Re: A question to candidates
Hi, 2007/11/23, Vincent Untz [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Le vendredi 23 novembre 2007, à 14:42 +0100, Murray Cumming a écrit : On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 01:18 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: [snip] 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. [snip] This is generally caused by the habit of only making decisions in meetings, instead of making decisions on the mailing list. And a tendency to think that all decisions must be unanimous. It works like this. Something is discussed. It becomes an unstructured debate and the meeting runs out of time. Someone says Well, let's make a decision at the next meeting. But everyone knows that nothing will be done in the meantime to make that more likely, and half the meetings are postponed (or don't have the relevant people attending). As Jeff mentioned, this year, we had quite a lot of decisions on the mailing list. But while it could have been done in 1-2 days, it sometimes take one week. This is what we can improve. Thanks Vincent and Jeff for clarifying this (saved me the time to write an explanation). That's exactly what I meant. :-) --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
On Nov 22, 2007 5:52 PM, Anne Østergaard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Questions to the candidates: 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? For those who don't know, before going to law school I did in fact indicate my interest in serving as the executive director. After having spent a bazillion dollars on law school, my interest in going directly into non-legal, non-profit work is... low :) So, no. Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? Having volunteered to be the secretary, obviously my goal is to attend all board calls. But as the other candidates have already noted, life comes at you sometimes, so inevitably some meetings are missed. Can you accept competing official ISO standards? 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? Jeff and Vincent have more than adequately addressed these- they are too vague for me to give more detail than they already have. Suffice to say that I believe deeply in free, innovative, and competitive standards, and I will act appropriately. I will note that I think that the recently released board statement is fairly balanced and appropriate, given the circumstances. Luis ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidacy: Jeff Waugh
quote who=Andrew Cowie On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 06:34 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote: * This year has been pretty tough for me as a Board member, as I've been starting a new business which has required a lot of time, I have been travelling a lot, and conference calls have been at a particularly bad time for me in Sydney. Do you have a plan to deal with the situation this coming year? Sorry, missed this mail until now... Yeah, I think the situation this year is different in a number of ways: * I'm not organising linux.conf.au this time around, and I failed to realise how much an impact that really had on almost the first half of last year. * There were some extremely demotivating personal issues in the GNOME community that I had to contend with last year, which led to a fairly long period of depression (mentioned in my blog a few months back). I can only hope this doesn't return. * Finally, the nature of the work Pia and I are doing in our business is changing a bit from frenetic startup stuff to more regular, ongoing projects... and *hopefully* less travel. I totally thought that would be one of the benefits of leaving Canonical... Unfortunately, I can't see the timezone thing changing too much. :-) - Jeff -- GNOME.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australia http://live.gnome.org/Melbourne2008 People keep asking me why we aren't married, and he says, 'Every time I am about to ask you, you do something annoying'. - Kate Beckinsale ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation
On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 02:02:49AM +0100, Olav Vitters wrote: On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 12:44:52AM +, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: Don't cry about people who criticize the Foundation's unconditional support for OOXML, you're pointing guns at your own feet (and in fact just took another shot). Nice trollish statement. Maybe, if you want to conviniently forget the «The more you guys keep playing the neutral game, the more you'll get abused like this.» part... Rui -- Hail Eris, Hack GNU/Linux! Today is Pungenday, the 36th day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3173 + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi + So let's do it...? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation
On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 12:44:52AM +, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: Don't cry about people who criticize the Foundation's unconditional support for OOXML, you're pointing guns at your own feet (and in fact just took another shot). Nice trollish statement. -- Regards, Olav ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
On Nov 22, 2007 12:11 PM, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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)? I think a lot of the other candidates have had good answers here with regards to non-hiring spending; in particular I've long thought travel and micro-meetings (especially geographically distributed ones like the newly proposed GNOME Asia Summit, and the various meetings in Latin America), and I proposed such spending at my very first board meeting (though it didn't happen, for understandable reasons.) I'd love to have a pro-active system administrator on staff, but I think a good ED would be a better first hire- they should be able to increase revenue, allowing us to hire a sysadmin later, which wouldn't be true in reverse. I've not been privy to the current ongoing job search, so I'm not sure why we haven't hired a post-Tim exec yet (bad job description? bad search policy? just lack of good candidates? etc.?) but obviously understanding that would be one of the first priorities of a new board, I'd think. 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 is hard for me to speak in specifics, given that I've been fairly out of the loop with the current board. As I've discussed on this list before, I do think that communication and delegation could be improved, but those are ongoing issues that must constantly be worked on, whether or not they are problems or strengths. Luis ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Hi, Jeff Waugh wrote: quote who=Murray Cumming This is generally caused by the habit of only making decisions in meetings, instead of making decisions on the mailing list. And a tendency to think that all decisions must be unanimous. A majority of the decisions this year were made on the mailing list, with a quorum consensus rather than majority. Plenty slipped through, and tougher decisions were deferred to meetings or ultimately not made, but largely due to team coherency issues more than anything else. There were *very* few times that the Board suffered from consensus gridlock this year, which is a good sign. Backing Jeff up here - in the two years since you were on the board, we made major steps forward in making decisions on the mailing list. I think this is one of the most positive aspects of the reduced board size I encouraged, mixed with a semi-formal mailing list voting policy we brought in while I was chairman. 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: A question to candidates
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)? As many of the other candidates, I also believe that we should spend money by promoting smaller events, specially the type of meetings that would bring a group of people who share the same interests and can tackle a determined task. The first of such meetings should be a board of directors meeting, so that we can nail thing down, bond and do some team building. Also, I believe that some of the money could and should be spent with a strong marketing campaign to help promote and attract new users, volunteers, and partners. As far as hiring, it is fairly hard to answer it without having a little bit of background of the roles and tasks to be performed, as well as the issues that led to the decision of hiring theses positions. Sure I can infer some of the needs and tasks to be performed by the titles, but as I have learned long ago, titles don't always mean anything. 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 seems to me that that current board had the best intentions and were prepared to accommodate and support user led events with financial support. However, one thing that came to my attention was that the information about this fund wasn't made as public and transparent as it should have. Also, it is my oppinion that like good investors, the board should be always in the look out for opportunities to promote the Foundation and augment out user base. Remember, our users are our best asset! There are some great markets to explore in South America, South and East Asia, to name a few. And if we cannot financially (or for whatever reason) make it to such places, we should seek out and tap on our contacts, helping them establish a plan of action to hold events. We should be the ones seeking for these opportunities and not assume that everyone knows about this possible financial resource and wait for them to come to us. Also, I feel that a little bit of public recognition to our past and current collaborators could do everyone a great deal of good! Sure, everyone who has ever helped in any way, shape or form has done it without the expectations of fame and success. But if I can point out the latest post by Olav[1] titled Stats as an example, it is a great example of some public recognition to those who spend a great deal of time down in the trenches. Take Daniel Nylander for instance. This guy has been atop the commit list, bug triage and translations for pretty much as far as I can remember. And he is only ONE of MANY doing some great work for GNOME. You know those mugs I just recently heard of that have been used as gifts to our partners? How about some type of recognition plaque for those who are doing some outstanding work for us? Or for those who are showing potential as a means to fuel their drive? Remember, our users (and obviously our collaborators and developers ARE our users too) are our biggest and most important asset! [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2007/11/21/stats/ 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: A question to candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 01:18 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: [snip] 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. [snip] This is generally caused by the habit of only making decisions in meetings, instead of making decisions on the mailing list. And a tendency to think that all decisions must be unanimous. It works like this. Something is discussed. It becomes an unstructured debate and the meeting runs out of time. Someone says Well, let's make a decision at the next meeting. But everyone knows that nothing will be done in the meantime to make that more likely, and half the meetings are postponed (or don't have the relevant people attending). So the result is that the decision waits for 4 weeks or more, and then probably waits again. By this time, anyone outside the board has probably given up, so the board just lets it drop. Nobody takes the blame for this at the moment, so it's easy to do. A firm chairman needs to stop this from happening. This doesn't happen all the time, but it happens a lot of the time. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Hi, Lucas Rocha wrote: After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2]. ... I think the best way to spend this money in 2008/2009 is: - To support (presential) activities that will facilitate contributors to move the desktop and platform forward. - To support activities that will streghten the local user groups around the world. It's worth noting that this is our money in the bank - the foundation will have revenue again next year from the advisory board, GUADEC, perhaps a little merchandising and other fundraising. In the past, it's been difficult to spend this money for a few reasons - people tend to not ask, or ask late, for funding, which makes it hard to budget and give a prompt response to requests, but also because not having an executive employee, the board tends to be a roadblock. For example, the board has included in the published budget a grant for a GTK+ summit, which GTK+ developers have never requested. Perhaps people expect the board to organise the thing as well as spend the money? Similarly, there are grants for an ISD meeting, an Accessibility summit. There are many more of these - but of $18000 budgeted for small team meetings, we haven't spent any. We also don't have big capital needs - we don't pay for bandwidth, hardware or hosting (thanks to the sponsorship of RedHat, Canonical, OSU OSL, Sun Microsystems, Intel, HP and others who contribute material and infrastructure). Our travel budget, outside GUADEC, is in the region of $20,000 per year. Just pointing out that on current trends, this kind of supporting activities and funding miniconfs isn't going to happen on its own. About the hiring, it really depends. At first sight, I would prefer to hire an executive director because it would have more impact on GNOME Foundation actions (marketing, business partnerships, conferences, etc). However, if we can't find a really good person for the position, I would prefer to hire a sysadmin. Of course, one thing doesn't necessarely exclude the other. I no longer believe that the board will be able to find and hire a satisfactory candidate (at our price point) on its own. I believe the next board should consider funding a head-hunter to get us pre-interview candidates. - We could be more pro-active on proposing actions to the community. You solve this by proposing actions. :-P I'm planning to propose some small developers summits to some maintainers. Sometimes little things like this are all that's needed - good idea. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation
On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 01:22:00AM +, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 02:02:49AM +0100, Olav Vitters wrote: On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 12:44:52AM +, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote: Don't cry about people who criticize the Foundation's unconditional support for OOXML, you're pointing guns at your own feet (and in fact just took another shot). Nice trollish statement. Maybe, if you want to conviniently forget the «The more you guys keep playing the neutral game, the more you'll get abused like this.» part... Don't change the subject. The statement I quoted is trollish. There is no need to say we are shooting at our own feet repeatedly. Especially without any argument (I do not mean just text in an email). The announcement was not neutral. -- Regards, Olav ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
Will you apply for the position as new Executive Director for GNOME? If elected to the Board, this will be my first time to learn the intricacies of the job and get acquainted with what such a role really implies. So it is fairly safe to say that I would not run for such position yet. :) Will you apply for any paid position within GNOME while serving as board member? I believe the answer for this one is the same as the one above. Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? I believe my time zone will allow me to be present at pretty much most meetings. also, the company I currently work for is very accommodating and understanding and I should be able to attend these meetings. Can you accept competing official ISO standards? Absolutely! I can see how having and supporting several ISO standards can be rough on those writing the code, but we should not close a door if we have a good percentage of users relying on such standards. However, we can definitely educate them about the ones we support that are free and hopefully win them over. This is why I'd like to see more support going for the guys behind Abiword, Glom, Gnumeric, Epiphany, etc... Open Office and Firefox are GREAT examples of good software but I happen to believe that we already have great software in our code base that has been delegated to second place. How about we promote a an event where people who are involved with the software mentioned before plus anyone who can be of help and offer insight can sit down and jot down what needs to be done in order to bring them out of the closet? Err... apologies for going off on a tangent. :) 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? As I had mentioned before, if we have a genuine need to support it, I'm 100% behind 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: A question to candidates
quote who=Murray Cumming This is generally caused by the habit of only making decisions in meetings, instead of making decisions on the mailing list. And a tendency to think that all decisions must be unanimous. A majority of the decisions this year were made on the mailing list, with a quorum consensus rather than majority. Plenty slipped through, and tougher decisions were deferred to meetings or ultimately not made, but largely due to team coherency issues more than anything else. There were *very* few times that the Board suffered from consensus gridlock this year, which is a good sign. - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australiahttp://lca2008.linux.org.au/ If your life was a movie, would you pay to see it? Would you pay to see an advertisement for it? - James Morris ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Hi Dave, 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... Ok. 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)? I think the best way to spend this money in 2008/2009 is: - To support (presential) activities that will facilitate contributors to move the desktop and platform forward. - To support activities that will streghten the local user groups around the world. About the hiring, it really depends. At first sight, I would prefer to hire an executive director because it would have more impact on GNOME Foundation actions (marketing, business partnerships, conferences, etc). However, if we can't find a really good person for the position, I would prefer to hire a sysadmin. Of course, one thing doesn't necessarely exclude the other. 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? Weak points: - Sometimes certain things get stalled because we (Board) don't get enough feedback (+1's or -1's) among us. We should have more effective ways of making those daily micro-decisions and getting things done more quickly. - We could delegate more often. When delegation is possible, the Board should have some sort of list of potential volunteers for certain types of actions. For example: business partnerships (Dave, Quim, Jonathan, ...), Artwork (Andreas, Jakub, Vinicius, ...), user group contacts, etc. Actually, I think I'll start doing this straight away. :-) - We could be more pro-active on proposing actions to the community. You solve this by proposing actions. :-P I'm planning to propose some small developers summits to some maintainers. Cheers! --lucasr ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Le vendredi 23 novembre 2007, à 11:58 +0100, Dave Neary a écrit : For example, the board has included in the published budget a grant for a GTK+ summit, which GTK+ developers have never requested. Perhaps people expect the board to organise the thing as well as spend the money? Similarly, there are grants for an ISD meeting, an Accessibility summit. There are many more of these - but of $18000 budgeted for small team meetings, we haven't spent any. That's why we explicitly asked people if there are some face-to-face meetings they'd like to have next year and gave some examples. If nobody proposes such meetings, the current board already has many ideas of what we could do so we could ask the relevant people if they're interested (ie, be more proactive). (also I'm not sure why you mention GTK+ developers never requested a GTK+ summit: it seems to me they did) 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
quote who=Vincent Untz (also I'm not sure why you mention GTK+ developers never requested a GTK+ summit: it seems to me they did) It's sort of in the middle -- they wanted to do one, but never really came to the Board for support. We've always been 100% behind helping though! I'm going to spend some time putting together a GNOME Mobile summit, which I hope will be an appropriate venue for a GTK+ development meeting too. - Jeff -- GNOME.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australia http://live.gnome.org/Melbourne2008 If I can't be near you I would rather be adrift in space. - Neil Finn, Try Whistling This ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A question to candidates
Le vendredi 23 novembre 2007, à 14:42 +0100, Murray Cumming a écrit : On Fri, 2007-11-23 at 01:18 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: [snip] 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. [snip] This is generally caused by the habit of only making decisions in meetings, instead of making decisions on the mailing list. And a tendency to think that all decisions must be unanimous. It works like this. Something is discussed. It becomes an unstructured debate and the meeting runs out of time. Someone says Well, let's make a decision at the next meeting. But everyone knows that nothing will be done in the meantime to make that more likely, and half the meetings are postponed (or don't have the relevant people attending). As Jeff mentioned, this year, we had quite a lot of decisions on the mailing list. But while it could have been done in 1-2 days, it sometimes take one week. This is what we can improve. Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
