Hi, 2007/11/19, Bruno Boaventura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > With the final list of candidates announced, it's time to submit > questions about the GNOME Foundation and GNOME Project to this years > prospective Board of Directors. > > The list, a summary of each candidate's statement and a link to each > candidate's candidacy can be found at: > > http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2007/candidates.html > > Here we'll go: > > [1] How much impact would being a member of the GNOME Foundation Board > have on your current contributions to GNOME ?
As I already mentioned in my candidacy announcement, I've been trying to help the GNOME community to find its own direction and as a Board member I expect to pro-actively organize or just facilitate face-to-face meetings for boosting different aspects of our software stack. Also, after my participation on the Board for some months, I think I can be really helpful on getting the daily Foundation tasks done which involves mostly replying different kind of requests (from community and other organizations) and properly communicating our activities. > [2] Online Desktop and Services are being talked about as the next > large step in GNOME - what is your vision for Online Desktop and > Services and how would you measure them ? I think the Online Desktop initiative is a great opportunity for us to enwide the scope of GNOME project from a specific desktop environment to a broader user experiences set. This means taking advantage of this huge amount of funny, socially powerful, useful information and services available on the Web. Embracing Online Desktop also means trying to bring a new set of goals to GNOME which are related to a more social and entertaining user experience, something that, in my opinion, has been lacking in GNOME for a long time. Currently, GNOME achieves very well the goal of proving a desktop environment that "just works" in most of the cases. However, there's still a long way until we're cool, sexy and atractive enough to catch the attention of home/domestic users who just want to have fun and share "stuff" with their friends. Online Desktop can help a lot in this regard. IMO, we should always keep a "platform thinking" about Online Desktop. This means that it's really important to provide as many "platform enablers" as possible so that companies, FLOSS communities and other organizations can create their own services and easily "link" them to our desktop. I would be really happy if in 2009 (?) I see something like "Click here to Install the WEB_SERVICE_NAME plugin for GNOME" in Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Jaiku, etc. I think the GNOME Foundation (and the Board) can help the Online Desktop initiative by bringing this topic for discussion to the Advisory Board members, promoting cooperation among companies. FLOSS projects and other organizations, and making sure that hackers have the necessary infrastructure available. Also, there's a lot to discuss about the wider topic of free (as in freedom) web services (something that Luis is already investigating?). > [3] What are the SMART goals that you desire to set for yourself > should you be elected to the Board ? I've already mentioned those in my candidacy announcement. I'll just copy here to avoid linking to another page. As I said, some of them are about keeping the good current work, others are proposed improvements and others are both. Reactive perspective: - Respond quickly to requests about sponsorships, partnerships, general questions, etc. Proactive perspective: - Incremental production of annual report to make it easier to have something in the end of the year; - Take care of transparency, provide useful information about current Board activities, and bring topics for discussion to membership when applicable; - Organize and/or facilitate topic-based summits with relevant contributors for boosting, hacking, setting direction of diffents parts/aspects of our desktop and platform. Those summits could be self-contained or take place on existing FLOSS conferences. The topics could be things like: "real-time communication", "panels and applets", "GNOME mobile", "eye candy", "online desktop", "python bindings", "multimedia experience", etc. - Keep in touch with user groups to know what they need for their local activities. > [4] If you were part of the GNOME Board last year and a candidate > again, what would you like to put as your achievements as a Board > member ? In my 4 months as a Board member, it took sometime for me to understand how the Board works and to be confortable for getting real tasks. In the last couple months I've been replying the requests that came in, coodinating the annual report and actively participating on Board discussions. I would say that now I feel like a Board member. :-P > [5] Do you think it is important to mentor and coach potential leaders > in the GNOME community ? If yes, what do you think the role of the > Board be in this task ? If no, what are your thoughts on this ? I think it's extremely important to coach potential leaders in the community. First, because this is intrinsically important in a volunteer-based project as you always need to have people available, motivated and capable for getting things done and coordinating activities. If we don't gradually refresh our group of leaders, the project will just die. Second, because currently GNOME is lacking people. For example, nowadays, we have lots of modules which are under-maintained (or under-developed) because current developers are already overloaded and we don't have enough new contributors coming in. Also, there are several (interesting and important) activities inside the project that are just stalled because there isn't anyone available to get them done. Honestly, I think the Board has almost nothing to do with coaching potential leaders in the GNOME community. You don't need to be a Board member to do that. In general, Board members are actual leaders in the community so they often coach some potential leaders but this is because they're leaders, not because they're Board members. Anyway, I see two possible ways through which the Board members could help on this regard: one is by delegating tasks to community members and the other is by motivating GNOME contributors to be candidates for the Board and then giving them some support when they are part of the Board. > [6] Some of the tasks of a Board Member are mundane administrative > tasks, are you comfortable taking on such tasks as opposed to being > always involved in strategic and visionary thinking ? I don't have any problem on taking "mundane administrative tasks". As I said in my candidacy announcement, I've been involved on both technical and non-technical activities in GNOME. So, I'm totally OK with doing things like replying to requests, contacting people, participating on meetings, etc. Also, I wouldn't be a candidate if I didn't like the job. :-) > [7] What or which according to you, is the one "tipping point" move > for GNOME in the coming year ? I don't think there's one "tipping point" but many. Considering my plans as a Board member, I would say that for next year the community should focus on deciding and agreeing on the future of some major aspects of our platform and desktop. For sure, there are already quite many important changes happening next year. If you look at our Roadmap for 2.22 and 2.24 there are major platform changes coming: gio/gvfs replacing gnome-vfs (2.22), dconf/GSettings replacing GConf (possibly 2.24), convergence of Pango and Qt into HarfBuzz (possibly 2.24). Also, I guess there will be some very important decisions about the future of GTK+ (3.0?) in the next GUADEC. On the desktop side, Mallard is coming on 2.22, new applets API (possibly 2.24), new session manager (possibly 2.22), new GDM (possibly 2.22), many new features/plugins in the applications and interesting modules being proposed. In others words: 2008 will be quite important for GNOME anyway. However, there are quite many other unclear/undecided things which are cross-module topics (eye candy, multimedia, online desktop, panel and applets, etc). As Board member, I want to make sure that developers are aware that they can count on the GNOME Foundation support for relevant hacking sessions and meetings and pro-actively propose small summits to discuss about (and hack on) some strategic modules. > [8] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda > right now ? What will you do more or better than the previous boards > in that aspect ? I think there are some important topics that has been flowing around for some time that are still undecided or just not-yet-done. Some things I think we should work on in order to reach a final decision and/or just get done: - Sysadmin hiring - Executive director hiring Those are tricky topics in the sense that we have quite divergent opinions about them. Also, it's hard to find the right person (in case we decide to hire someone for those positions). For the next year's agenda, my proposal is that we focus as much as we can on two things (in order of priority): 1) Full support for activities which might move the desktop and platform forward (meetings, hacking sessions, conferences calls, etc) 2) Users groups support for their local conferences and events > [9] What is your positioning with respect to the issue of OOXML? IMO, Microsoft is using the ISO standardization process as a political weapon against free/open standards. So, I'm against OOXML as an ISO standard. On the other hand, I don't think we should put this whole discussion as "OOXML vs ODF: The Battle for the next Universal Document Format". In practice, there will be a Microsoft file format (ISO standard or not) which is still widely used anyway. So, I think it's very important to GNOME to provide the best support possible for OOXML in order to allow users to use Free Software to edit any kind of document. > [10] Why do you think we need a GNOME Foundation ? First of all, one thing that should be clear for everyone (candidates or not) is that you can do pretty much anything in the community without being a Board member. You don't need to be a Board member in order to contribute with translations, software development, marketing, documentation, community building, web, etc. The participation on the Board basically allows you to participate on the decisions related to ("material") support to the community (very often through sponsorships) and to be part of the "institutional face" of the project (which involves a bunch of actions in a different level). So, why do community need GNOME Foundation? There are several practical reasons: - To manage the money coming from Advisory Board members and donators - To support activities that are considered relevant to the GNOME community - To act as an official and institutional voice of The GNOME Project - To make sure the community has the necessary (material) infrastructure for its daily work Thanks! --lucasr _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list