GNOME Foundation looking to hire administrative help

– by Tina Gasperson –
Citing a need for someone well-versed in all types of administrative duties,the GNOME Foundation has issued a request for comments in regard to hiring a full-time, salaried “person Friday.”The GNOME Foundation exists as a non-profit organization to direct the GNOME desktop project, its releases and standards, and to direct public relations efforts. GNOME is a graphical desktop for the X Windows system and is included with most Linux distributions.

There’s a “excellent candidate available now” for the job, says Havoc Pennington of Red Hat. Sounds like whoever gets the job is going to be pretty busy, judging from the looks of the list of duties posted to the foundation. He’ll be handling all the bookkeeping, organizing GUADEC (the GNOME user and developer European conference) and all that is entailed with that and other conferences, including booth setup and attendence; plus developing an advocacy campaign, fund-raising, funds spending ideas, and, (pant, pant) communications with other advisory boards.

And not only must this admin person be a jack-of-all-trades, but he’s also going to have to raise his own salary as part of that fund-raising effort mentioned above. “We are hiring on a ‘you raise your own salary’ basis. Our candidate
has an excellent track record in fund raising, and feels he could
pay himself and go on to develop a substantial fund for supporting
GNOME,” writes Pennington in a post to the GNOME foundation list.

Of all these responsibilities, the conference set-up duties seem to stand out as particularly important to others who have commented on the possibility of making a full-time hire. “Just look at the general GNOME preformance when it comes to booths conferences.
If a full-time person takes care of this we [probably] won’t end up doing things
at the last minute as we seem to have done in the past, such as last year’s
Montreal Linux Expo, when I found out we had a booth by walking around the
showfloor and noticing a completely empty booth with a ‘GNOME’ sign on it,” wrote George Lebl of the foundation.

The KDE project, another Open Source desktop that is included with most Linux distributions, does not have a foundation to oversee its affairs, and says it has no plans to create one.