Re: Additional questions for the board candidates
On mer, 2005-11-23 at 18:56 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: [...] So basically you guys will be responsible for being the official voice, steering the releases, communicating with vendors and customers, GNOME related conferences and promotion. steering the releases is really delegated to the release team, who is trying hard to delegate this more to the whole community :-) I know my questions are not very related to promotion. Most of them are related to the official voice and the communication with commercial and noncommercial organizations part of the text. First question: How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should GNOME do with fd.org? Desktop standards are important. However, I don't feel that as a board member, I should push the developers to cooperate even more with freedesktop.org. First, I'm not sure what this would mean (we already cooperate a lot :-)), and as a second point, the one who is doing work is the one taking decisions. If the developer don't want to use a freedesktop.org spec, there are probably some good reasons for this. I obviously don't dislike freedesktop.org, since it has brought us a lot of good things. And I think we're doing quite well with freedesktop.org. Is there any problem I'm not aware of? Second question: What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? Of course KDE people are welcome to our conferences: everyone is welcome, AFAIK. Paying their travel might not be possible, though: I'm pretty sure we can't pay the travel for everyone who we'd like to see. But it can happens if we invite someone from another project (like KDE). Having a KDE developer talk at GUADEC... Well, why not? If it's on topic, yes. And the opposite is true. I'm not sure I get your question, though. We've been open with KDE since a long time, and we cooperate with them when possible. We don't disregard their work (although we may think they're doing the things right, but that's why we're contributing to GNOME and not to KDE...). Third question: In my opinion, GNOME lacks strong leadership that steers development choices and standards. We have no Linus Torvalds (oh I forget a lot important kernel developers of today, it's not the point -- I picked the most famous one and everybody knows this guy and understands his role as a kernel developer, right?). It's getting increasingly hard for a novice desktop developer to know which desktop standard will succeed and which will not. It's getting increasingly difficult to achieve getting things that will influence other components done. Amongst them are clipboard standards and infrastructure, configuration standards and infrastructure, desktop (presence) notification but also programming environments and languages like C#, Python and Java and the language bindings (which ones belong in the 'official' GNOME distribution -- for commercial software developers this is an extremely important question: Do we support .NET or we don't? Do we support Java or we don't? There's no clarity). And D-BUS is moving forward rapidly. This will introduce a lot new such standards. Even D-BUS itself is such a standard of which it hasn't been said that it's the IPC for a typical modern GNOME application. Or is it ORBit-2? D-COP? I guess nobody knows. Yet there's no real leadership telling the GNOME app developers what direction to go. And there's many questions and even more exciting new technologies being developed today. A very interesting such technology is Galago (desktop notification specification). There's many others (and I'm not going to list all of them just to please their developers). And it's growing rapidly in numbers. I can imagine companies that would like to target the GNOME desktop, while developing solutions for their customers, would like this type of leadership to happen. Yet I can imagine a lot Free Software GNOME developers dislike any form of leadership. It's not a simple problem to solve. Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? So, I'm starting to be worried: do you really see so many problems in GNOME? Are other people thinking the same way? I don't think we have a problem of leadership. If there's a good technology that we should use, we use it. What you might see is
Re: Additional questions for the board candidates
Hi, Philip Van Hoof wrote: So basically you guys will be responsible for being the official voice, steering the releases, communicating with vendors and customers, GNOME related conferences and promotion. You guys being the foundation. Not necessarily the board. How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should GNOME do with fd.org? I never like to see repeated work. It's always disappointing to me to see KDE people say that fd.o is a GNOME effort, that the standards there are imposed on them. I'm not really in a position to help change that, but I know that fd.o houses a number of efforts to encourage inter-project co-operation (like the Create project) which are desktop independent. In fact, I dislike seeing duplicated work at the distribution level too, and I think the foundation would be a great place to consolidate some of that duplication, and make the integration job easier and cheaper for distros, and making the core desktop better in the process. Second question: What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? It's going to come from bottom-up, and from top-down. First, as individuals, we need to avoid a them us situation - and that means watching your tongue sometimes. I think we do OK at this at the moment. Second, as an organisation, we need to make sure that we're talking to each other. I'd like to see GNOME talking part in the OSDWs organised by Aaron Seigo, for example. It'd be better to start working together on that kind of thing that each person organising essentially the same thing in their corner. I'd like to see KDE e.V and the GNOME Foundation co-sponsor development work that benefits both desktops. I'd like to see us applying for grants together. I can imagine companies that would like to target the GNOME desktop, while developing solutions for their customers, would like this type of leadership to happen. Yet I can imagine a lot Free Software GNOME developers dislike any form of leadership. It's not a simple problem to solve. Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? I guess it's the board's job to make sure that some kind of leadership exists, but it's definitely not the board's place to make that kind of decision. Otherwise someone would be asking prospective board members whether they though Mono should be added to the bindings, and Beagle to the platform. One problem we have on that particular issue is that at the moment, we don't have anyone ready to make that call, because making the obvious call will alienate at least 2 distributions supporting GNOME. But the call will need to be made soon, because in about 6 months, we're going to be in a situation where we have a de facto fork. Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project for the GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve yourself in the One Laptop Per Child concept? I'm happy that people in the GNOME project are working on the project, and I will try to keep in contact and make sure we know what's happening. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
Hi there, En/na Curtis Hovey ha escrit: 1. How much time can you dedicate to the board each week? In the first half of 2006 I will be part time dedicated to GUADEC coordination - http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/node/164 . Part of this time can drop easily to board related tasks. 2. How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and less the next? I'm self-employed and I work from home. I 'only' need to negotiate scheduler with my partner and my son (I take care of him mainly afternoons, so her mother can work also). 3. Please rank your interests: a. GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business, and individuals b. GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items nationally and internationally c. GNOME legal issues like copyright and patents d. GNOME finances and fund raising e. Alliance with other organizations. Answered in the 'official' questions. 4. Explain how you expect to meet you goals. Being pragmatical defining the goals. Sometimes an organisation needs to dream in order to move forward. The good thing about GNOME is that the community is full of dreamers. This means the board don't need to dream but to be pragmatical an efficient, finishing what has been started and not starting (yet) what can't be properly finished. 6. Please assess GNOME: a. What are its strengths Products (desktop GTK+ apps), community, vision, philosophy, gnu, brand, art, i18n b. What are its weaknesses identity, dependency of distros, public voice, gnome.org, welcoming newbies, distance from users, opacity, foundation, board, sound, games c. What are its opportunities FOSS reference, public corporate big deployments and migrations, accessibility, multilingüism, triumph of standards, freedesktop.org, P2P, FOAF, Web 2.0. d. What are its threats division, corporativisation, hidden agendas, misuse of resources, patents, winning the empire becoming the empire 7. Name the best album you purchased in the last year. gtk-gnutella -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Additional questions for the board candidates
How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should GNOME do with fd.org? Standards are useful for allowing big and distant projects collaborate and complement each other. Standards are useful for industries that move slower but any step they do is a solid step. Following the standards and contributing to building and improving them may be in te short term a pain in the ass and a very expensive investment of time. But in the long term I imagine myself explaining to my grandchildren: piano cello and the best thing I have possibly done to make this a better world is to follow, promote and improve open and public standards /piano cello ;) freedesktop.org is one of our best opportunities, because still nowadays perhaps half od the problems new GNU/Linux users encounter are related to desktop unsolved issues. What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? From a board perspective I think we should have good relations with the KDE people as well as the Xfce and any other project trying to come up with great ideas about free desktops. The place to meet is freedesktop.org, we have a lot to share and learn from each other. Full stop. From a GUADEC perspective, I'm not going to talk as a board candidate but as a GUADEC coordinator. There is a plan to have three tracks being one of them dedicated to the Toughest Bones Collection - http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/node/163 . A good bunch of tough bones in GNOME just happen to be tough bones for the rest of free desktops, and they are also putting efforts on to solving them. Anybody can present any paper for the GUADEC and, yes, since knowing their works and their thoughts would be interesing we could make more explicit this openness in the call for papers. Good idea! Also I was thinking of introducing more formats for sessions apart from the speaker-speaks-to-audience. For instance, round tables and debates. This would be an even more obvious gateway from the outside to GUADEC. Going to their conferences, if they invite us why not. In my opinion, GNOME lacks strong leadership that steers development (...) Yet there's no real leadership telling the GNOME app developers what direction to go. (...) Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? If the GNOME project needs leaders they should not be on the board. Leaders tend to be really busy with exciting things and there is a lot of unexciting but necessary work to do in the board. If the GNOME project needs technical discussion and consensus about all the topics you mention, the board is not the body to lead this discussion. Maybe the board should put in on the table if nobody does and this is important for the project. Maybe the board should push for consensus if the debate is dividing dangerously the community or is beating about the bush wasting energies and not getting any result. But definitely it is not the board who decides technical issues, and even a board formed by the most prominent GNOME leaders should shut up on this, and this very prominent leaders should go to the appropriate lists (out of the GNOME Foundation) to discuss and decide. One more thing. Personally I dont think we need a leader here. When a movement has a leader, it is too easy for a strong oppositor to chop of this head and convert the leader into a (passed away) hero, or into a (sold out) traitor, getting as a result a headless community. Call me paranoid or conspirationist, but I expect serious attempts to chop off heads in the free software community, so we'd better don't have any, or have many. Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project for the GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve yourself in the One Laptop Per Child concept? From a board perspective we should make sure they obtain the best results from using GNOME and they have a good communication with the parts of the GNOME project indirectly involved. As we should do with any big deployment involving GNOME. OT: I have a personal interest in the development of this project, but my main questions about it fall in fact out of the GNOME desktop. If you are interested: http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/node/166 -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital
Re: Questions to answer
El lun, 21-11-2005 a las 20:26 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] escribió: Hi, With the recent announcement of candidates, questions for candidates to discuss during these week is here. Questions are gathered from previous years' questions, from foundation-list, and this and previous years' discussions on gnomedesktop.org. Candidates are encouraged to answer questions to give ideas to Foundation Members why they should vote for them. And members can direct their questions to candidates different than these questions if they want. Good luck to all candidates and let the discussion begin: 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors? What will you do more or better than previous years Boards have done? Because I'd like to contribute with another perspective. I can't say I will do better than previous boards, but obviously I'll do my best effort to do a good job. 2) How familiar are you with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME? How much do you follow and participate in the main GNOME mailing lists? I am subscribed to 41 lists from gnome.org, between major and minor lists, that I usually read (some of them doesn't have any traffic, so don't get surprised about the amount of lists). Also I follow in a regular base what is happening in GNOME Hispano and GNOME Chile. I follow different sources such as footnotes, plantet's, and some media that have information about what is happening with GNOME, desktop and Free Software in general. So, I feel that I'm familiar with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME, even I hadn't been good writing a lot of emails in these lists. 3) What sources of funds do you as a candiate try do establish? And what will you spend it on? Not counting revenue from the shop and Friends of GNOME. Think more like the recent move by Mozilla or a subscription based bounty system. (olafura from gnomedesktop.org) Probably I'm not good on that task. I've been in the other side: how to achieve goals with a very reduced budget. I can help there. Furthermore, I don't think the whole board must have skills for everything, because people can be a complement each other. 4) Gnome is mostly a european and US based project, but seems to have some following in Latin America and India. How will you as a candidate grow the contribution base, especially in Asia, Africa and South America? (olafura from gnomedesktop.org) Or in general what would you do to increase community participation in the GNOME community and GNOME elections? I'm from South America :-) We have a big amount of users there, but no so many contributors to the core. There is a gap between local programmers (probably they don't feel self confident about their own skills) and the core hackers. I'll promote activities that promotes interchange of experiences and knowledge between them. 5) The board meets for one hour every two weeks to discuss a handful of issues. Thus, it is very important that the board can very quickly and concisely discuss each topic and come to consensus on each item for discussion. Are you good at working with others, who sometimes have very differing opinions than you do, to reach consensus and agree on actions? How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and less the next? I'm flexible on this. A longer answer could be found in the answer of this question in my previous message [1]. 6) Do you consider yourself diplomatic? Would you make a good representative for the GNOME Foundation to the Membership, media, public, and organizations and corporations the GNOME Foundation works with? I'm diplomatic when is needed. But, I must recognize that sometimes I've been opinionated when there was not good argument against a real fact. It's not common anyway. I try to listen all opinions and viewpoints given and I consider myself open minded. 7) What do you see as current threats to the future of a complete Free Software desktop? And what would you like the GNOME Foundation to be doing to address these issues? I did answer this question in my previous message [1] 8) What one problem could you hope to solve this year? I won't speak as a problem, but as a opportunity to improve. I would like to improve the transparency about the board works and improving the communication between different actors. 9) Please rank your interests: a. GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business, and individuals b. GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items nationally and internationally c. GNOME legal issues like copyright and patents d. GNOME finances and fund raising e. Alliance with other organizations. I did answer this question in my previous message [1]. In short it was a, d, e, b, c. 10) One of the ingredient for success in Free Software project such as GNOME is committed and dedicated memberships. How would you propose to promote new membership, and encourage commitment of
