Name: Baris Cicek Email: bci...@gnome.org Nick: baris Affiliation: Nerd Software
Bio I'm 27 years old, and contributing GNOME since early 2000s. I've been taking role of GNOME Turkish translation coordinator since 2004, and in past served community at GNOME Membership and Elections committee for three years. My last but not the least significant contribution was organizing GUADEC 2008 which was held in Istanbul. Since from the day one I've also been trying to contribute with occasional bug reports and patches for various GNOME applications as well. Why Board As being a foundation member I believe a big project like GNOME should need a more organized community and an NGO like the GNOME Foundation is the most important entity for the users and the developers of the GNOME. In past years I didn't have intention for being a board member, since I didn't believe that my experience with the community (or lack there of) is mature enough to handle such a role, moreover I could have used my energy as a member as well. (I still believe that to make a difference in GNOME, being on the board only gives you more responsibility than being a member nothing more). Being more integrated with community, and step back of some previous board members for new faces on board, I wanted to put my money where my mouth is. There are the things that I would like to help if I'm elected for board that I want to put more effort, being on board will give me motivation to get some improvement over them. Why Vote For Me If I'm elected for the board, this is my promise to the community that I'll do my best to get improvements on the following issues: + Make it easier to pay back Distributions, and ISVs are using our products and they get profit from this (which is fine). As a nature, what we want as a pay back is to make our products stronger by the help of their back contributions. We eventually improved this co-operation, but we need to work harder (and faster) to make paying back easier and efficient. We need to do our work on our side and expect (and convince) other parties to do their work. That includes infrastructure improvements (like our recent bugzilla upgrade), but also better policies and more open mindset. This way we can improve our translations, documentation, art and code base faster than ever before. So if I'm elected to the board, one of the things that I want to help is to coordinate parties to discuss and foster integration of GNOME with beneficiaries. + This is not limited to other parties Getting back contribution, or even contribution is not limited to other parties, but we need to do things inside our own community as well. Not very far ago, some might remember that we had some problems on our major foundation related mailing list. Mailing lists, or any other media that we can share our opinions are openly is very important. But for some reason, current way of working of ML does not help this. Not only we can't get valuable return on some of the mailing lists, but we also prevent experienced members to contribute to discussions. It's inevitable that we need a channel for generic discussions, and a media that handles these discussions better than the way we use some of our mailing lists. So that's why I would like to help on a reinforcement that will fulfill our needs. + QA for our events We have great events, and GUADEC is one of our biggest assets. Although every year we're having a better GUADEC, and every year we have better/more hackfests, we can't leave it to chance that these events be better in quality every year and time. We've already had a great leap forward on this front, by the help of hiring Executive Director, and it significantly improved the distributed structure of organization of these events. But we still lack some standardization in organization of events. We should have some default policies regarding events, and every time a new team start to organize an event, they should have a road map, that way they can use their energy much more better. This is the third issue that I thought to be useful on board and to be a candidate. If I'm elected, I'll work on things that will make life of organization team (ie. hosting guidelines, helpful instructions during the event, infrastructure that could be useful for events like conference etc.) of events. + Of course these are not the every thing that I would do if I'd be on board, I'll try to help for anything that I could be helpful, but if I'm elected, and nothing on these issues were improved during my term, I (and probably you too) should consider myself unsuccessful. We have lots of power, we just need to reveal it even more. Regards, Baris Cicek _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list