Re: Concerns about the election process
On Sun, 2006-26-11 at 20:18 -0600, Gabriel Burt wrote: On 11/26/06, Behdad Esfahbod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What he's saying is that, suppose you voted for me, Quim, Federico, Dave, Bastien, Luis, and Jeff, and were given the anonymous token 0bhnyOzwLJ05jYV2phjusfe0jBYO3HZf. How do you make sure that no one else who voted for the same seven candidates received the same anonymous token? I misunderstood. This could be solved by printing the token and the date/time that the vote was received, couldn't it? This solution would reduce the degree of the problem, but you still have the (less likely) problem of people voting for the same candidate around the same date/time. It's really much easier to simply allow the user to provide their own token. Is this information being logged so it could be used in this election? Another way could be to publish a list of people who voted, and people can check they are listed there, and compare the number of voters to the number of votes listed. This doesn't help the problem at all since it still doesn't convince me that my token belongs uniquely to me unless you put each person's token on the list beside their name (which destroys voter anonymity). Cheers signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Candidacy: Ryan Lortie
name: Ryan Lortie nick: desrt affiliation: Codethink Limited I am announcing my intention to run as a candidate in the upcoming election for the board of directors. (( me )) I've been around the GNOME project for a bit more than half a decade. I started in some rather user-facing parts of the desktop and quickly moved down the stack. Recently, I spend most of my days hanging out on D-Bus and messing around with GLib. I created GVariant, dconf and GSettings and have had a hand in some other technologies used in GNOME such as GVFS, the GIO networking APIs, GDBus, GApplication and many others. I've avoided running for the board in the past because I'm the sort of person who doesn't like meetings and I've always been a bit disorganised. I'm generally happier when I'm hacking on something. I'm running now because I have a platform (that you may or may not agree with). (( the platform )) The GNOME project is at a singularly interesting point in its history. We just shocked the world with the level of quality of the GNOME 3.0 release. Few would disagree that we are going through a period of growth and change as a project, but it seems that there is some disagreement on exactly what that means. For a while the foundation board has largely taken a hands-off approach when it comes to technical decisions. In my opinion this has allowed a number of problems to develop. I believe that GNOME is in need of strong and coordinated technical governance, firmly rooted in the structure of the community. I want to start a discussion about the best way to make this happen. I strongly support the GNOME philosophy of maintainers having control over their own modules. I believe, however, that this situation occasionally causes friction when trying to push large changes to the platform and desktop. There have also been cases when outsiders to the project have encountered problems with a particular maintainer and felt that they have no recourse. I want to investigate methods by which we can balance maintainer autonomy with the benefits of more coordinated technical leadership. Finally, I'm interested in the strength of GNOME as a community project. I think community projects are at their best when the power to control the future of the project lies clearly within the community and not consolidated within a single entity. I believe this is another argument for strong community technical governance. (( in summary )) Please don't vote for me because you recognise my name and think that I wrote some nice software or because the other candidates don't have as nice of a free t-shirt collection. I expect the ideas here to be a bit controversial. I'm happy to provide clarification on my thoughts. Please only vote for me if you believe that I am right. Thank you ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidacy: Ryan Lortie
[removing foundation-announce from the cc:] hi Allan, On Mon, 2011-05-23 at 14:59 +0100, Allan Day wrote: * Do you have any concrete ideas of what 'strong and coordinated technical leadership' would involve? It sounds very nice and all, but I'd like to hear some specifics before I cast my vote. ;) I think it's premature to say this is the solution which is why I've limited myself to identifying a (perceived) problem. I am simply stating that we should move in a direction of more coordinated technical decision-making. That said, it's true that I've had some ideas of how this *might* look. The most obvious solution to me is the creation of a technical board, directly elected with membership restrictions by affiliation (basically, just like the foundation board). This board (in conjunction with the release team) would be actively involved in the feature planning that takes place at the start of each cycle. The board would necessarily improve communication between the hackers of different companies serving on it. It would also serve a 'crisis response' role by acting as the point of contact for people who feel that they've hit a brick wall with a maintainer or when a long annoying technical debate is going on in the community with no clear consensus. The scary part: this board would be given a stick: the ability, by supermajority (2/3rds?), to veto maintainer decisions. Of course there is quite a debate about if it's desirable (or even possible) to use the stick in certain situations. The hope is that maintainers would generally respect the decisions of the technical board. Peer/community pressure alone may be enough here. The board would also clearly be aware of its own limitations and would act accordingly. Another possibility is to empower the release team, identify them as the 'crisis response' point of contact and ask them to be more proactive with respect to the above listed situations. After discussions with Frederic Peters, it is unclear if some of the existing members of the release team would be comfortable with these new roles. * If you are elected, you will have to fulfill your role as a board member, yet you have not mentioned anything to do with your suitability for this post. Indeed, it almost makes me think that you are unsuitable for the position! So, do you think you will be able to do a good job in the day to day running of the Foundation? I would not take election lightly. I understand that the board was reduced to seven people to give each member more of a sense of individual ownership of the business of the board and this is a responsibility that I would take quite seriously. As mentioned in my candidacy statement, I'm not the most organised person I know. I am quite good, however, at taking on a task and getting it done. * I presume that your candidacy is an attempt to gain a mandate for the changes you are proposing, yet I wonder whether it will count for much without the support of the release team and maintainers. Have you had any discussions with either of the above about your ideas? I've been loosely discussing this topic with very many people over the past year and a half or more. Most discussion that I've had on this topic has been in person at events. I've talked to quite some maintainers, the former release manager and the new release manager. I've also talked to at least one other member of the release team. I've also talked to our downstreams and other outsiders to the project about their problems. By and large, the impression I get from most people when discussing this is that they believe that a problem exists and that we should solve it. Individual maintainers tend to believe (more or less) that since they are not part of the problem, the solution is unlikely to impact them in a negative way. Some maintainers have expressed scepticism about the negative impact that this proposal might have on maintainer motivation (or the motivation of their employers). It's possible that my selection of conversation partners is not representative of the project. * Following on from the above: do you think that you personally need to be on the board for these changes to take place? Why not just get a discussion going and come up with a plan? Very many of the people that I've talked to about this issue (particularly recently, due to the timing) suggested that I run for the board so that I could advance this issue. I agree that my election to the board would not be strictly required to this end. At the same time, this is not the only issue that motivates me to want to be a member of the board. My rushed candidacy statement certainly focused on this issue, but it's not like it would be my only concern. I did intend to start a discussion. Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidacy: Ryan Lortie
hi Philip, (keeping in mind that creating a technical board is very much an open question) On Mon, 2011-05-23 at 19:48 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote: - Will all foundation members get a single vote? That was indeed my intention. I think your other proposals are too difficult to implement and possibly even undesirable. Do you have some others ideas about how it might be possible? Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Candidates question: Contributor agreement
hi Olav, On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 12:01 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote: Given that we already have a policy on copyright assignments[1], I wondered what is your position regarding contributor agreements[2]? Should the board do something with contributor agreements and if so, what should be done? First let me say that I believe that contributor agreements and copyright assignment, in practise, tend to be functionally equivalent. For this reason, I think they deserve equal treatment. I think our current policy on copyright assignment is excessively wishy-washy. I'd actually be in favour of a new policy: No. External dependencies are one thing, but I feel very strongly that any sort of legal agreement as a precondition to participate in the development of software that is considered part of the GNOME project is completely unacceptable. There are two reasons for this: First, GNOME is a community project. It belongs to the community. I fundamentally disagree with any company ever having exclusive rights over 'their corner'. It's totally incompatible, in my opinion, with the very concept of a true community free software project. Second, I think that having a legal document as a barrier to entry to contribute to GNOME (or part of it) is undesirable. One of the best things about our project is the low barriers that typically exist between different modules. Our commit access reflects this philosophy: it's easy to get in, and once you're in, you're in. Erecting artificial barriers would very much be moving backwards here. Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for all board candidates
hi Jeff, On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 05:43 -0700, Jeff Schroeder wrote: 2.) Other open source / free software projects run their meetings in the open via IRC (such as Fedora's FESCO I believe). Would you consider that, and if not, what about recording how board members vote on a given topic. This includes +1 / -1 / abstains and perhaps give a small comment on any -1 or abstain. In my opinion, as an open foundation, the transparency of the board is absolutely critical _where possible_. Leaders should always set the example for members. I do believe that privacy in board meetings has its benefits. It allows for discussion of sensitive topics where the personal privacy of another is concerned (hiring choices, reimbursements, etc). It also allows for frank discussion on public matters between members of the board. If the meetings were opened up to the public, these discussions would simply be driven to back-channels, and I don't believe that to be a net improvement. That said, the transparency of any elected body to its electors is important. The detailed minutes that we receive of each board meeting have been quite good and I believe this to be a sufficient mechanism. In essence, I have no problem with the status quo on this topic. Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
hi Andy, On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 11:10 -0700, Andy Tai wrote: As Fedora is the only current GNU/Linux distribution adapting GNOME 3.0 as the default desktop, how would you facilitate to make GNOME technologies to work well (meaning minimal local patching needed) on other GNU/Linux distributions like Debian, and such distributions which may work on components competing with certain parts of GNOME, such as Ubuntu? And how would you facilitate to make GNOME 3 run well on other free OS environments, especially the BSD based ones, like OpenBSD and FreeBSD? From a technical standpoint, I believe these issues to be outside of the duties of the foundation board. Personally, I put a good deal of effort into insuring that our software ports to non-Linux platforms and I think that the effort is worth it. Just yesterday I was consulting with the OpenBSD project about how a change to GLib might effect them and I installed a Windows VM to check that the change didn't have a negative impact there. I'm willing to put the extra effort in because I don't believe that we gain a whole lot by ignoring other platforms. And how would you facilitate collaborations with Ubuntu, especially, despite the different viewpoints of developers on issues like GNOME Shell vs. Unity? I have a somewhat privileged vantage point here, having attending the past 11 Ubuntu developer summits. As far as I'm concerned, our projects have gone separate ways. There is no hope, at this point, for a Unity/GNOME merger or anything of the sort. I don't consider Unity to be part of GNOME in any way, nor do I think that it ever will be. I believe, though, that we still have responsibility to Ubuntu as a downstream project. They are a lot like Nokia was, in my mind -- using GNOME technologies to implement an alternate user experience. As users of our software, we should treat them well. One thing that very many people at Canonical have told me is that they are unsure about how the GNOME project views them and what they can expect from us. They are particularly unsure about if our developer platform is meant only for GNOME OS or if it welcomes outside uses and takes their needs into consideration. I think that as a project we should clarify our positions to them and our expectations of them. A lot of the damage coming from silly blog posts and comment threads is a result, partially, of unclear communication on our part. I think that the greatest advantage that we could gain from our relationship with Ubuntu at this point is their use and promotion of GNOME as a developer platform. Mark wants 200 million devices running Ubuntu -- a concern which probably isn't shared by a lot of GNOME hackers. Those 200 million devices will attract external developers, though, and if those developers are using the GNOME platform, I think we're all better off for it. Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Boston Summit: We're going to Montréal!
Hello foundation members, Despite some heroic efforts by Colin and Karen, we were unable to acquire a venue in Cambridge for this year's Boston Summit. Fortunately, some kind folks from Collabora jumped in and offered to help organise the event in Montréal. We've been furiously phoning around to hammer out the details over the past couple of days and I'm happy to announce that it's now official. The summit will occur, in Montréal, over the usual Canadian Thanksgiving (US Columbus Day) long weekend. Book your tickets now. The dates are Saturday October 8 to Monday October 10. There was some talk about a Gtk hackfest being co-located with the summit, but this will not happen. The venue for the summit is the École Polytechnique de Montréal. The venue is well served by the Metro (station Université-de-Montréal on the blue line). The hotels are very inexpensive compared to Cambridge (many available for less than $100/night and almost nothing over $200). Montréal Trudeau Airport (YUL) is the natural choice for those arriving by plane. Montréal is also about a 5 hour drive from the Boston area. As of 2009, a passport is required for those entering Canada by car. Montréal is a beautiful city with a lot of history. Anyone who has some vacation time to burn would be well-advised to stay a few days extra. See more information on Wikitravel: http://wikitravel.org/en/Montreal A big thank you to Colin Walters and to Collabora for their efforts in Cambridge and Montréal, respectively. Look forward to seeing you all there! -- Ryan Lortie (on behalf of the board of directors) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Mission Statement
hi meg, On Thu, Aug 7, 2014, at 11:18, meg ford wrote: I don't think it's relevant. GSoC is also outside of the mission statement, though as I said before I think there are allusions to outreach in the Charter. I think the discussion should focus on what is relevant, which is how the Foundation should deal with the financial and administrative aspects of the program. Otherwise we can also lump in any other outreach we do to new contributors, which I think would be odd, since FOSS does rely on contributors and internship programs are a good way to recruit them. I certainly agree that attracting new contributors is an absolutely essential part of ensuring the survival of any free software project, and I even believe that in terms of how the program is structured, OPW's format is more effective at creating long-term community members than is GSoC (due to the more 'internship' nature rather than the 'complete a project' nature of GSoC). I think there are two fundamental differences between GNOME's involvement in GSoC and GNOME's administration of OPW, which make all the difference: The first is that we are not handling the sending of payments to students in GSoC, so the amount of work we do here is much smaller. The second (and more important) is that our participation with GSoC is limited to interaction with students who are all directly contributing to furthering our own goals of creating GNOME: people who will (hopefully) become members of our community. Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Ryan Lortie
karaj, I am announcing my candidacy for the board of directors. If elected, this would be my second time on the board. I have been a GNOME developer during many years, mostly on lower-level things. I am currently affiliated with Canonical where I am in the desktop team, mostly in context of working on the GNOME technologies that are also used in our products. I am happy to answer any questions that you may have about how I would represent you on the board of directors. Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
