Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!
Hi, I am probably going to ask this question to every answer like this (candidates: you might anticipate answer it straight out?): Og Maciel wrote: [3] What are the SMART goals that you desire to set for yourself should you be elected to the Board ? a) Promote, Promote, Promote! Everybody now! :) I feel that there isn't enough marketing going on for quite some time now. ... b) Pay extra attention to making sure current and previous collaborators are properly credited and acknowledged for their contributions. ... c) Bring the GNOME Fun Wagon to newer places! Fund smaller, localized events so that people get to experience the GNOME goodness! ... d) Expand our collaborative relationships to encompass other projects and distros, to help promote better communication channels and ensure that our partners and distributors have a place to get what they need, as well as provide us with usefull information and feedback on ways to improve. ... e) Revisit our build methodology and work new ways to automate and validate the tedious building process for our releases. ... f) Have I said that GNOME is people yet? :) Let us tickle that GNOME foot and make the whole user experience fun and rewarding! What has prevented you from doing/encouraging these things as an ordinary member? The marketing team is open to all, several members propose/organise local events (gnome.conf.au, FOSDEM DevRoom, Boston Summit, GNOME Asia Summit, GNOME conferences at FISL Latinoware in Brasil, GNOME stands at conferences around the world), and so on. What makes you think you will be more able to do these things as a board member? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!
On Nov 20, 2007 9:06 AM, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What has prevented you from doing/encouraging these things as an ordinary member? The marketing team is open to all, several members propose/organise local events (gnome.conf.au, FOSDEM DevRoom, Boston Summit, GNOME Asia Summit, GNOME conferences at FISL Latinoware in Brasil, GNOME stands at conferences around the world), and so on. What makes you think you will be more able to do these things as a board member? Great question, and one I was antecipating... :) I believe the answer that applies to my case is a combination of several factors, which I will try to account for in no particular order below: * Maybe the Board was too transparent, but the truth of matter was that I wasn't really aware of it or its past decisions and/or agenda items; Transparency is a good thing but marketing still applies; * For quite some time I was stretched thin with my community involvements and it took me some time until I felt I had left a concise and well thought out roadmap for the next organizer; * Not knowing the right people and the proper channels to make my voice heard, something I hope to resolve by becoming more exposed and expanding my relationships (networking). This goes well with my point that we need good leaders who not only can make decisions but can coach and incentive people to come out from the shadows and step up to the plate; * Money! Being a dad of two young daughters, and the fact that I took a major pay cut when I moved to North Carolina (a decision I don't regret a bit; my wife worked too and now she stays home) have left me with no budget for traveling and attending community events. Sure I have met many people online but nothing beats the real face to face interaction! Some of these factors still apply to me to a lesser extent, so how am I going to do it as a member of the Board? I believe that I will have more exposure and will get to interact with a greater variety of people. This will allow me to learn a bit more about the available channels and be able to take a more proactive stance intead of bang my head against the wall not knowing what or who to tap. A combination of some serious marketing campaigns coupled with a more substantial method for financing these enterprises will take me from someone who advocates atop a soap box to something more organized and with broader reach. Let us venture into newer and smaller venues... bring GNOME to where the users are. Also, this membership would give my ideas more credibility as I'd be not speaking from my own perspective but backed by the Foundation and the entire Board. Well, I think this is about it. :) Cheers, -- Og B. Maciel [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG Keys: D5CFC202 http://www.ogmaciel.com (en_US) http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!
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
Re: GNOME Foundation Elections 2007. Let's start the debate!
On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 07:39 -0300, Bruno Boaventura wrote: 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 ? The past year I have been busy with work on the OLPC project and have not had much time to dedicate to GNOME besides serving on the embedded advisory board. Now that my job is shifting from a Development to Leadership roll I will have more time (less context switches) for positions such as the GNOME Foundation Board and continuing to represent GNOME at such meetings such as the Desktop Architects meeting and the upcoming Desktop Plumbers meetings. My work on the Release Team will sadly have to move to another community member. The good news is this is a great way to get into the day to day functions of the GNOME project. [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'm currently listening to the LUGRadio interview of Havoc Pennington and Colin Walters (http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/#episode88). I've been lucky enough to see the evolution of the Online Desktop from Ya, to Mugshot to GNOME Online Desktop. Things happen in small steps which only seem large if you tend to only look at the major milestone within the project. From the beginning I have been excited about the prospects of moving GNOME beyond the desktop. I in fact think that using the limiting nomenclature of a Desktop Environment has hamstrung us and we should simply call ourselves GNOME. I see the GNOME Online push as pulling us into the Wild West of the Web platform where everyone is staking their claims and there is yet to be monopolies to stifle innovation. Sure Google is big but sites like Facebook and Wikipedia were able to emerge. The only way to defeat entrenched adversaries in business is to outflank them with disruptive technology. Microsoft did it to IBM with the Desktop, Google did it to Microsoft with web search and we have the chance to bring in integrated Open Source web applications to the mix and even define a new era of Open Services. My vision is bringing a whole connected platform which is open, one small step at a time. How do we measure that? By knowing that the quality of what we produce will be better than what proprietary technology can produce. That in turn is measured in how we grow GNOME and grow the platform. That being said I believe the Boards mission in this is to not set direction but grease the wheels so that those who want to move in this direction find it easy to do so. This could included procuring hardware for applications to run on or facilitating talks between the different interested groups. [3] What are the SMART goals that you desire to set for yourself should you be elected to the Board ? 1) Increase participation in GNOME from within and without - (S)pecificly - identify areas where we need help and would be fun for other to participate - even the smallest of tasks can get people more active in the community - (M)easurable - The question to ask is are we meeting our various project goals, if not go back to the first S - (A)ttainable - if I leave office with one more person working as part of GNOME it will be a success, more and I will be dancing with joy - (R)ealistic - GNOME grows with the strength of our leadership and we have had strong leaders throughout the years. That is as real as it is going to get. - (T)imely - this goal can be attained with fairly quick changes as outlined in my next few goals Ok I'm going to forgo the rather dull SMART format for now 2) Find out the bottle necks within the board and work to getting others in the community to take on responsibility. The board is a fairly small group of people who need to learn how to delegate and include the rest of the community. It is not an ivory tower of cabal leaders. Giving small consumable tasks to foundation members involves them and lessens the burden on our part time board members. 3) Make sure the next Boston Summit kicks ass. This years was a bit of a letdown though good work still got done. It is an important meeting to grow membership as well as set direction. Being a Boston resident I organized the Beer Summit, given about a week. I think I can organize the whole Boston Summit as a board member next year. [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 ? Or, [4] If you are a candidate for the first time,
