GNOME ED Update – September
We’ve now moved my reporting to the board to a monthly basis, so this blog should get updated monthly too! So here’s what I’ve been up to in September.
Recruitment
Recruitment continues for our four positions that we announced earlier this year, but I’m pleased to say we’re in the final stages for these. For those interested, the process went a little bit like this:
- Applicants sent in a CV and cover letter
- If they were suitable for the position on a quick read of the CV and letter, they got a short questionnaire asking for more details, such as “What do you know about the GNOME Foundation?”
- Those with interesting answers get sent to a first interview, which mostly technical
- Then, those who are still in the process are invited to a second interview, which is competency-based
- At the end of all this, we hope to make an offer to the best candidate!
End of year
For those who don’t know, the Foundation’s financial year runs from the start of October to the end of September. This means we have quite a bit of work to do to:
- Finalise the accounts for last year and submit our tax returns
- Make a new budget for the forthcoming year
Work has already begun on this, and I hope to finalise the new budget with the board at the Foundation Hackfest being held next week.
Libre Application Summit
LAS was held in Denver, Colorado, and I attended. There were 20 talks and three BoF
sessions held, as well as a number of social events. From looking around, there were probably around 60-70 people, including representatives from KDE and Elementary. It was particularly pleasing to see a number of students from the local university attend and present a lightning talk.
I also had meetings with System76 and Private Internet Access, as well as a couple of local companies.
Speaking of System76, we also had a nice tour of their new factory. I knew they were taking manufacturing in-house, but I didn’t realise the extent of this process. It’s not just assembly, but taking raw sheet metal, bending it into the right shape and painting them!
My meetings with PIA were also interesting – I got to see the new VPN client that they have, which I’m assured will be free software when released. There was a couple of issues I could see about how to integrate that with GNOME, and we had a good session running through these.
Other conferences coming up
In October, I’m hoping to attend Sustain Summit 2018, in London, followed by Freenode.Live in Bristol, UK. I’ll be speaking at the latter, which is in November. Then, after a couple of days at home, GNOME is going to SeaGL! Meet me and Rosanna in Seattle at the GNOME booth!
Friends of GNOME
Another thing that happened was fixing the Friends of GNOME signup page. For some reason, unknown to us, when you submitted the form to PayPal, it redirected to the home page rather than the payment page. This didn’t happen if you selected “EUR” as the payment method, or if you selected “EUR” and then “USD” before submitting. After lots of head scratching (an analysis of the POST data showed that it was /identical/ in each case) I changed the POST to a GET, and it suddenly started working again. Confusion all around, but it should now be working again.
I am personally disappointed at how communication has been handled for the hiring process.
A friend of mine applied for one of the positions, and after months without response and apparent inactivity in the minutes, I had to break her the news through this blogpost that she was apparently left aside 2 stages ago.
I expect higher communication standards from GNOME than the average recruiter.
That is… odd. Everyone should have been processed and got an update when they first applied. Anyone who didn’t proceed should have had an email. Could you mail me (neil@gnome.org) with some details and I can have a look to see what’s gone wrong?
Glad to hear this was just a misunderstanding, scratch all my previous comment 😅