These weeks were full:

• Allan Day, Sri and I had a successful meeting using Google hangout, where we discussed the redesign of news.gnome.org, a restructuring of the news process, and tried on reindeer disguises. We couldn’t help but be impressed with the hangout, which worked perfectly with our 3 different operating systems. Since then, Sri has worked tirelessly to create a test space for me to start building the site. I attempted to load the gnome-grass theme to my own hosted space as a fall-back, but encountered php errors when activating the theme. I’m working on solving that, but it would probably be better to have space on existing GNOME servers. THANK YOU to Sri and Andrea Veri for all their work.
• I started on the task of writing an article about the GNOME “Thank You Pants Award” for the Annual Report. To that end, past pants winners, Matthias Clasen and Gil Forcada have obliged me by answering several interview questions regarding this creative award given annually for service to the GNOME community. I hope to write an amusing entry for the Report by next week.
• On Joanie Diggs’ suggestion, I have started working on updating the GNOME deployments page on the wiki. It is sorely out of date, and does not present a good or current portrait of GNOME in the real world. The very good news is that, with Marina’s help,  I have already tracked down some unmentioned projects of note, and am hopeful of finding more. Our marketing efforts depend on us proving the viability of GNOME by being able to cite real-world usability. I’m happy to contribute to that end.
• During an OPW intern meeting, we discussed a fun new design project to improve the women’s intern application process and new intern introduction process by creating a series of comics outlining these areas for contributors. I plan to help with this once it gets going.
• I’m happy to report that on Tuesday, I got my git privileges instated, thanks to Andrea Veri and Vinicius Depizzol, creator of the Gnome grass wordpress theme. I hope this will make me more effective helping out with the web development task load, which is hefty right now. Little tasks like updating the a11y progress banner on gnome.org can be done so quickly when you can git push!
• Last, but not least, I’m going to start creating some of the hackergotchis that some of you have been waiting for! Look for more floating heads coming your way!!

So, I’m busy… and it’s all good.

P.S. If any of you are going to the developer conference in Brno, I’d sure love to connect with you about doing a short report from the event for GNOME news-

• I submitted a nomination application entering GNOME for a 2012 Computer World Honors Award. Thank you so much to Karen Sandler,  Juanjo Marin,  and Bryen Yunashko for all your help. Collaboration works, and what a fun way to get the job done! We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
• Started working with Allan Day on the big project of improving the news infrastructure of GNOME. We hope to streamline the process for gathering and distributing news, with the goals of stimulating more contributions, ensuring fresh content on www.gnome.org, and communicating more effectively with our 16,000 followers on social media like Facebook and Twitter.
• Our current thoughts are represented in the diagram below, which I added to the wiki, along with comments. Sri has suggested creating some quality videos from events like GUADEC. I’d be more than happy to make the videos happen at GUADEC, if I get to go!  BryenY has made several suggestions about the News Crew editorial process based on his experience creating news for openSUSE. Of course, he reminded me again of the importance of  subtitles in all of our videos- thank you Bryen

Finally, our fearless leader, Karen Sandler, has received rave reviews for her keynote presentation at Linux Conference Australia. According to Jacob Applebaum, “Karen Sandler’s keynote at #LCA2012 is hilarious; she’s a great public speaker and her talk about heart implants is thought provoking.”  Thank you, Karen.

And since my hackergotchi has not yet appeared on planet, here I am:                                

I’ve been enjoying working on the new “friends” pages of the website. They’re about ready to go, except for the donation form, the most important part!

Take a look here: http://www.gnome.org/friends-2

Yesterday, I saw a request on the wiki for an ad to be made and placed on stackoverflow. I made one, and it received enough votes to be placed in rotation on their site. They suggested I should place it in a couple of other forums as well- so I plan to! Here it is:

It’s winter in the Colorado mountains. We’re skiing and skating, and hoping for more snow!

I’m a new intern with the Gnome Outreach Program for Women. I live in Paonia, Colorado, on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains in the USA. I co-owned a wireless ISP  here until we sold it 2 years ago. I do freelance graphic/web design, and technology consulting. I have used exclusively Open Source software for many years, and am so happy to be able to contribute to this project.

Paonia, Colorado

I am working on website issues during my internship. My mentor is the absolutely fabulous Allan Day. Here are some of the things I did in my first week at Gnome:

• learned to use git
• learned the infrastructure of Gnome, the procedures for editing the website, got access to www.gnome.org and wp.gnome.org and www-oldgnome.org
• filed 2 bugs and made 3 patches
• suggested that there needed to be a new process for editing the wptest.gnome.org repository files, so that developers can test their edits before pushing them to the live  www.gnome.org repositories (i.e. I created a bunch of new work for Allan, Andrea, Jeff, and maybe Sri – thank you to all)
• made (mostly grammatical) edits to the gnome.org website
• chose a plugin for the gnome.org wordpress site that enables email notifications to be sent whenever a change is made to gnome.org from the wp interface (thank you to Jeff for installing it)

Besides all that work, I had a lot of fun:

• I started learning to “love the smell of rebasing first thing in the morning”, as Allan suggested I would.
• I enjoyed an informative and fun irc meeting with other women interns and mentors. We spent a great deal of time discussing the perils of the “hackergotchi”, including the very serious issue of whether long hair can be successfully included in the graphic.
• I found that Marina and I seem to be on the same wavelength, as we made the same comment simultaneously several times during IRC chat.
• I was notified by Marina that I had overwritten Emily’s wiki art request. She almost ended up with my hackergotchi head! Fortunately, tragedy was averted at the last moment.

I look forward to another week of work, because I have found the Gnome community to be especially helpful, super friendly, extremely cooperative, very intelligent and remarkably FUN!

Christy