Who is the community? Is it a bunch of guys in their basement? Not really. Communities are made up of a number of people that contribute at all different levels.
At the core we have people that write the source code – the committers. These are the people that actually wrote the project. However, however much work they do, they don't do it all alone.
The next group is people that make contributions – they make code suggestions to the committers or they may contribute in other ways like marketing or answering questions on the mailing list or supporting the systems or answering questions on the mailing lists.
One of the things that GNOME contributors do is man GNOME booths at conferences. They get an event box – that was put together by a contributor, man the booth for the conference and then send the event box back or on to the next event. (picture of event box)
But committers and contributors are not all there is. There is also a large user base. Users are very important. They spread the word of the project and contribute ideas as well as bug fixes – in a sense they are all testers.
Now in all projects we have paid individuals and volunteers. Interestingly enough open source communities view them all as individuals, even if they are getting paid by a company. If an open source contributor that works for a company leaves that company, they still maintain their contributor status – the company loses it.
So how many people get paid to work on GNOME? - Aproximately 38%. The rest are volunteers. (Pie chart.)
Who pays them? Companies of all shapes and sizes. (Logos)
Why do they pay them? For numerous reasons (Show the different types of companies.) Some of them use GNOME internally – their employees depend on it. Some of them ship products with GNOME in it, from desktops to mobile devices. Some of them have built consulting companies around open source software. (Might expand a bit here – Emily thought they'd be interested in how they made money from GNOME.)
Why do the individuals work on open source software? This also varies widely (use slides from Would you do it again?) Some do it to scratch an itch, solve an interesting problem, learn something, be creative, learn new skills, show you're clever, get fame, do the right thing/humanitarian.
What's interesting about communities, when you mix these individuals, some that get paid, some that don't, all with different motivations, you get a community with a very distinct culture and a set of values. And no two communities are the same.
Some communities, that have given open source a bad rap, tolerate some really nasty behavior on their mailing lists – lots of flaming. Other communities, like Apache, are known for being very welcoming and not tolerating that behavior.
GNOME has built up some really strong values. What values make up the GNOME culture?
Accessiblity
Internationalized
Access to all
Easy to use/pretty
Working well with companies, 6 month releases, communication with companies
Having fun
That makes for a strong community
Many communities that have been around for a while and grown quite large decide to build a structure. The Apache Foundation, Eclipse, etc. Let's look at how the GNOME Foundation is structured.
All contributors can be members – we currently have 414. All members vote. These are individuals voting, not companies. They can vote regardless of what type of contribution they made and how much they've contributed. People writing lots of code get to vote, people helping out with events get to vote.
What do they vote for? Well, since running a large organization by voting would be very time consuming, they vote for directors. The current board of directors has 7 members and it will serve for 12 months. Elections happen roughly around GUADEC every year. Throughout the year, the board makes all of the day to day decisions.
Which brings us to our next point. What does the Foundation do? The Foundation exists to further the goals of the GNOME project. They do this by helping put out the 6 month releases, doing marketing, making day to day decisions, running the budget, etc.
How does it make money and how does it spend the money? The GNOME Foundation makes money by taking in donations. Donations from individuals through our friends of GNOME program and donations from companies. Companies that donate $10K/year become sponsors and most of them have seats on the advisory board. The advisory board doesn't run the foundation but they offer advice and help the foundation understand what companies believe is important about GNOME and foster communication and collaboration between companies and the community. This is especially important for projects like GNOME that don't ship directly to end users – most users get GNOME through a distribution, a 3rd party. Getting the distribution's feedback about GNOME users is very important to the future success of GNOME.
So last year we brought in over $200K and this year we plan to bring in over $300K. How do we spend that money? We spend that money helping our developers be successful. Just last week we had a user experience hackfest in Boston – a bunch (how many?) of developers got together for a week to discuss how the user experience is going and to decide how to improve it in the future. We invited and sponsored Dave (?) who talked about his experience deploying and using GNOME in the city of ?. Bringing users to the developers so that we can further the goal of GNOME of bringing a easy to use desktop to the world – build with volunteers and companies working together.
So where do we go from here? GNOME has a great community, lots of developers, contributors and users. It's deployed on xx million systems world wide, it has great foundations, it's internationalized, accessible, and easy to use and has a good format for working with companies with its advisory board and six month release cycles. So where do we go from here? We will continue to make our desktop easy to use and accessible to all (OLPC picture or older person using computer) and we'll expand into new areas. Netbooks are taking off – they are providing affordable computing to people. GNOME Mobile – GNOME technologies are used in many of the worlds leading mobile phone brands. Building on open source technologies enables them not only to get to market faster but to offer cheaper and more open solutions – I believe it is netbooks and cellular phones that will reach most of the world before the traditional desktop. (Numbers from OsiM notes: millions of mobile phone users world wide, most of which have never used a computer or even had a land line.)
Thank you very much for joining us this weekend at GNOME.Asia. We all look forward to sharing the exciting things that GNOME is working on. We hope that you will join us whether it's as a user, as a bug submitter, as a translator or as a coder. Please feel free to ask anyone questions and to talk to anyone. Remember one of the values of the GNOME community is "FUN" and "ACCESSIBLE" - I've found that they are very welcoming. You want to know what the first thing I heard when I went to my very first GUADEC in 2001? "You're a girl!!" Please talk to us, learn and join us in bringing free and open source solutions to the world.