A question to candidates
Hi, I did send these to the membership committee, but voting's nearly open, and I think they're important, so I guess I'll just ask... The foundation's role is essentially to facilitate the enthusiasm of the GNOME project, as Andrew Cowie blogged earlier [1]. This consists of two major elements - managing/improving the finances that the foundation has, and identifying areas where those finances can help remove roadblocks or encourage productive contribution. After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2]. What do you see as the best way to spend this money? In terms of hiring, do you prefer hiring a sysadmin, or an executive director? What other priorities do you have for expenditure this year, outside of our usual cost centers (GUADEC + salaries + travel sponsorship)? A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points? Cheers, Dave. [1] http://research.operationaldynamics.com/blogs/andrew/boards/gnome-foundation/many-ways.html [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2007-November/msg00016.html -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Hi, On 11/22/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I did send these to the membership committee, but voting's nearly open, and I think they're important, so I guess I'll just ask... The foundation's role is essentially to facilitate the enthusiasm of the GNOME project, as Andrew Cowie blogged earlier [1]. This consists of two major elements - managing/improving the finances that the foundation has, and identifying areas where those finances can help remove roadblocks or encourage productive contribution. I agree with Andrew's post. The Linux Australia idea sounds quite cool to me: facilitate the enthusiasm. I see the Board exactly as that, the group of people in charge of deploying the Foundation resources to facilitate initiatives, events, meetings, etc. After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2]. What do you see as the best way to spend this money? In terms of hiring, do you prefer hiring a sysadmin, or an executive director? What other priorities do you have for expenditure this year, outside of our usual cost centers (GUADEC + salaries + travel sponsorship)? If it's really critical to have more manpower for doing sysadmin tasks, that should be the priority I think, after all we are supposed to give good and enough infrastructure for the projects. Besides usual things like GUADEC, I would like to see some money passed to local groups for marketing things and events. In particular for my dear side of the world (Latin America) where stuff is mega cheap to do. I would support expending money on supporting initiatives that can produce new users and developers in places where we don't have much of them. A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points? Improvement, mmm, as I mentioned earlier I would like to continue making the Board work more transparent so people know not only the outcome but the process, this would be positive to prospective candidates I think. Another thing I feel I could help with is in communication with people, as I said on earlier emails I think my age and personality makes people see me as someone quite accesible and open, this -I think- would help me be a good entry point for people trying to communicate but still a bit shy to do it by other means like mailing the entire Board, of course the idea would be to destroy that shyness and make quite clear that the Board is happy to receive comments and ideas no matter how silly they can sound. greetings Diego ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
quote who=Anne Østergaard Will you apply for the position as new Executive Director for GNOME? Will you apply for any paid position within GNOME while serving as board member? Unlikely, although I have considered it in the past. It would be foolish to rule anything out. Enough people have asked me about it that it seems to be in the realm of possibility. Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? I'd try, but as anyone who has been on the Board will attest (and those who have been on the Board while living in GMT+10 and above would INSIST) it is difficult to attend *every* meeting in between the average business, travel and personal commitments of GNOME Board members. Hopefully the meeting time will be somewhat more compatible with my timezone... but looking at the list of candidates, I somewhat doubt it. ;-) Can you accept competing official ISO standards? Absolutely. It is ISO's role to facilitate the development of standards in a coherent, transparent manner, not to determine the market demand for a given standard. I think it's extremely short-sighted to protest OOXML on the basis of competing standards given that standards exist for technologies that we are very likely to want true Free standards for in the future - for example, video encoders and decoders. What is your position towards official standards that do not meet the gennerally accepted definition of a free and open standard. Such as Microsoft OOXML? That is an extremely loaded question, so I can only refer to my sigquote for the appropriate response. - Jeff -- GNOME.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australia http://live.gnome.org/Melbourne2008 If you have any poo, fling it now. - Mason the Chimpanzee, Madagascar ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Hi, Le jeudi 22 novembre 2007, à 18:11 +0100, Dave Neary a écrit : Hi, I did send these to the membership committee, but voting's nearly open, and I think they're important, so I guess I'll just ask... The foundation's role is essentially to facilitate the enthusiasm of the GNOME project, as Andrew Cowie blogged earlier [1]. This consists of two major elements - managing/improving the finances that the foundation has, and identifying areas where those finances can help remove roadblocks or encourage productive contribution. After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2]. What do you see as the best way to spend this money? We've started sponsoring small face-to-face meetings, and this will continue. This is probably one of the best way to spend this money. Hiring is also important (see below). In terms of hiring, do you prefer hiring a sysadmin, or an executive director? Can I cheat and say both? :-) There has been issues with our infrastructre too frequently in the past few months (bugzilla being unresponsive for quite a long time, eg). We can't blame our current infrastructure team since they're already doing a great job. It's just that we have quite some infrastructure and making everything work (and adding new services or upgrading some others) is time-consuming. So it seems to me that we need a sysadmin. We also clearly need an executive director (using quotes here since we've tried to avoid this term when posting the job description) so the Foundation can grow a bit, get more funding, have someone working on getting new perspectives, etc. We've seen this year that hiring an executive director is hard, very hard. I'm hopeful that hiring a sysadmin would be (comparatively) easier. And I'm also hopeful that we can get some funding to hire the sysadmin. So my plan is to hire a sysadmin using part of what he have in our back account now and using some new funding, and keep enough cash so that we can hire an executive director too. It might sound too ambitious, but I think it's doable and that it's the best way to go. What other priorities do you have for expenditure this year, outside of our usual cost centers (GUADEC + salaries + travel sponsorship)? Face-to-face meetings on specific topics. Replying positively to requests from local groups (as long as they're reasonable ;-)). A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points? [it's probably a hard question for candidates that weren't on the board this year] Keeping track of everything: I've already written about this in my reply to the 10 questions. It's just need to be a task taken seriously, with a good tool. And someone to do it. Difficulties to delegate: known issue again. I think sending private mails to one or two people instead of waiting for people to propose to help is the way to go. Taking too much time to decide: it sometimes happen that we wait for a meeting or for another event to take a decision, while the decision is pretty trivial. It might be related to my first item, since pinging people so they say +1/-1 could be enough. There are probably other weak points... Can't think of them right now, though. Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
Hi, Le jeudi 22 novembre 2007, à 23:52 +0100, Anne Østergaard a écrit : Questions to the candidates: Will you apply for the position as new Executive Director for GNOME? No. Will you apply for any paid position within GNOME while serving as board member? I'd say it's highly unlikely, although it's hard to be sure. I won't apply for a job if I helped creating the job description, that's sure. (And of course, I wouldn't participate in the decision process). But again, it's really unlikely that this will happen. Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? I'll try, but it's impossible to say yes. The goal is to attend 100% of the calls, but sometimes, life outside GNOME makes it impossible to attend a call. Can you accept competing official ISO standards? I'm not quite sure why ISO matters here. It certainly happens to have two competing standards, even if the two weren't standardized by the same body. Take RSS and Atom, eg.: the first format has become a de facto widely adopted standard, and the second, standardized by the IETF, is also widely used. Sure, it's a pain to have to support both, but it happens. (I know, RSS is not a single format, and there are at least 3 variants of it, but you get my point ;-)) So, yes, I can accept. But it's more convenient to have only one. What is your position towards official standards that do not meet the gennerally accepted definition of a free and open standard. Such as Microsoft OOXML? I'm not sure what free standard means (is this related to patents? Is this free as in libre or free as in gratuit?). Also, I'm assuming you want to talk more specifically about file formats and not all types of standards. I'm all for open formats, and, to be honest, the fact that a format is standardized is not that important to me. That being said, and obviously, I'd very much prefer to have something not being standardized if it's not open. (don't know if this answers your questions, if not feel free to ask for clarifications) Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 01:18 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: Le jeudi 22 novembre 2007, à 18:11 +0100, Dave Neary a écrit : [...] A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points? [it's probably a hard question for candidates that weren't on the board this year] Keeping track of everything: I've already written about this in my reply to the 10 questions. It's just need to be a task taken seriously, with a good tool. And someone to do it. Difficulties to delegate: known issue again. I think sending private mails to one or two people instead of waiting for people to propose to help is the way to go. This is new to me. I thought this was the way the board was trying to delegate. I don't remember many times that help has been requested. Regards, -- Germán Poó Caamaño Concepción - Chile ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 02:10 -0300, Germán Poó-Caamaño wrote: This is new to me. I thought this was the way the board was trying to delegate. Well, more recently it has been. But for most things that are brought up to board, it's either not possible or not feasible to ask for help publicly. The issues eventually become public and go in the meetings. So what we've been doing has been to think of one or two community members that we think can handle it and email them. Most of the times this works, so that's a great thing. -- behdad http://behdad.org/ Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
Hello :) On 11/22/07, Anne Østergaard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Questions to the candidates: Will you apply for the position as new Executive Director for GNOME? No, I don't think so. Will you apply for any paid position within GNOME while serving as board member? No, if I'm elected that's because other members are willing to trust me to be on the Board for a given period of time and I think I should respect that and complete this time as long as it's possible (life always have surprises). Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? I will try to, the goal is to be there at 100% of the calls. I think my timezone helps (GMT-5) and also that I have flexibility with my free time. Can you accept competing official ISO standards? It's better to have just one, but if by some reason there's more than one, well we either reject one and leave part of our users out or we use both and give users freedom to choose. Similar to what others said in the first question-pack thread. What is your position towards official standards that do not meet the gennerally accepted definition of a free and open standard. Such as Microsoft OOXML? I don't like them :). I'm really mad when I receive documents in freedom unfriendly formats and when I open them they are all mutant and horrible, it's a shame to have this impossed over people that is not aware of the problem. So the answer would be no, I don't like this kind of stuff at all. Feel free to ask for clarification if I didn't understood any of your questions correctly. Diego ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
