Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On 21 May 2014 12:24, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Sure, those of us who are not currently paid can speak up on mailing lists, but we're (mostly) roundly ignored. I think this is a classic case of code speaks -- i.e. if you're willing to spend the time writing the feature and maintaining the code for the next 5 years, you probably have more say than someone just yelling do it like this and not contributing anything concrete. I think most projects inside and outside the GNOME umbrella are structured in a meritocracy which seems to work very well indeed. Having a voice != getting to decide what other people work on. Richard ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 07:24 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote: Yes, you're part of the community. But you're being paid by a large corporation to work on it, and as a result are beholden to them at least as much as to the rest of the community. Red Hat is not the only thing that matters in the GNOME world. Or, it shouldn't be. Why do you think it is the only thing that matters? What gives you that impression? But for the last several years, Red Hat's wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, Are you saying that Red Hat employees mostly worked on features that Red Hat thought were important to GNOME? That's hardly a surprise, but I'd be interested to know why you think it should it be any different. If you refer to particular technical decisions, such as our shift towards systemd, I think the events of recent months have proven us right. If you're talking about some new features that might appear useless to you, note that there will always be others for which those features are important. (I've actually read that people thought the Wacom tablet integration wasn't something we should have been working on. Turns out we now have the best Wacom integration across any platform, even proprietary ones, and it's pushing designers towards using GNOME). including the larger user base of GNOME which is what (I believe) has driven it to fracture into so many DE's over the last 3-4 years. We need to make sure that people who aren't working for Red Hat have a say. Make sure that people who aren't being paid to work on free software have a voice. Sure, those of us who are not currently paid can speak up on mailing lists, but we're (mostly) roundly ignored. This is what has driven the community apart. This is the problem. That's because GNOME is a meritocracy. You don't get to steer GNOME's development simply by saying something on IRC or a mailing-list. You need to actually do. And there are plenty of community members and non-Red Hat employees that actually do, a lot of them working on both core desktop infrastructure and some of our new applications. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 8:35 AM, Alberto Ruiz ar...@gnome.org wrote: Do you have examples of situations where Red Hat (or any other company or corporation for that matter) has trumped what most of the community wants/needs? If you do, what do you think the board could/should do about it? I presume that it is the fact that a lot of the core maintainers of GNOME are Red Hat employees. From what I understand of Red Hat culture, that doesn't really mean much. I was having drinks with a person who used to work at a company who got bought out by Red Hat. I believe it was Cygnus. The biggest culture shock they had was the fact that Red Hat employees regularly flamed each other on a number of mailing lists and often quite gleefully. I'm not sure Red Hat is the picture of corporate toe the line that you generally see at other places. I think in general, FOSS people do tend to be an ornery crowd. :-) If there is an issue though with voices not being heard then that should be addressed. sri ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 09:30 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote: In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. That's (fortunately) incorrect. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, I find that incredibly insulting, especially as it's the second time you say this. I'm paid to work on GNOME, and like most of my colleagues working on GNOME, I was a GNOME contributor before being paid to work on it. Suggesting that we don't have GNOME's best interests at heart is just hurtful, and incorrect. and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? And you really think that those evil corporations would manage to make us make changes to GNOME that we think would be detrimental to GNOME as a project? Do you want me to assign those remarks to ignorance or malice? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate what is truly needed vs wanted. Once we figure out how much money we need to be spending, we can evaluate our current funds, where they are coming from and how to raise more. This information is publicly available for up to the end of 2013 at
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
Of course people should be able to be paid to work on free software. That's great. But when one or two large companies pay the majority of developers, it becomes hard to argue that it is still a 'community led' project, let alone one which is independent. And that's where GNOME is right now. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:35 AM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 May 2014 10:14, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: Suggesting that we don't have GNOME's best interests at heart is just hurtful, and incorrect. Agreed. I've never once been told by anyone at Red Hat to do something that I didn't think was in the best interests of GNOME as a project. Richard -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 5:15 AM, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Of course people should be able to be paid to work on free software. That's great. But when one or two large companies pay the majority of developers, it becomes hard to argue that it is still a 'community led' project, let alone one which is independent. And that's where GNOME is right now. If you are afraid that one entity has too much influence, you can recruit other companies to invest as much. The other option mentioned is the Wikimedia option. I believe they only collect donations from individuals. However, as far as I know, they never had other organizations paying people's salaries, so I don't know if that's an option for GNOME. Stormy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
Yes, you're part of the community. But you're being paid by a large corporation to work on it, and as a result are beholden to them at least as much as to the rest of the community. Red Hat is not the only thing that matters in the GNOME world. Or, it shouldn't be. But for the last several years, Red Hat's wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, including the larger user base of GNOME which is what (I believe) has driven it to fracture into so many DE's over the last 3-4 years. We need to make sure that people who aren't working for Red Hat have a say. Make sure that people who aren't being paid to work on free software have a voice. Sure, those of us who are not currently paid can speak up on mailing lists, but we're (mostly) roundly ignored. This is what has driven the community apart. This is the problem. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 07:15 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote: Of course people should be able to be paid to work on free software. That's great. But when one or two large companies pay the majority of developers, it becomes hard to argue that it is still a 'community led' project, let alone one which is independent. And that's where GNOME is right now. Are we (those paid contributors) not part of the community? Are non-paid volunteers the only ones that can be part of the community? I don't understand your answer here. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:35 AM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 May 2014 10:14, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: Suggesting that we don't have GNOME's best interests at heart is just hurtful, and incorrect. Agreed. I've never once been told by anyone at Red Hat to do something that I didn't think was in the best interests of GNOME as a project. Richard -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 07:15 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote: Of course people should be able to be paid to work on free software. That's great. But when one or two large companies pay the majority of developers, it becomes hard to argue that it is still a 'community led' project, let alone one which is independent. And that's where GNOME is right now. Are we (those paid contributors) not part of the community? Are non-paid volunteers the only ones that can be part of the community? I don't understand your answer here. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:35 AM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 May 2014 10:14, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: Suggesting that we don't have GNOME's best interests at heart is just hurtful, and incorrect. Agreed. I've never once been told by anyone at Red Hat to do something that I didn't think was in the best interests of GNOME as a project. Richard ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
I'm not going to quote the emails about company control and Red Hat's contributions in particular as I think it's gotten fairly heated and my thoughts are more easily generally expressed. I think we need both to be successful - companies that are invested in GNOME technologies who are users and contributors and who care about it because it is useful to their business and individual contributors who are here because they are jazzed about our awesome mission. We need to work on both now to try to figure out how to get wider adoption of GNOME and how to show that we're an important project that is worth a hobbyist's time and is fun to be a part of. As Emily and Sri have mentioned, we really need to put a premium on encouraging people when they first show an interest, something I think we've gotten better at but still need a lot of improvement on. We need to go out of our way to take an interest and to be advocates for GNOME to new individuals and new companies. I've been scratching my head over this for a while. Speaking at conferences and being present where people meet and talk about important technologies have been the approaches I've pursued but I think there's a lot more that can be done. A lot of it involves promoting culture that is welcoming, which I think we were leaders of once upon a time and have gotten much better with more recently. We definitely want to make the companies already invested in our space feel good about their contributions while making sure the infrastructure is in place for no corporate control. I'd love it if we could do something like put together a team of volunteers who are ready to help companies adopt GNOME, whether it's to go and talk to decision makers or to go and give an occasional demo or training session. I recognize that this is a lot of work and nontrivial to organize (we have to make sure the right people are representing us) but it's part of what I think GNOME has been missing. With the right enthusiasm from the membership this is something that can be done. I also will say that the boards and foundation memberships that I've worked with have been more productive when everyone has a positive attitude. Being critical of the way things are and what other people say is necessary for insightful discussion and change but finding the core of what someone is saying and helping to find positive ideas for that change is essential. In general positive communicators are more persuasive and create a better collaborative environment. I've been a bit dismayed about the negative tone of a lot of the emails regarding candidacy, not just this thread. I want to be on a board that has differing views but can communicate in a way that inspires cooperation. karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
Do you have examples of situations where Red Hat (or any other company or corporation for that matter) has trumped what most of the community wants/needs? If you do, what do you think the board could/should do about it? 2014-05-21 13:24 GMT+02:00 Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com: Yes, you're part of the community. But you're being paid by a large corporation to work on it, and as a result are beholden to them at least as much as to the rest of the community. Red Hat is not the only thing that matters in the GNOME world. Or, it shouldn't be. But for the last several years, Red Hat's wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, including the larger user base of GNOME which is what (I believe) has driven it to fracture into so many DE's over the last 3-4 years. We need to make sure that people who aren't working for Red Hat have a say. Make sure that people who aren't being paid to work on free software have a voice. Sure, those of us who are not currently paid can speak up on mailing lists, but we're (mostly) roundly ignored. This is what has driven the community apart. This is the problem. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 7:18 AM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 07:15 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote: Of course people should be able to be paid to work on free software. That's great. But when one or two large companies pay the majority of developers, it becomes hard to argue that it is still a 'community led' project, let alone one which is independent. And that's where GNOME is right now. Are we (those paid contributors) not part of the community? Are non-paid volunteers the only ones that can be part of the community? I don't understand your answer here. On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 6:35 AM, Richard Hughes hughsi...@gmail.com wrote: On 21 May 2014 10:14, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: Suggesting that we don't have GNOME's best interests at heart is just hurtful, and incorrect. Agreed. I've never once been told by anyone at Red Hat to do something that I didn't think was in the best interests of GNOME as a project. Richard -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Cheers, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate what is truly needed vs wanted. Once we figure out how much money we need to be spending, we can evaluate our current funds, where they are coming from and how to raise more. Donating to GNOME as an individual is not as easy as it could, indeed should, be. We don't currently have a specific 'campaign' going on, and as a result, a cursory glance at the website reveals no obvious way to donate to GNOME's general fund (as far as I can tell the only way to do so is to find the tiny 'Support GNOME' link at the very bottom of the page). Additionally, I still don't understand why the only way to donate to GNOME is through PayPal. Why don't we allow people to donate via google or amazon? Why not accept bitcoins? Why not encourage people to support GNOME via AmazonSmile and similar programs? These are just the first handful of ideas for alternative, and largely untapped funding options that occur to me at first glance. I'm sure there are myriad other funding options which we have not investigated fully, and which do not include asking for corporate sponsorship. Finally, I believe the board needs to be far more transparent than it has been of late as to its activities finances. The board in the past has been resistant to allowing non-board members to 'sit in' on meetings - even as a means for Engagement team members to take notes and report minutes. As I understand it, the board represents and works on behalf of the membership and their meetings ought to be public. Emily Gonyer I have been a long time user of GNOME since the 1.x days, and an active contributor for the last 2+ years, primarily in Marketing/Engagement with limited development and design contributions. I actively promote free software whenever and wherever I can, and feel strongly that it is only through free software that we will be able to keep the freedoms that we all cherish both online and off. Those freedoms are being actively obstructed and eroded by corporations and governments around the world. As a member of the board of directors I will actively work against these forces, in order to ensure a free and open internet for everyone. Good luck to all! -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-annou...@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate what is truly needed vs wanted. Once we figure out how much money we need to be spending, we can evaluate our current funds, where they are coming from and how to raise more. This information is publicly available for up to the end of 2013 at https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/FinancialSummary . What conclusions have you drawn from it? Donating to GNOME as an individual is not as easy as it could, indeed should, be. We don't currently have a specific 'campaign' going on, and as a result, a cursory glance at the website reveals no obvious way to donate to GNOME's general fund (as far as I can tell the only way to do so is to find the tiny 'Support GNOME' link at the very bottom of the page). Additionally, I still don't understand why the only way to donate to GNOME is through PayPal. Why don't we allow people to donate via google or amazon? Why not accept bitcoins? Why not encourage people to support GNOME via AmazonSmile and similar programs? There is a big link in the
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On 2014-05-20 09:30, Emily Gonyer wrote: In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? When people serve on the board of directors they have a duty of care and a duty of loyalty to the organization. We have asked that board members use their personal email addresses for communication, for example. Still conflicts do come up and in those cases the board members recuse themselves from any decision making for the organization. I think the board has been nicely conservative about this, at least in the time I was Executive Director (even in one case having a board member not present for any of the conversation about an issue their company had an interest in). Also, not every board member who is employed at an advisory board member is paid to work on GNOME. You're right that the needs of the project must come first for board members when they are acting in that capacity, which is why we have disclosure of affiliation and treat conflicts carefully (and can't in any case have more than two people from any particular employer). I do think it would be unfair if we excluded candidates who happen to be employed at our adboard members. That all said, it is nice that we have such a diverse set of candidates this time! karen On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On 20 May 2014 14:30, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? Thank you for your reply. I would like to point out that there has been outreach to the projects which were forked from GNOME, but with poor results. I encourage you to address the issues that you see regardless of whether you join the board or not. There are also precautions in place to ensure that no single corporate entity employs a majority (over 40%) of board members. At the moment, this means that a maximum of 2 out of 7 board members can share an employer. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate what is truly needed vs wanted. Once we figure out how much money we need to be spending, we can evaluate our current funds, where they are coming from and how to raise more. This information is publicly available for up to the end of 2013 at https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/FinancialSummary . What conclusions have you drawn from it? Donating to GNOME as an individual is not as easy as it could, indeed should, be. We don't
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
On 2014-05-20 09:49, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: On 20 May 2014 14:30, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: In regards to paid and unpaid contributors to GNOME, I honestly feel that unpaid contributions should be favored. I realize that is probably unlikely to occur, but it ought to. Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Unfortunately of course, we all know this is not true. In practice most of the top contributors are paid to work on GNOME - as a result, most of their work is directed by corporations, and their wants/needs and not by the thousands of individual users who have different wants/needs. But because they are paid to work on it, they have more time to do so and rise faster and receive more respect and admiration than those of us who do so 'just for fun'. This creates a lopsided portrait of the wants/needs of users. And, of course, the corporations who are paying for the work don't care what individual users think - why would they? As a result, users are ignored and the larger free software community alienated. This is, IMHO why the GNOME ecosystem has fractured so fully over the last couple of years. Where we once had GNOME we now have GNOME Shell, Unity, Elementary, Cinnamon and Mate all competing for the same handful of users. I'm not going to pretend that I know how to fix this problem. I don't. But I do know it exists, and that it has been largely, if not completely ignored by the majority of GNOME developers and certainly by the Board of Directors thus far. Perhaps most striking is the very composition of the Board of Directors itself. How many are not paid to work on GNOME by an Advisory Board member? Isn't this in some way a conflict of interest? Shouldn't the board be independent and not tied to corporate interests? Shouldn't the needs of the project come first, and not the needs of any individual corporation? Thank you for your reply. I would like to point out that there has been outreach to the projects which were forked from GNOME, but with poor results. I encourage you to address the issues that you see regardless of whether you join the board or not. I agree with what Kat says here and it's true for all candidates and everyone asking questions and reading this too: you don't need to be a board member to effectuate change in GNOME! In my last email I should have pointed out that that we did reach out to those projects. While there were some poor results for some things as Kat says, I think the cross desktop events and efforts that have been going on have been really positive. karen There are also precautions in place to ensure that no single corporate entity employs a majority (over 40%) of board members. At the moment, this means that a maximum of 2 out of 7 board members can share an employer. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:00 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 20 May 2014 12:10, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Emily, On 17 May 2014 19:42, Emily Gonyer emilyyr...@gmail.com wrote: Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I understand your concerns with regards to corporate involvement in the project direction. Based on the available financial information, the corporate sponsorship enables the Foundation to employ an executive director and an administrative assistant. Without this sponsorship, much of the administrative work would need to be taken over by the Foundation membership and the current board is already facing the challenges resulting from having only one employee at this time. How do you aim to achieve your goals without alienating the companies that enable the Foundation to have employees to do the administrative work and offer financial support to our membership? GNOME is Free software, with a broad base of unpaid and paid contributors. It seems that you wish to change the proportions of GNOME contributors from the two backgrounds, how do you aim to achieve this? I think we need to take a good, hard look at what we're spending money on and evaluate
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] Why? Because GNOME is, at least in theory, a free software 'project'. As such, it is supposedly run, and worked on largely by volunteers. Free software does not mean that the developers have to be volunteers. It means that the users have the essential freedoms so that they have control over the software that does their computing. See http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html. We're happy when the developers of free software get paid. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer
Name: Emily Gonyer Email: emilyyr...@gmail.com Affiliation: None Dear Foundation, I'm interested in serving on GNOME's board of directors for the first time, in order to help steer GNOME in a more open and community led direction. It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again. I have been a long time user of GNOME since the 1.x days, and an active contributor for the last 2+ years now. I actively promote free software whenever and wherever I can, and feel strongly that it is only through free software that we will be able to keep the freedoms that we all cherish both online and off. Those freedoms are being actively obstructed and eroded by corporations and governments around the world. As a member of the board of directors I will actively work against these forces, in order to ensure a free and open internet for everyone. Good luck to everyone! Emily Gonyer -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
