hire people to work on GNOME projects

• companies that sponsor events like GUADEC, GNOME.Asia and hackfests

This financial support has given GNOME the ability to grow as a project. Being able to get most of the community together at our annual GUADEC conference as well as holding smaller local events and hackfests has enabled the community to work closely together, creating desktop technologies that adhere to strong values like freedom, internationalization, usability and accessibility.

What Will GNOME do Next?

GNOME 3.0 discussions are well under way with a preliminary roadmap outlining new technologies and user interfaces. GNOME's challenge for the next couple of years will be figuring out what the "desktop" means to users who have a traditional computer, a netbook or a smartphone. GNOME is actively working on the best technologies and user interfaces to help users navigate these technologies.

The GNOME Foundation will support GNOME 3.0's evolution by getting feedback from the community and sponsor companies, continuing to release GNOME every six months, and working out a plan to deprecate old code and provide an appropriate migration path for partners and users.

In addition to working with our existing community and partners, the Foundation will continue to grow. We'll add new corporate sponsors, perhaps companies focused on mobile technology, chip design, netbook manufacture, and telecommunications carriers. We'll add new community members, including developers and volunteers that work on planning new events and growing existing ones. We'll see new teams in countries like Nigeria that are busy translating GNOME into local languages.

The desktop will continue to evolve as people work and interact with technology. We'll see more devices from desktops to smartphones, more people in developing countries beginning to use technology and technology adapting to meet their needs. The GNOME project will continue to work to make a free desktop available to everyone regardless of their physical ability, financial status or the language they speak. Come join us!

What do I do at work?

A couple of people have asked what I do. I blogged about it a while back, What do I do as Executive Director of GNOME, but I get the sense that people are looking for regular updates. You can find those on the Foundation blog, I post a weekly update there.

(And I think a lot of people have questions about what Executive Directors do. My post is now #3 in Google if you search for "executive director job description", #2 for "what does an executive director do" and #3 for "executive director do". So if you are an executive director, you should probably post what you do for your community, employees and shareholders ... it looks like they'd like to know!)

Talk about what's important to you

One of the best ways you can help a cause you care about is by telling your friends about it.

Recommendations from family and friends are the number one reason people buy products, support causes or try out services. I don't know if it's because they trust their friends' opinions or because they can see that their friends really use, but whatever it is, people are more likely to use something if their friends speak positively about it.

So the best thing you can do to support your favorite cause, whether it's open source software in general, GNOME or your favorite local bookstore, is to use it and talk about it.

If it's GNOME, the GNOME marketing team has created these cool badges to add to your website.

Thanks to Andreas Nilsson, Paul Cutler, Jaap Haitsma, Claus Schwarm and others who made this happen!

Spread the word!

OpenSUSE Community Week

OpenSUSE is holding a community week this week, with a GNOME track. Curious as to what that really means, I asked Vincent Untz and Zonker (Joe Brockmeier) some questions. I really like that open source projects often find really new and effective ways to get things done.

There's a openSUSE community week going on right now, what is a community week?

Zonker: Our community week is a chance for experienced contributors to help pass on what they know about packaging, translations, testing/QA, and so forth to newer contributors and mentor them a bit to help them get started. It's also a chance for people to just pop in and meet with a lot of contributors to learn more about the project and ask general questions about the openSUSE Project.

Vincent: It turns out that there are many people out there who are interested in helping but they just don't know how they can help. This is where the community week is really helpful: we introduce people to the various activities that are handled daily by various teams, and we show them how they can contribute to this activities.

How do people join?

Zonker: In the various IRC channels. There are separate channels for the GNOME team, KDE team, marketing team, etc. You can find them all here: http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate/IRC

How many people are participating?

Zonker: Hard to say. We've about a dozen openSUSE contributors who will be leading sessions this week, and more who've helped with setting up the schedules and recruit people to lead sessions and so on.

According to the Facebook page we already have about 100 confirmed attendees, and I'm pretty sure that not all of the openSUSE contributors and new contributors use Facebook, so I'd say it's well more than that. Looking at the IRC channels today, I'm seeing quite a few nicks in IRC that are new. I'd say by the end of the week we'll have seen hundreds of people join in sessions across the various topic
areas.

Vincent: Just a (random) data point: in #opensuse-gnome, we generally have around 60 people. When I looked at some point yesterday, we had 80-85 people. That's +33%, which is quite good. Also, it's IRC, so we get people joining and leaving at all time of the day :-)

Of course, not all of the new faces have time to contribute, but they are able to learn more about the community this way, which can only be a good thing.

(oh, and the not-so-new faces -- people who were already on IRC before the community week -- are also contributing too)

Are they still working or did they take the week off?

Vincent: It really depends on the people -- some people are investing some of their free time at work, some are not working (students, or people taking vacation). And then we have some interesting cases like Christopher Hobbs: he'll lead the GNOME Bug Day on Friday, and I believe his employer lets him handle this specific event on his work time.

Zonker: For Novell employees, this is part of the job to engage with the community, so I'd have to say "still working," but people doing Community Week should be doing this as part of their normal work. Not all the topic owners are Novell employees, so I can't say whether our other contributors are taking time off or getting time off to do presentations.

What type of work gets done during community week that doesn't normally get done?

Zonker: Primarily, a lot of mentoring and teaching. It happens other times, of course, but this is more of a focused effort.

Vincent: I can confirm this. Based on the past two days, the main difference is that experienced contributors take more time to help newcomers, and newcomers ask more questions.

What are you most excited about so far?

Zonker: We seem to be getting a fair number of participants so far, so I'm excited by that.

I'm also surprised, but probably shouldn't be, at how many groups are jumping in and setting up sessions of their own -- the Samba team, Education team, and the openSUSE Weekly News folks have already
volunteered to do sessions though those topics weren't on the original schedule. Which is, of course, awesome. The more the merrier!

Vincent: One thing that really strikes me is that people are willing to learn. It's not something new, but it's really good to see people curious about things, and experimenting, asking questions, etc. to learn the right things to do.

Also a really good surprise is that the Thunderbird people are planning a Linux testing day this week and coordinated it so it ends up the same day as the GNOME testing day of the community week. So we'll have packages of the latest thunderbird code for people to test. I didn't expect some cross-project effort like this, and I'm quite excited about it :-)

What's in store for rest of the week?

Vincent: On the GNOME side, we'll have some wiki space reorganization, but most importantly we'll have a testing day on Thursday where we'll get feedback/bugs from people on various features or applications (thunderbird, multiscreen support, probably pulseaudio, also hopefully the new at-spi-dbus code that will be the basis of GNOME 3.0 accessibility, maybe also gnome-shell, etc.). Then we'll have a bug day on Friday where we'll triage the GNOME bugs filed against openSUSE, and forward all the relevant ones upstream.

And of course, people seem to want to package applications, so this will be an area where we'll keep helping people! We plan to have more volunteers this week-end to help mentor, and so we'll see quite some action on Saturday and Sunday in #opensuse-gnome!

Zonker: We have a lot more sessions for packaging, testing/QA, GNOME, KDE, marketing, and openFate will all be on the schedule. The openSUSE Board will be holding several sessions Wednesday and Saturday to meet with contributors and answer questions about the board and to get
feedback.

Zonker:  You can find each of the schedules here: http://en.opensuse.org/Community_Week

There's still time to join them!

A call to support open source software projects

Many of you saw J5's call to support the GNOME Foundation. The initial response has been great! I wanted to follow up with a general call to support open source software projects financially.

The GNOME Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. By definition it must serve the general public and by definition it must be supported by the general public.

Our charter is not to be supported by a small subset of companies, but to be supported by a large group of companies and individuals. Remember 501(c)(6)'s are trade groups and are supported by a group of companies. Their charter is not to help the general public but to help the business of their group members. The GNOME Foundation is a 501(c)(3) - which helps the general public. 

The GNOME Foundation has been lucky to have a group of companies that support us financially. With their help we've been able to do a lot of good things over the past 10 years. We've had annual conferences, hackfests, and programs like the accessibility outreach and women's outreach programs. And while a number of companies have expressed their interest in joining the GNOME Foundation and supporting us financially, the reality is, very few companies are adding anything to their budget this year.

But compare the GNOME Foundation's financial support from 12 companies to the FSF's model.

The FSF receives most of its funding from 1,000s of individuals. According to their 2007 tax forms, they raised $845,000 from the public. (That number probably includes companies, but it's mostly from individuals.)

That is a much stronger position to be in. Not only because they raised more money, but because they are supported by the many individuals.

Open source software has shown the strength of individuals in creating great products. In the FSF's model, they have also shown the strength of individuals in being able to financially support causes they believe in. Providing your own financial support enables you to do what is right for your project. (Companies don't prevent us from doing what is right. But when they provide funding, they set direction. For example, when we depend on them for funding for hackfests, we hold the hackfests they are interested in sponsoring. Luckily, they sponsor good things! However, there is much more we could do, like the GTK+ hackfest we wanted to have this year.)

Bradley Kuhn and I were talking at the Collaboration Summit and we were thinking we should have a campaign to encourage open source software fans (users and developers) to support open source software financially. Pick two projects, any projects, and support them. Here's a short list of some projects that are set up to receive donations and use the money to support their projects:

• GNOME Foundation (And obviously I'm biased. :)
• Free Software Foundation
• Apache Foundation
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• GIMP
• PostgreSQL
• Plone
• ... and many, many more.

In addition, I'd encourage people to sign up for "subscription" plans. Having regular donations come in helps projects plan things.

I have a few more posts coming up:

• Voice your opinion of how money should be spent. For example, voice your opinion on the mailing list when the budget is shared or when the call for plans goes out. (And if you aren't in favor of donating money to free software projects, share ideas on how things can be done with no budget or which things you'd like to see cut from the budget. Or how you'd like to obtain the money.)
• Participate in your project's non-code plans:
  
  • In GNOME's case, become a member of the Foundation and vote for people that support your positions! Not only is your vote very important, but having a strong membership helps the Foundation show what it has to offer when discussing our technology and our plans with potential partners and sponsors.
  • If you have the interest or skills, join the GNOME marketing team - help create our messages to the general public or run campaigns like Friends of GNOME or a merchandising store.
  • Speak about free software, why you believe in it and your project to the general public as well as at open source events.
  • Help your friends use open source software. Don't push them but be there to help them install it, even if it's just one application like GIMP or OpenOffice. If it works well for them, they might come back and ask you for others. Encourage them to contribute (skill or money) if they have a good experience.

And of course, continue to write great code and create awesome free software projects!

Which projects will you support?

Hackfests, fundraising and the economy

When I took this job it was agreed that part of my job, but not all of it, would be fundraising. However, because of the economy I find myself thinking about fundraising more often than not these days.

For example, take hackfests. Hackfests are events where you get all the key developers for a project together in one place and they spend a few days or a week discussing issues, planning future releases and writing code. As most open source work happens virtually, hackfests are great opportunity to meet in person and make a lot of progress on things like planning a new release or a particular issue.

Last year many of the GNOME Foundation sponsor companies sponsored hackfests. They were happy with the outcomes - good conversations, good code, great planning sessions - and at the beginning of this year they were interested in sponsoring more hackfests. So we were tentatively planning for about six hackfests this year. However, when we went to raise funding for the first one, a GTK+ hackfest, we soon found that while companies still thought hackfests were a good idea, but, with a couple of exceptions, they no longer had any budget to help fund them. (The notable exceptions: Intel is funding a GNOME documentation hackfest in June and Igalia wanted to sponsor the GTK+ hackfest that we had to cancel.)

So what do we do?

1. Find more economical ways to run hackfests. We can plan them close to other events where people might already be, have smaller hackfests, coordinate multiple hackfests at the same time, etc. (It disappointed me that nobody has taken Nokia up on their offer to host related hackfests at the Danish Mozilla/Maemo Weekend.)
2. Find additional funding sources. There are many types of funding out there, some of them easier than others to acquire. For example, there are grants, which might take us a while but could provide substantial funding. There is individual support. The Free Software Foundation is primarily funded by individuals that believe in their cause, not companies. At $10/month, they have enough individual sponsors to support a much larger organization than the GNOME Foundation. So we can and should encourage GNOME users and supporters to sign up for Friends of GNOME.
3. Find other ways to accomplish what hackfests do. While there is no substitute for face to face conversation, some of the work can be accomplished by virtual hackfests, dedicated hack days, setting goals and milestones, ...

Other ideas? Thoughts?

What would you say about the State of GNOME?

Against my dad's best advice, I'm going to admit that I don't feel like I'm the best person to give a "State of GNOME" talk. I mean, it's an open source project. I don't run it, I don't manage it and people not only don't ask me for permission to do things, they don't make a point of making sure I know everything. And that's good! I find out most of my GNOME news the way everyone else does - through blogs, mailing lists and wiki's. We are an effective open source software project and communication is good. That said, I'm happy to help spread the word of all the good things GNOME is up to. (And if you'd like to help too, please join the GNOME Marketing team!)

So, here's what I think I will say about the State of GNOME talk the Collaboration Summit this week. Feel free to add points in the comments or point me to more info. (If you are going to be at the Collaboration Summit and would like to help give this presentation as a member of GNOME or help with QA, let me know!)

The GNOME desktop is alive and well. Despite rumors that everyone and everything is moving to the browser, the desktop is here to stay.

It is true that the desktop is evolving. People are using their desktop differently. You have netbooks, smartphones, multiple desktops, online apps, ... so what people expect and need out of their desktop is now different. (And to be honest, most users don't care about their desktop. They care about their email or their social network or the app they use for work. And the desktop or their phone or their netbook just gets them there. You care a little bit, like you care what kind of shoes you wear or what kind of car you drive, but most of the time, you just want it to work painlessly and easily.)

Luckily there are a lot of people who think about the desktop a lot. They make sure it works really well for all the others that just need it to access their stuff. Who are these people? Volunteers, free software lovers, passionate developers, translators and designers determined to make technology accessible to all.

The GNOME community has 2000+ contributors. 400 of those are members of the GNOME Foundation. 300-500 come together every year for GUADEC. 40% of them are paid to work on GNOME, the other 60% do it on their own time. The 40% are paid by lots of different companies. These 20 sponsor the GNOME Foundation - the list continues to grow and there are companies outside of this list that hire GNOME developers.

All these people the community – contributors and users alike – as well as the companies, have a shared mission and values. Although the GNOME mission is articulated in many different ways by different people, it's basically to provide a free and open desktop platform for the world, accessible to all regardless of ability, financial resources or nationality. And by desktop, I mean your interface to your technology. GNOME also applies to netbooks and smartphones.

The values of the GNOME community have been clearly defined and articulated over time:

• Accessibility. I've had a chance to work a bit with the a11y folks lately - they're a great team. Accessibility means making sure the technology you have works for you, regardless of whether you can hear the beeps that you have new mail (maybe it flashes at you instead), regardless of whether you can read that size 8 font document someone sent you (what were they thinking? - at least you can easily magnify it), regardless even if you can double click your mouse.  And much, much more. They have screencasts online. We're going to have 2-3 summer interns from HFOSS working on GNOME a11y this summer.

• Internationalized. GNOME is internationalized into many, many languages and the number grows - daily it seems. Recently the GNOME board was contacted by someone from Nigeria who wanted someone from GNOME to go speak at an open source conference in Nigeria. I have to admit that we (especially me) were skeptical at first but it turns out they even have a GNOME Users Group in Nigeria that's been translating GNOME!

• Easy to use. A lot of what you see in GNOME 3.0 is intended to make GNOME easier to use. GNOME also places importance on making smart default choices for the user.

• Beauty. Beauty as in look good but also as in function well, elegantly, simply.

• Working well with companies. GNOME has a long tradition of working well with companies and has developed things like 6 month release cycles and the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board to maintain those working relationships.

• Having fun!

GNOME 3.0. A state of GNOME talk would not be complete without mentioning GNOME 3.0! We announced GNOME 3.0 last week. Actually it was announced at GUADEC last summer but there's been a lot of activity kicked off last week by the release team. (And you can read the whole account on the Planning for 3.0 website.)

In the Planning document, the release team first addresses vision - GNOME 3.0 needs an overall vision for the entire GNOME project. "What we are missing is people blessing one specific vision and making it official, giving goals to the community so we can all work together in the same direction." These days GNOME includes not "just" the desktop but a lot of applications. We need a vision and a direction for the entire GNOME project.

They called out 3 areas of focus for GNOME 3.0:

• User Experience
• Streamlining of the Platform
• Promotion of GNOME

On the user experience side they focused on two projects:

• GNOME Shell is a new way of managing your panels, launching applications, finding documents, etc.
• Document management. GNOME Zeitgeist is a new way of finding documents. The days of carefully storing documents into organized folders are over for most people. Zeitgeist adds most recently opened, tags, comments, location, etc to help you find your data.

On the steam lining side of things, the release team is working on deprecating old stuff in an organized fashion while adding new technologies like Clutter and support more languages like Javascript.

Promotion is primarily marketing. Promoting GNOME, attracting new developers, highlighting applications (I'd guess that most people don't think of applications when they think of GNOME), launching a much needed redesigned website.

Other changes the release team called out as worth mentioning:

• Desktop Testing which was launched recently.
• Art/Design. There's been lots of work on theming (like at the GTK+ Theming Hackfest) and we hope to have good collaboration between developers and designers.
• People and social networking. A lot of work has gone into the telepathy framework enabling interaction not only between people and apps but between people.
• Mobile: the GNOME Mobile platform was first introduced in GNOME 2.24 and since then a lot of the work GNOME developers have done has been towards making desktop technologies function well in the mobile space - devices with small screens, limited processing or alternate input methods like touch screens.

So come join us in developing the future of the desktop. We need everyone from coders to designers, from testers to writers, from promoters to users.

What would you add to the State of GNOME?

Open source enables companies to collaborate

Dave Neary gave me his speaking slot at OSiM USA. I have two challenges, make a talk to fit his title and abstract (although you can almost always safely ignore the abstract) and give a good talk in 20 minutes of time. Here are some thoughts I have. (The title of the talk is Increasing Ecosystem Collaboration through Open Source but I'll let Dave blog that talk.)

Open source software has proved that collaboration between individuals, regardless of geography, time and management structures, can work really well. The open source software model works:

1. Self motivated. Open source software developers get things done. They don't need to be reminded of what's important or how much work they should be doing.
2. No management. There are no managers in open source software. There are leaders but people don't work for a manager who tells them what they need to work on first. (A friend of mine once worked all weekend on a customer problem only to have his manager tell him on Monday that if he was going to work all weekend there were other things he should have been working on!)
3. No time clock. Nobody cares if it took someone 10 minutes or 10 hours to write that patch. They just care if it works and when they can get it.
4. No performance reviews. There's lots of peer review and lots of feedback - perhaps more than anyone wants - but there are no annual performance reviews tied to raises and promotions.
5. Fast. While it may not always seem so, things get done very quickly in the open source model. Someone has a good idea and they just do it.
6. Bad ideas die. On the other hand, bad ideas just die. Nobody keeps pushing for them - or if they do, they can't get other people to waste their time on it.
7. Evolves. Ideas and projects in open source software evolve as the world changes and new people join the project. (And nobody is paying big money to keep it the same.)
8. Work gets done. Even without anyone telling them how to do it and what to do, work just gets done.
9. Communication is great. While it may not always be friendly, communication in an open source software project is great. Everyone knows who is doing what, what decisions have been made and everything is publicly disclosed and documented. In a completely virtual and global environment. If communication isn't great, the project usually doesn't last.

Some companies have figured out how to work well with open source software. Now we need companies to figure out how to work together in an open source way. While some companies have figured out how to work together, either through consortia or through their employees that work on the same open source software projects, others are still figuring out how to collaborate and still keep a competitive advantage. Open source enables companies to collaborate.

Take GNOME Mobile. Many companies are working together, producing very different products, all built on GNOME technologies that are being adapted to new mobile devices. They collaborate on the technologies. On their ideas. And avoid reinventing the wheel. Not only are they using existing GNOME technologies, but the changes they add to make it work well in a mobile environment (whether it's netbooks, scientific devices or phones) and can be used by others who share the burden of maintaining and developing it. Without losing their competitive edge.

So how can companies get involved and cooperate with other companies effectively?

• Join any consortia or group related to your project, like GNOME Mobile and the GNOME Foundation. This is a good first step as it enables you to meet all the players and often you can find friendly mentors and people to help. Sometimes this is as easy as joining a mailing list. Other times it means paying a membership fee or going to an in person meeting or a conference.
• Join the discussion. Join the mailing list, irc channel, comment on blogs. Listen and participate. Become part of the community. (You might want to do this before you officially join.)
• Hire developers or contract companies. Open source software works because lots of people work on it. You'll get a lot of good stuff for free, and people will be glad you are using it, but you'll want to have some technical resources to fix a particular bug, add a specific feature or adapt the open source technology for your product.
• Use the software! Use the open source software out there. By using it, asking questions, suggesting changes, you'll become part of the community.
• Let people know you are using it. Several of the products using GNOME Mobile technologies have never told us. We've "discovered" them. We'd be more than happy to work with them.

Any other things companies can do? (As people who have seen my more recent talks can attest, I use the ideas people leave in comments. Thanks!)

5 types of company open source relationships

Companies and communities is a topic I'll speaking on at SCALE. I welcome any feedback or points to consider!

First off, there is no ideal company/community relationship. There are lots of different types of relationships between companies and the communities they work with (or don't work with) - and no one way is perfect for everyone.

The goal should be for companies and individuals who use and support open source software to work effectively together. And part of working effectively together means making sure that the open source model is sustainable. Which means interacting for the good of the project, not just taking or using open source software.

However, how best to interact with the community is a question that many companies struggle with.

It's easy to give companies some general advice: be transparent, let your employees contribute, talk about what you are doing, ... but a good advice has to take into account what the company is trying to do with open source software.

In this post, I just want to enumerate some of the types of companies that interact with open source software.

I'll use some of the companies in the GNOME communities as an example because I think GNOME has good, strong ties with the companies in its community.

I can define the following types of companies. There is some overlap between categories.

1. Companies that just use open source software products. These are companies that use GNOME software in their company, say as their desktop or as their image editing software. People use GNOME and they are part of our community whether we talk to them regularly or not. They test the software, do word of mouth marketing, and add credibility to the project among other things. I wrote a whole article about The Role of Consumers Within an Open Source Community. You could argue that a company full of users might have more responsibility to the project than just an average user. And some do. We sometimes get financial support, great case studies and references from companies that use GNOME.

2. Companies that distribute GNOME. In the case of GNOME, some of these are obvious, like all the Linux distributions. Others are not so obvious, like devices or phones that contain GNOME technology. There are also several categories, those that modify the open source software product and those that don't. In the case of GNOME, I think many of our distributors modify it before they ship it. These companies bring some obvious benefits like developers working on the project, fixing bugs and adding features. They also bring some less obvious benefits like ties to end users, marketing, and financial support. The best companies figure out how best to "work upstream." Working upstream means working close to the project, getting your fixes and contributions accepted and into the main branch. For many companies, that is really hard. They often have to make a lot of fixes to make a product acceptable for their solution or their customers and by the time they have time to check it in upstream, they're a version behind and the project doesn't want it. The best companies figure out ways to minimize that time warp.

3. Products built on or with open source technologies. These are companies that build products like Nokia tablets, Garmin GPS units or Supersonic Imagine (the breast cancer scanner). Some fall more into the user category than the distributor category (although they do both.) They need to make sure their developers establish relationships with the community, at the same time they make sure that their companies also establish a good reputation for being supportive of the open source software products they use.

4. Creators of open source software products. There are more of these than you'd think and they fall into lots of different subcategories. Products like Banshee where the key developers work at Novell or products like Maemo started by Nokia but working on creating an external community. These companies need to decide whether they want an external community, an independent community or if they just need an open process for their project.

5. Services. Companies offering services or contract development work around an open source software product. In the GNOME community these are companies like Fluendo, Openismus and Codethink. These companies often have strong community ties because they hire contributors or their employees quickly become contributors.

Any other types?