Quarterly Report

GNOME Foundation Providing a Free Desktop for the World June, July, August 2009 Hi GNOME Foundation members The second quarter of 2009 was a and fans, busy one as the teams worked on our regular releases as well as This is our first quarterly report – prepared for the Desktop Summit please let us know if you find it and GNOME 3.0. In addition, our useful! Friends of GNOME members came through in a big way – they In these quarterly reports we want contributed $12,392 to the GNOME to focus on what the GNOME cause – more than a company's Foundation and its members are annual dues! A big round of doing, so most of the reporting is applause to them! done by the teams doing the work. You'll hear directly from the release A big thanks to all the GNOME team about the incredibly busy Foundation members, GNOME quarter they've had, you'll see first contributors and our Friends of hand how much the travel GNOME for a successful second committee is improving our ability to quarter of 2009! sponsor travel for GNOME Foundation members, and you'll Best, read updates from all our teams focused on our mission of providing Stormy Peters a free desktop accessible for Executive Director, everyone. GNOME Foundation Release Team

Vincent Untz

The last quarter was an incredibly minimal risks for the stability of the The 3.0 announcement enabled us active quarter for the Release desktop. to finalize the 2.28 schedule and to Team. In addition to the usual actually issue a joint schedule for GNOME releases that happen After 2.26.0 went out, we GNOME 2.28 and 2.30/3.0, making every three weeks in average coordinated an announcement with GNOME 2.28 an evolutionary step (covering 2.25, 2.26 and 2.27 the sysadmin team about the towards 3.0. releases during this quarter), some switch to the git version control important topics were discussed, system, a topic that was debated Finally, the Release Team had a followed by decisions. for a long time within the meeting at the beginning of the community. 2.27 development cycle, where we The very beginning of the quarter did a post-mortem on 2.26, and started with a focus on 2.26.0 After a lot of preparation work that prepared the work on 2.27. One (which went out mid-March), with has been happening since noticeable change that was the Team handling last-minute GUADEC 2008, the GNOME 3.0 discussed and that can be freeze break requests and making planning was finally set in stone implemented for the 2.29 sure all modules would have a new and properly announced via a development cycle is moving the version out by 2.26.0. One of the document explaining what are the module proposal period earlier in hot topic that was discussed a lot goals of this new version and how the cycle, so we can announce was the state of session saving in we want to achieve them. With this earlier the decisions and give more gnome-session, and how to fix the work, the Release Team wants to time to maintainers to properly regressions in this area with help the project focus on a specific integrate the new modules. vision. Bugsquad Team

Andre Klapper

Top bug closers in Q2 were Akhil GNOME Bugzilla. The negative reported issues are outdated or Laddha with 435 reports and Fabio number in Q2 is especially due to a fixed already plus upstream Durán Verdugo with 367 reports. cleanup of GnuCash reports. developers do not work anymore Without GnuCash “only” 9210 on old versions. 9978 reports (bugs + feature reports were closed. requests) were opened and 12549 Plans for Q3 include to have an were closed. After GNOME 2.26.1 had been IRC Bugsquad meeting at the released in April submission of bug beginning of August and among Normally the number of new reports about GNOME versions other issues also discuss a policy reports has always been higher older than 2.24.0 via Bug-Buddy how to handle old forgotten reports than closed reports as new application was blocked. that have not seen any updates for products get added constantly to Experience shows that most years. Marketing Team

Paul Cutler

In the second quarter, the The second quarter also saw the In Q3 the team will continue to Marketing Team saw a number of return of GNOME Journal work on Friends of GNOME by projects start. The most visible (gnomejournal.org/) after more than adding more subscription options project was the Friends of GNOME a year's absence. Articles included and publishing the survey results. program. The Friends of GNOME a report on the GNOME Asia Work on the GNOME 3.0 campaign website saw a number of updates, Summit, GConf Concepts for will start including creating content including the addition of badges Developers, an Introduction to the and a developing a project plan for and buttons, with subscribers Message Indicator, a review of the different campaign elements. A having the ability to display custom Gourmet Recipe Manager, and a new GNOME store will also launch badges as well as “Support Behind the Scenes interview with in the third quarter offering GNOME GNOME!” badges available to all Stormy Peters. users the ability to purchase GNOME users to display on their GNOME branded merchandise blogs and webpages. After John The GNOME Marketing Team from t-shirts to stickers and more. Palmieri's blog post¹ and email began planning for GNOME 3.0 Work will also continue to work on outlining how the GNOME brainstorming and discussing content for the new GNOME Foundation needs help with marketing ideas for a potential website as well as the Marketing donations, the Friends of GNOME marketing campaign to introduce Team getting involved with the program saw record level users to the changes in GNOME GNOME 2.28 release notes and contributions, and fundraising in the 3.0. Claus Schwarm submitted a create a Press kit for the 2.28 first six month of 2009 has raised campaign brief that the team will release. Lastly, the Marketing more than 2006, 2007 or 2008. A be working on to market GNOME Team is also looking to create a survey to current and former 3.0, including media partnerships, worldwide Press Team to interact Friends of GNOME subscribers viral marketing, on the web, a with journalists and and provide was also sent out in Q2 and the video campaign and more. relevant and timely news about results will be published in Q3. GNOME.

¹ http://www.j5live.com/2009/04/30/the-gnome-foundation-needs-your-help/ Web Team

Lucas Rocha

The GNOME Web Team has been Management System (CMS). The structure, a new website design, working hard on the development use of a CMS will potentially allow and the initial implementation of of a beta version of the new more people to contribute with new important Plone components. The GNOME website that will be content and hopefully make the next project milestones towards available by the time GNOME 2.28 website more appealing and useful 2.28 involve the implementation of is released. This effort is being for the GNOME users and new design in the CMS, the coordinated by Lucas Rocha with developers. production and review of the actual great help from Art and Marketing web content (texts, images, teams. The new website will The development of the new sections, etc) and the development feature reviewed web content in a website has been split in three of an infrastructure for the refreshed design using Plone as teams: Content, Design and CMS. translation of the website content the underlying Content As of today, the teams has in different languages. produced a reviewed content Usability Team

Calum Benson

Shell user interface prototypes and It's expected that many of these Turn off button and application improvements, in preparation for a bugs will be fixed upstream to menu icons by default for GNOME preview release alongside GNOME improve the experience for all 2.28. This change has been 2.28. GNOME users. considered for some time, in order to improve visual consistency, Allan Day continues to work on Planned for Q3: reduce clutter, and reduce the need analysis for potential redesign of to continually invent new icons for Matthew Paul Thomas from tabbed applications and GNOME's every new function that becomes Canonical to give two usability tab widget. available in GNOME. This should talks at Gran Canaria Desktop also prove beneficial for the Allan also wrote a tutorial on Summit: one on the regular accessibility themes, allowing them usability testing with Pongo, a Ubuntu/GNOME usability studies to provide better icon coverage screen+webcam recording app that Canonical have started doing, than has been possible up to (written by Andreas Nilsson) that's and a lightning talk on “10 Common now.Experiment with changing the useful for doing usability studies. GUI Bloopers”. default toolbar style in GNOME Anton Kerezov carried out an online Marina Zhurakhinskaya from Red from text-below-icons to survey of GNOME user Hat to lead a GNOME Shell Design text-beside-icons for GNOME 2.28. demographics and basic desktop BOF at GCDS. The hypothesis is that this style usage. He had over 1000 reduces the amount of vertical responses, primarily from people Allan Day to run a BOF on tabbed space uses in toolbars, allowing on GNOME mailing lists. application issues at GCDS. more room for actual content, and that important buttons are given a Canonical's Design and User Kristin Travis and Jenya Gestrin larger size than other buttons, Experience team launched the from Sun to call for making them easier to click. This Hundred Paper Cuts project, to feedback/participation on the work change will be evaluated over a identify 100 trivially easy-to-fix they've been doing on a potential few development releases prior to bugs that the average user would control center redesign for GNOME 2.28, and the final decision made encounter on their first day of using 3.0. This work was started last nearer the stable release. a brand new installation of Ubuntu. year, and has already included one usability study. Accessibility Team Willie Walker The GNOME Accessibility Team Doffman (Codethink), Rob Taylor collaborating closely with Owen started a GNOME component in (Codethink), Mike Gorse (Novell) Taylor from Red Hat to integrate the HFOSS project. Three students and Brad Taylor (Novell) held an magnification into GNOME Shell (Rachel Foecking - Trinity College AT-SPI/D-Bus planning meeting and ultimately supplant gnome-mag '11, Ryan Gee - Wesleyan '11, and and code sprint. They made for GNOME 3.0. Ted Nichols - Wesleyan '10) significant progress on getting worked on MouseTrap and closer to the Bonobo/CORBA Community member Alejandro VizAudio under the mentorship of deprecation goal¹ for GNOME 3.0, Piñeiro from Igalia released the first GNOME community members with specific AT-SPI/D-Bus work version of Cally (Clutter Flavio Percoco Premoli, Rohan Anil being tracked via the Linux Accessibility Implementation and Bryen Yunashko. Foundation². Library).

The projects went well, resulting in Ke Wang from Sun has made great The GNOME desktop automation many improvements to MouseTrap progress on the Java ATK Wrapper project (Mago) has made excellent and a potential new module for which will supplant the progress using the Accessibility libcanberra. At least one student Java/CORBA implementation for layer. also plans on continuing with the AT-SPI. The GNOME Accessibility projects work. The HFOSS organizers have continued to be actively would also like to continue the Brad Taylor and Mike Gorse made developed, enhanced, and relationship with GNOME for next great progress on Mono maintained, including: Orca, year's HFOSS summer institute. accessibility for GNOME. MouseTweaks, MouseTrap, Gok, We created a small “GOPA-sized” Luke Yelavich from Canonical Accerciser and Dasher. grant for Joanmarie Diggs to work started the Speech Dispatcher For the upcoming quarters, we plan with Xan Lopez on WebKit work with a goal of supplanting on focusing on the Bonobo/CORBA accessibility. It's a difficult problem gnome-speech for GNOME 3.0. deprecation goal for GNOME 3.0. but the work is proceeding at a fast Joseph Scheuhammer from the pace with strong positive Adaptive Technology Research Willie Walker will also be cooperation between Xan and Centre at the University of Toronto representing the GNOME project at Joanmarie. Willie Walker (Sun and has begun working on “Jornadas Regionales de Software GNOME Accessibility Lead), Li magnification. We intend on Libre” this fall: Yuan (Sun), Ke Wang (Sun), Mark http://jornadas.opencommunity.cl/en.

¹ http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/BonoboDeprecation ² http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Accessibility/ATK/AT-SPI/AT-SPI_on_D-Bus ³ http://blogs.igalia.com/apinheiro/2009/07/20/cally-moved-to-clutter-repository-and-other-news/ Documentation Team

Shaun McCance

In April 2009, Shaun McCance sent and we have since held regular CC-BY-SA 3.0 license for all newly an email outlining the steps we meetings for planning and produced work. This alleviates need to take to revamp our community involvement. We've many issues we've had with documentation and our team to also become part of a larger open licenses in the past and helps us better help our users. These plans source documentation community, collaborate with our downstream began to be realized by June 2009, which will help us produce better distributors. when four members of the documentation. documentation team attended the In Q3, we hope to continue the Writing Open Source conference in Support for Mallard documents was momentum we've started by Owen Sound, Canada. landed in Yelp, and team members continuing to produce topic-oriented began producing Mallard-based help and developing missing The results of the conference were topic-oriented help for Empathy. functionality in Mallard. With four amazing. This real-world usage of Mallard team leaders, we're better able to has helped further shape it into a teach new contributors and grow Paul Cutler, Phil Bull, and Milo viable solution for our team. our team. New contributors will be Casagrande each stepped up to essential to the long-term success help Shaun with team leadership, The team has also decided on the of our efforts. Art Team

Andreas Nilsson

During the second quarter of 2009, requested by developers as part Started a visual cleanup of the art team did: of Art Requests¹ GNOME, starting with reducing heavy overuse of icons #557469, Work on the one-canvas branch Lots of small fixes here and #583352. This will continue of gnome-icon-theme, there :) during Q3 with more alignment introducing new, big 256x256 fixes and visual noise reduction For Q3 we did and plan to do: icons and a new workflow. We work. hope this will land for 2.28 Art Meeting during GCDS, went Start of new widget theme for well. Work on several issues 3.0

¹ http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/ArtRequests GNOME Mobile

Dave Neary

During the second quarter of 2009, mobile track on Wednesday. The represented GNOME Mobile in a a lot of GNOME mobile related mobile influence was also clear well attended session. They technologies were announced or during the free desktop part of the outlined the two key use-cases released such as the Moblin conference, with keynote by Dr. where the GNOME stack has release, oFono, ConnMan, Walter Bender on Sugar and Quim gained traction on mobile devices: SyncEvolution, and the Gil on Maemo, and a number of as a great base on which to build announcement of the Nokia & Intel lightning talks on mobile related general purpose operating systems co-operation agreement. projects including Anjal, a new with novel user interfaces adapted mobile mail client. for small screen sizes and different Intel released Moblin 2, and a lot of input methods, such as Sugar, work which had been done behind Core GNOME technologies in use Maemo and Moblin, and in vertical closed doors exploded into the on mobile platforms were embedded applications with public eye. Moblin includes a prominently featured throughout the restricted user interfaces, allowing number of libraries specifically conference. Notably, Telepathy, ODMs to rapidly build and develop targeting mobile use-cases, Tracker, Gstreamer and Clutter got reliable and usable user interfaces including oFono and ConnMan, prominent exposure. Newer for their devices, as was the case which were both developed in technologies including ConnMan, for Vernier's LabQuest, the Garmin co-operation with Nokia, and SyncEvolution and GeoClue were Nüvi 860, Bug Labs' BUG and SyncEvolution, which are promising also presented. Subersonic Imagine's Aixplorer additions to the GNOME platform cancer detection system.In After three years of the GNOME on mobile devices. addition to Paul and Dave's Mobile initiative, we can clearly say presentation, Dirk Hohndel of Intel GNOME Mobile at GUADEC: that mobile is now well and truly also presented the Moblin vision in The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit part of the GNOME psyche. a keynote, and there were a schedule was loaded down with number of presentations on mobile-related presentations this GNOME Mobile at OSCON: developing visually rich applications year - including the very successful Paul Cooper and Dave Neary traveled to OSCON, where they with Clutter. GNOME Events

Dave Neary

A lot of planning and preparation GNOME and KDE, and especially Community Leadership Summit went into the Gran Canaria Claudia Rauch, Chema Casanova (July 18 - 19): GNOME Desktop Summit which was held and Stormy Peters. presence: Dave Neary, Lefty right at the start of the third Schlesinger, Jono Bacon, Jorge quarter. The Gran Canaria Desktop Also a great success was the Castro, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, Summit was a great success, spanish language content of the Bradley Kuhn, Simon Phipps creative juices were stirred, conference, GUADEC-es, with progress was made on sticky tutorials and presentations FLOSS Foundations meeting problems, and great presentations targeting local developers and user (July 20): Dave Neary were shared by our community groups. organising, Simon Phipps, members. Bradley Kuhn, Aaron Williamson Other events from the second present The collaboration with the KDE quarter of 2009 include: community went great. We OSCON: GNOME presence Solutions Linux, Paris: GNOME overcame a number of included presenters: Stormy stand and presence -thanks to organizational difficulties to pull off Peters, Dave Neary, Paul GNOME-fr Collaboration a conference which left almost all Cooper, Rob Bradford, Chris Summit, San Francisco participants satisfied, and eager to Lord, Karen Sandler (SFLC, GNOME's lawyers), Simon repeat the experience. Pulling off a Collaboration Summit, San Phipps, and more. conference for 1000 attendees is a Francisco, April 8 - 10: different problem to organising one Substantial GNOME presence Open Source World, San for 500 to 600 attendees, and the Francisco, August 11 - 14: organising team can be proud of GNOME stand at LinuxTag, GNOME speakers: Stormy the result. Many thanks must go to Berlin, June 24 - 27, sponsored Peters, Jono Bacon, Joe the Cabildo for their financial and by Lanedo, manned by 'Zonker' Brockmeier institutional support, Agustín Benito GNOME-de Bethencourt and the other Red Hat Summit, Chicago, Sept Future events include: members of ASOLIF for their huge 1 - 3: Substantial GNOME- amount of work in ensuring we GNOME-es organised related content have the infrastructure we GUADEC-es after GUADEC, requested, and of course the OSiM World, Amsterdam: July 8 - 10 organising committees from both GNOME presence: Dave Neary, Lefty Schlesinger, Ari Jaaksi, Mobile related content Candidate towns who would be Imad Sousou presenting, LiMo, interested in hosting GUADEC next Moblin & Maemo related content. "Jornadas Regionales de year are invited to send their Software Libre"¹ Willie Walker proposals to the board at Software Freedom Day: There will also be representing the [email protected]. The closing will be many free software GNOME project date for applications will be related events, including a announced soon. mini-summit on women's Boston Summit: In October, the participation in the free software GNOME Summit will once again Another GNOME related movement that the Free be held in Boston, on the MIT conference, the Maemo Summit, Software Foundation and the campus. The location and dates hosted by Nokia, will also be held GNOME Foundation are have now been confirmed, and in October, on the 10th to the 12th, co-hosting. the summit will take place on in Amsterdam. Details are available October 10 - 12 in MIT's Sloan on the Maemo wiki². LinuxCon, Portland OR, Sept 21 Building in Cambridge MA. - 23 GNOME will be represented at the Organisation of the Boston Summit 2nd International Symposium on Boston Summit, Cambridge MA, is being done by John Palmieiri Computers and Arabic Language in Oct 10-12 again. Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the period of 10-12 October Maemo Summit, Amsterdam, The call for proposals for GUADEC 2009. Khaled Hosny is organizing Oct 10-12: Substantial GNOME 2010 will also open soon! the GNOME attendance.

¹ http://jornadas.opencommunity.cl/en/ ² http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009 Finances Income Expenses $65,100 Desktop Summit sponsorship fees* $34,401 Wages + associated taxes and fees $20,000 advisory board fees (Sun, Novell) $188 administrative costs $5,000 GNOME Asia $190 bank fees $175 interest $10,439 Desktop Summit travel* $12,392 Friends of GNOME $3313 employee travel $142 Friends of GNOME mailing $900 community events and travel

* The Desktop Summit sponsorship costs, income and expenses will be split with KDE e.V. These numbers only represent a portion of those collected or spent and are not the portion that will be accredited to GNOME. Travel Committee The travel committee was formed Airfare: $1500 that to $41,000 in airfare alone for in April 2009. Team members Accommodation: $800 36 people in 2008. include: Total: $2300 At GUADEC they arranged for Germán Póo-Caamaño The documentation team blogged sponsored GNOME Foundation about their experience and members to blog about the event, Chema Casanova accomplishments. wear a GNOME sponsored badge and to have their photo taken. This Emily Chen For GUADEC they managed travel is key for showing sponsoring assistance for 39 people: Rosanna Yuen organizations the impact that their Airfare: US$ 23,399.64 sponsorship has for GNOME. They manage the travel budget for Accommodation: US$ 8,438.32 community events. The travel Total: US$ 31,838 During Q3 they will add a new committee reviews applications for member to the team, continue to The travel committee is greatly travel assistance, approves them work on reimbursements for the improving the GNOME within the budget and processes Desktop Summit and the Foundation's efficiency in the receipts and reimbursements. documentation hackfest and sponsoring travel. For example, by manage the travel for Q3 GNOME In the second quarter of 2009, they organizing lodging as well as related events. managed the GNOME Foundation approving airfare, they were able to travel budget for the documentation substantially increase the number For more information on the Travel hackfest and for GUADEC. of people who received travel Committee or for sponsorship for assistance. For GUADEC 2009 travel to a GNOME related event For the documentation hackfest they managed travel assistance for see http://live.gnome.org/Travel. they sponsored 4 people's travel: 39 people for $31,838. Compare I18n Team The GNOME I18n team GNOME migrated to the Git commit support through coordinated the translation effort version control system for the l10n.gnome.org. for GNOME 2.26, which was made management of the source code. available on March/April 2009. The GNOME I18n team is helping Complete implementation of git Linux distributions such as Fedora during the migration to Git with repository management program. 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 offer the new thorough documentation for Continue providing git help to localised GNOME. translators and dedicated support translators as soon as asked”. through the mailing list. GNOME 2.26 supports 48 Contact team coordinators for languages in total, compared to 45 During Q3, the GNOME I18n Team languages that are about to slip languages in the previous release. plans to: from 'Supported' status, assist After the release of GNOME 2.26, Complete implementation of git to stay in supported status. Membership & Elections Committee There are currently 368 members of the GNOME Foundation. Please remember that you must renew your membership every two years. New GNOME Foundation members:

Andrew Stormont Bertrand Lorentz Rouquier Philippe Bharath Acharya Pablo Sanxiao Roca Jonny Lamb James Liggett Sébastien Granjoux David Siegel Brad Taylor Li Yuan Marina Willie Walker Emily Chen Nils Faerber Martin Picek Zhurakhinskaya Arun Raghavan Frederic Muller Paul Cutler Alex Launi Philip Withnall Ava Zhang Jonathan Matthew Pockey Lam

You can see a full list of members at http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/members.php.

Elections

The annual elections for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors were held in June. The following directors were elected by the GNOME Foundation members.

Behdad Esfahbod Lucas Rocha

Brian Cameron Srinivasa Ragavan

Diego Escalante Urrelo Vincent Untz

Germán Póo-Caamaño