GNOME Advisory Board Fees Changing

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

GNOME Foundation members and supporters,

Thanks for all your help and support during the past year. It's been a terrific year. We've accomplished a lot of great things in 2009 (8 events in the 4th
quarter alone!) and we are looking forward to an even busier 2010 as we
get ready to release GNOME 3.0.

For 2010, with the support of our advisory board, we are raising the GNOME Advisory
board fees to $20,000 for large companies and $10,000 for small
companies. The additional funding will enable us to to hold regular and active hackfests, support a small staff and support GNOME at local events worldwide.

In 2010, we'll have:

• A small staff that enables the community to be effective. We believe the minimum staff to keep everything running effectively is an executive director, part time administrative assistant and a system administrator. These staff skills will complement and enable our community of GNOME contributors. Having contributors who are excellent hackers, artists and documentation writers take time off to do system administration work is not the most effective use of our resources. (We do have people with great system administration skills, just not enough time.)
  
• Establish a regular and reliable schedule for hackfests, as these are essential for getting past roadblocks and getting new initiatives going, such as GNOME 3.0! In 2009 we had plans for many essential hackfests and due to the economy and the way we had fundraising set up, we were unable to do any of the ones we had planned for the first half of the year.
  

Maintaining a small staff and a regular schedule of key hackfests will enable us to:

• Recruit and integrate new contributors quickly. GNOME's popularity and the size of its community depends on integrated and running web infrastructure. There are some efforts under way to make this happen, for example, we are updating our web site to more easily enable contributions from more people, upgrading bugzilla to improve everyone's working speed and we are adding a CRM system. This is a lot to do, which is why we need a regular system administrator who can ensure that existing contributors work effectively and new contributors come up to speed quickly.
  
• Hackfests are one of the key ways we get great things done. GNOME 3.0 was started at the usability hackfest at last year's Boston Summit. The GTK hackfest made tremendous progress last year and the documentation hackfest this year not only improved Mallard but set an example for other free software projects. In the following year, we would like to have hackfests for GNOME 3.0 usability, user deployment, accessibility, and marketing. We need to make sure the income we can count on can support a few key hackfests without additional money.
  

We have worked on making this plan a reality by raising more money and spending the money we have more effectively. For example:

• We raised money in new ways, like Friends of GNOME which has raised $25,000 this year! (This is up 390% from last year when we raised only from $6400 over the whole year.)
• We've signed up 3 new sponsors. Given the current economy, that was a great result. It's reasonable to assume to pick up some more when the economy improves.
  
• We established a travel committee, which greatly improved the GNOME Foundation's efficiency in sponsoring travel. By organizing lodging as well as approving airfare, the travel committee was able to substantially increase the number of people who received travel assistance. For GUADEC 2009 they managed travel assistance for 39 people for $31,838. Compare that to 36 people for $41,000 in 2008.
  

While all this has helped us, it has turned out to be insufficient to accomplish our basic plans for staffing and hackfests. Additional reasons we asked advisory board members to consider accepting a raise in advisory board members fees.

• Advisory board fees have been steady for 10 years. Inflation, the value of the dollar and the economy have all changed during that time. ($10,000 in 1999 when the GNOME Foundation first started is only $7,892 in today's dollars.)
• As companies vested in the interest of GNOME, they will profit from these plan, too. All the companies in our community will benefit from a better system administration structure that enables new members to join quickly as well as existing members to function most effectively. They will also benefit from usability and accessibility hackfests that affect GNOME 3.0 projects. Any marketing effort the GNOME Foundation does for the free desktop will help all of the companies that currently use and deploy GNOME technologies.
• Many of them support us throughout the year. While we hope that they'lll continue to support us throughout the year, by having a larger annual donation up front, we hope to have more reliability.
  

Thanks to all our sponsors for supporting us in this change. Thanks to all of our contributors for their time and energy making GNOME projects and events a success. We couldn't do it without you.

We look forward to an exciting 2010 and the release of GNOME 3.0! 

Best,

Stormy

--
Stormy Peters
Executive Director
GNOME Foundation