Re: Brochure for potential sponsors: need help!

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

Ok, I updated and chopped text. If I was going to add any back, it'd
be in the plans for 2009. If I was going to cut more text it'd be in
the about sections.

(We could also cut some text from the about-foundation page in the
friends page. Or at least bold the parts I didn't cut.)

GNOME

The GNOME Project is:
+ a complete, free and easy-to-use desktop environment accessible to all,
+ a powerful application development framework for software developers, and
+ a set of free software applications for mobile devices.
GNOME is part of the GNU Project, is Free Software, and developed as
Open Source software.

The GNOME project encompasses many applications from the desktop to
multimedia applications for end users to development tools. See
http://projects.gnome.org/ for the entire list.

The GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Foundation supports the GNOME project goal of creating a
computing platform for use by the general public that is completely
free software.

To achieve this goal, the Foundation coordinates releases of GNOME and
determines which projects are part of GNOME. The Foundation acts as
the official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of
communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial
organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation sponsors
GNOME-related technical conferences, represents GNOME at relevant
conferences sponsored by others, helps create technical standards for
the project and promotes the use and development of GNOME software.

The Foundation has over 400 members, all contributors to GNOME, who
vote once a year to elect the GNOME Board of Directors who run the
Foundation. The Foundation has two people on staff, an executive
director and an administrator.

The Foundation also has 20 corporate sponsors and a board of advisors
that represent the corporate sponsors. Corporate sponsors include
Access, Canonical, Debian, Free Software Foundation, HP, Google, IBM,
Igalia, Immendio, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla Foundation, Nokia, Novell,
OLPC, OpenedHand, Red Hat, Software Freedom Law Center, Sugar Labs and
Sun.

Why join the GNOME Foundation as a sponsor:

1) Open source technologies are forming the building blocks of desktop
and mobile computing platforms.

2) The foundation provides a conduit to the developers.

3) As an advisory board member, through regular phone meetings and an
annual face to face meeting, you will have a high-value communication
channel with the GNOME community, through the board of directors.

4) The advisory board also provides the ideal forum for improved
collaboration on areas of common interest among distributors of the
GNOME products.

5) By joining the GNOME Foundation and sponsoring GNOME, you will
create good will among GNOME developers. They know that the GNOME
Foundation fees go towards things that help GNOME developers like
hackfests, sponsoring travel to conferences, and system administration
resources.

7) General press. If you wish you can be part of GNOME related
initiatives and announcements throughout the year.

Sponsorship fees are $10,000/year.

The advisory board is made up of sponsor company representatives and
meets in person annually at GUADEC and holds regular teleconference
calls throughout the year.

Most sponsors also provide additional funding for specific programs
like events and programs targeted at specific technologies.

During 2008, the GNOME Foundation was able to help bring a free and
open source desktop to the world by doing the following:

    * Participating in the Google Summer of Code program in which 30
students and mentors participated.
    * Running an Accessibility Outreach Program that resulted in
improvements in documentation, magnification, and mouse control
through a webcam.
    * Held several hackfests, which was widely seen as successful for
tasks like planning the future of GTK+ and the GNOME user experience.
    * Held several large worldwide developer conferences to enable
developers to collaborate effectively and to educate new users and
developers.

In 2009, we could use your help to accomplish the following:

    * Produce more end-user-focused technology and features through
technology-specific hackfests.
    * Continue to provide a place for our sponsors to discuss their
GNOME-related plans.
    * Organize a usability study focused on GNOME technologies used by
all people, including children, users in developing nations, and
people with accessibility needs.
    * Provide travel subsidies to bring our worldwide community of
volunteer developers together.
    * Have more active dialogs between our sponsor companies and our
developers through monthly advisory board meetings.
    * Hold a joint GUADEC/Akademy conference, a Free Desktop Summit,
in order to encourage collaboration and common specifications.
    * Ensure that there is a free and open source stack for mobile
devices by working with other mobile groups to define and produce
GNOME Mobile.
    * Hire a system administrator to provide the on-call support that
would give our volunteer developers and volunteer administrators the
resources they need to keep the GNOME project moving forward.
    * Support local conferences such as GNOME.Asia, GUADLAC (Latin
America), the Boston Summit, GNOME.conf.au (Australia), and Forum
GNOME.
    * Start an internship program aimed at exposing business students
to the free and open source software world and bringing their
expertise to some of the marketing and business challenges we have.
    * Support the community in defining and executing a release plan
for GNOME 3.0.

Thanks for your interest.

For more information please see http://www.gnome.org/foundation. To
follow up, please contact:

Stormy Peters
Executive Director
GNOME Foundation
stormy gnome org
970-481-2076

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 15:53 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote:
>> - The text says "The Foundation has over 400 members, all contributors
>>    to GNOME, who vote once a year".
>>
>>    Actually we now vote every 18 months
>
> We had a single 18-month period to put the new board elections
> closer to GUADEC so that the new board can use GUADEC to get
> face time early in their term.  Now that they're more closely
> aligned, we'll have our regular annual elections again.
>
> --
> Shaun
>
>
>
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