GNOME ED update – October

I’m currently writing this from sunny (but very cold!) Colorado Springs, and tomorrow I’m off to SeaGL. We’ll have a booth there, so come and say hi to me and Rosanna if you’re in Seattle! More on that in the next report, however :)

General

As per usual, our main focus has been on the hiring of new staff members for the Foundation. We’ve completed a few second interviews and a couple of first interviews. We’re aiming to start making offers around the end of November. If you have put in an application, and haven’t heard back in a while, please don’t worry! It’s simply due to a large number of people who’ve applied and the very manual way we’ve had to process these. Everyone should hear back.

We’ve also had some interesting times with our banking. The short version is, we’ve moved banks to another provider. This has taken quite a bit of work, but hopefully, this should be settling down now.

As mentioned in issue #43, we have an employee handbook. However, it’s not public and hasn’t been updated. We’ve now managed to find a service that will do some of this for us, so we don’t need to create a whole load of text.

Finally, some minor items: Three trademark agreements were granted/modified, one GDPR request is being considered (removal of email from list archives), the GNOME namespace on handshake.org has been requested (which involved a number of calls with our trademark lawyer), a Dun and Bradstreet number (D-U-N-S) has been requested so we can then request a free Apple code signing certificate and the EU events box should now have a laptop.

Conferences

SustainOSS Summit

This event was quite interesting and was held in London at the end of October. There was an estimated 150 people attend, and all to talk about the sustainability of open source software, and how this can be improved (sustainability here should be read in all forms; financial, newcomer experience; maintainer burnout etc).

Freenode#Live

Held in Bristol at the start of November Freenode#Live was once again an impressive event, and I presented my “Why Free Software on the desktop matters” talk. The most useful aspect of the event is to meet up with key people in the FOSS community, and Advisory Board members.

Finally, as we were leaving the venue, one of the venue staff members came up to say hello. He’s a professional graphic illustrator/designer and although having never heard about free software before, was impressed by the conference and our passion that he’s volunteering to help with design work.