Re: Board of Directors Candidacy - Thibault Martin

[Seif Lotfy via foundation-list]

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On Wed, 26 May 2021 at 12:46, Thibault Martin 
wrote:

> Hello GNOME Foundation,
>
> I am announcing my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors.
> You will find below the key points of who am I in the GNOME Community and
> what I would like to help with. For the full length wall of text, please
> have a look at the blog post announcing my candidacy
> 
> .
>
> Like many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user.
> I eventually started helping with translations. For this activity I have
> regularily been chasing maintainers for string freezes, or to ask for
> explanations when strings didn’t make sense for me.
>
> This helped me to *blend in, meet the more general community, and finally
> take interest in higher level issues* such as our infamous chat platforms
> split
> ,
> or co-organising the GSoC 2021. I have a very strong interest in people,
> groups of them, ethics, how software impacts them all and how proper
> governance can help to achieve goals.
>
> As a member of the board, I would focus on our internal and external
> communication, where we have a lot of room for improvement. *Attracting
> new contributors is essential*: our public face and the messages we send
> must resonate with their values. Once they are here, the bottleneck for
> their contributions must be removed: what they can do and where to do it
> must be clear, how to do it as well. While getting new recruits is
> extremely important for a project to stay in good shape, *sustainability
> cannot be achieved without taking care of long time contributors*.
>
> I am strongly biased towards *think for a bit but start doing quickly,
> ask around how it impacted others, and adapt* rather than overthinking. I
> believe KPIs are necessarily biased and get circumvented all the time. *Human
> interactions is how you measure success*.
>
> As the head of digital identity of a large organisation, I am experienced
> in projects aiming to lower the friction for customer onboarding. Quite
> counter-intuitively, many parallels can be drawn between corporate
> customers and non-profit contributors.
>
> Open-source software communities used to despise designers and thought
> they knew better. Now we welcome them and see the positive impact they
> have. A second mentality change needs happen: *we must allow the persons
> who are good at hyping others to help*.
>
> Regards,
> Thib
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Change in affiliation

[Seif Lotfy]

For some reason this was in drafts and not sent out.
November was my last month with Collabora. Thus no affiliation
Cheers
Seif
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Re: Questions about the new GNOME Forums

[Seif Lotfy]

While I do agree with some of your concerns, I do understand the need
of such a new communciation platform:
Google has been around and seems like it did not help us communication
with the community.

IMHO need either one or both of:
1) a central location for communication and people helping each other
== see ubuntuforums
2) a stackexchange like askubuntu which is also very popular.

Those two proved successful building a strong community behind Ubuntu.

So the requirement here would be having some gnome community members
to participate. And I think it is a very nice communication platform
since IRC and mailinglist have failed us.

I for one am a fan of stackexchange. But I think we should support the
idea of the forum for a while to see how it goes. Stackexchange is not
dialog friendly as a forum.

Cheers
Seif



On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 8:48 PM, William Jon McCann
william.jon.mcc...@gmail.com wrote:
 Hi Karen,

 On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote:
 ...

 I think newcomer users really expect to get information in the forum
 format, so I think it could be very useful. I guess we'll see what happens
 there in the meantime :)


 But perhaps more will get information from google.

 I think it is important to make high quality, trustworthy information
 available to search engines. It isn't clear to me at all that forums
 accomplish this without a *lot* of moderation. Which in itself can come
 across as heavy handed.

 Availability of this kind of information starts a virtuous cycle. While
 disseminating lower quality information can easily create an overload that
 makes things hard to correct later.

 Have we considered using something like Stack Exchange instead? Anyone have
 experience with it?

 Thanks,
 Jon

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Re: GNOME now

[Seif Lotfy]

Good points Brian :)
I like the last part this advanced UNIX-hacker type does not seem to
be the primary user GNOME is focusing on anymore.
May I ask you however to try to reply to each question with one
sentence if possible so I can create a small overview able chart
later?
Cheers
Seif

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 1:26 AM, Brian Cameron brian.came...@oracle.com wrote:

 I think one of the most significant challenges for any free desktop
 that is trying to reach the average user is how to deal with the fact
 that most people like using computers, tablets, smartphones, etc. to
 interact with non-free multimedia.  Not just viewing movies and
 listening to music, but also creating content in increasingly
 collaborative ways.  Tools that use non-free technologies like Skype or
 Vonage are not just popular, but a requirement for many people who pay
 for such services.  How many average people would purchase a device
 that did not support such tools?

 Proprietary companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft coordinate
 sophisticated agreements with media companies and often go along with
 nasty DRM agreements required by those who own the rights to popular
 media.  Even some popular artists, like The Beatles, are very
 controlling about who can access the media they control.  If you avoid
 DRM, you probably have to avoid such popular artists - including pretty
 much anything released on a DVD.

 In certain markets, not being able to access non-free media may not
 be a problem.  The device the FedEx employee uses to collect signatures
 or a Point-of-Sale system might be good examples of devices that
 do not need much media support.  Such markets might be an ideal focus
 for a free desktop environment that, perhaps naturally, lacks
 strong DRM support.

 But, if the average user is the target, how does GNOME plan to
 provide access to non-free multimedia that the average user tends to
 access and create?  Is the community working to make GNOME attractive
 to some big company that can negotiate the expensive licenses needed to
 provide access?  Or is GNOME focusing on users who do not have an
 interest in using, accessing or creating non-free media?  Is GNOME
 just waiting until relevant patents expire and these issue hopefully
 just go away?

 I always thought that GNOME more appealed to hacker types because
 hackers tend to be more agreeable to figuring out how to work in a
 DRM-free environment.  For example, a hacker would likely be more
 willing to rip their audio in OGG format.  But this advanced
 UNIX-hacker type does not seem to be the primary user GNOME is focusing
 on anymore.

 Brian



 On 11/14/12 11:08 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:

 On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 8:10 AM, Seif Lotfy s...@lotfy.com
 mailto:s...@lotfy.com wrote:

 Quoting Stormy Peters comment on a recent blog post concerning GNOME:
  We haven’t shared our vision or our roadmap for the future. Where’s
 the product going? What problem are we trying to solve? How are we
 going to do that?

 Good question.
 As a member of the board of directors I can't really answer this
 question at the moment either, without having to organize my thoughts.
 So many different point of views and ideas in the community that are
 not well discussed. The first thing that pops up in my head is GNOME
 OS. But then I am kinda lost. Maybe this is something we need to
 discuss here on the mailing list.
 Lets try to answer those 3 questions. What about one sentence per
 question for a start?
 I am avoiding a blog post since I am not sure its the best way to
 reach most of our contributors.


 For me, it's our byline right?  A distraction free desktop.  Our designs
 are all based on being able to write a desktop that allows us to get our
 work done, multi-task with whatever interruptions that we have in our
 daily life.

 Where are we going?  Are you talking about development or user land?

 What do other people think?

 sri

 Cheers
 Seif
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Re: GNOME now

[Seif Lotfy]

I am loving the replies until now. But can we try to keep this
focused. Can we try to answer the three questions with three short
answers.

[1] Where’s the product going?
[2] What problem are we trying to solve?
[3] How are we going to do that?

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 8:54 PM, Debarshi Ray rishi...@lostca.se wrote:
 What you say is not a vision. That's a what, not a why. Also, are we in
 the same business as Apple? Apple is in the business of challenging the
 status quo and thinking differently. ($:04 in the video) Are we?
 WHY are we doing GNOME?

 We are in the business of challenging the status quo in free software.

 Happy hacking,
 Debarshi

 --
 There are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming
 things and off-by-one errors.

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Re: A question for the candidates

[Seif Lotfy]

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Allan Day allanp...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hi all,

 Thanks to all the candidates for stepping forward. It's fantastic that
 you are interested in doing this important work.

 A question for you:

 Sometimes it can feel like the Board of Directors is a bit divorced
 from the rest of the GNOME project. Is this a problem, in your view?
 If it is, what do you think can be done about it?

 Thanks!

 Allan
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Hi Allan,

Thanks for the great question.
Before I give you an answer, I would like to empathize what great work the
board has been doing in the last years. From raising funds and our
financial capital to organizing hackfests and events, as well as pushing
for programs to get more contributors to GNOME, all this requires a big
amount of dedication and discipline. So I think a divorce from the project
is not the right description.

That being said, I understand where you are coming from. From a personal
point of view it seems to me that the board is so focused on *increasing*
our financial and social capital, that sometimes *maintaining* the social
capital is neglected. This leads to the observation of some that the board
as an entity not directly involved with the community and community
problems. To put it similar words to yours: It feels sometimes, that they
are divorced from the community (not from the project)

The board has been helping the community increase its social capital.
Getting new contributors takes time and effort to get them integrated, this
is where initiatives like OWP help alot.
But the board needs to focus a bit of its time and efforts on *keeping* new
and old contributors in the GNOME. This starts with the board getting
involved in community related issues and help fascilitate solutions to
ongoing disagreement. The board has been voted by the community, so I think
they represent a subset of the community that we trust.

Take the mailing-list from the last month. While some board members jumped
in to help solve the disagreements, I think it could have been solved much
quicker if the board had a meeting discussing the problem internally and
studying a way to solve the issue at hand.
As Bastien said before, it is not the board's responsibility to decide on
technical issues, or what application gets in or not. However I think the
board should step in when things seem to be rough and help *detect the
source of disturbance in the force*. By stepping in I mean, suggest having
a meeting, and then getting the parties involved to make a *clear* plan on
how the problem can be solved.

Ofcourse this can't be a long term responsibilty of the board. This is why
if I am elected, I will push for the formation of a community task force,
that would work on solving ongoing issues and negotiate between the parties
involved, as well as maintain a healthy communication atomsphere within the
community.
KDE already does this pretty successfully with its community working group.
This group is a point of contact for any community problem that might arise
in KDE. They've helped solve quite a few problems, among them the split of
KOffice and Calligra. Thanks to them they managed to keep both parties
inside KDE and the bad press around it was kept to a minimum. It took quite
some time but they managed to find a solution that worked for the whole
community without too much damage.

Cheers
Seif
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Apologies to GNOME

[Seif Lotfy]

It has been a very bumpy road for Zeitgeist with GNOME. I really don't
feel like going into details and history since this won't help us
proceed. I admit my part of the problem.

While I might not be the best developer around I do try to bring
something new to the table and I do hope that GNOME can see it at some
point. What started off as a GNOME project is now being endorsed by
Unity, KDE and lots of small community projects. We worked on being a
cross-desktop project with our roots in GNOME. I am not going to
debate what needs to be changed in Zeitgeist to be more GNOME friendly
(moving to git etc...) since its not fair for other deployments and
not fair for us as developers who are used to our work environment.
And while I might be the face of Zeitgeist the project has outgrown me
and we have lots hackers and contributors around, so please feel free
to get to know them.

So to sum it up:

Sorry we've disagreed about things or I've come across badly in the
past. I didn't mean to be impolite. just want to help bring some cool
features to GNOME and GNOME Shell. I hope we can have a clean start
and try and get along well from here

Cheers
Seif
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Re: A few questions for the candidates

[Seif Lotfy]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote:

 Hi,

 I originally wanted to have some questions included in the list of
 questions sent by the membership committee, but I feel like waiting for
 Friday while the voting period is already opened is waiting a long time
 and I'm not being patient here :-)

 I apologize because some of those questions are most likely a bit easier
 to answer for people who are already on the board...

 1) I've read with interest the mails from the candidates announcing
   they're running, and most (if not all -- I didn't double-check)
   include some motivations with examples of what they'd be interested in
 working on.
   Why are those tasks/ideas things you cannot work on while not being on
 the board?


Some of my points can be worked on without the board yet I missing the
overview in some areas and some others need official representatives from
companies or organizations. Being on board will ease the planning and and
organizing these meetings with set parties.



 2) What are your non-usual (ie, not code, not translations, not
   documentation, etc.) contributions as a GNOME Foundation member?
   (organizing events, pushing people to do things, finding sponsors,
   etc. are all possible answers)


If being a mentor for GSoC counts then yes. Else I only did coding.
(Does allowing Vincent to beat me in Mario Kart to boost his ego count?)


 3) What is your opinion on the co-location of Akademy and GUADEC in
   2011? And if you think it was not the best choice, will you still be
   able to help it happen?


I am actually for it since it motivates and pushes for cross-desktop
development and communication.



 4) How much free time per week do you think you will be able to allocate
   for the board? (I'm very well aware that this could be 0 for some
   weeks, and 100% of your time for other weeks; I'm just asking in
   general)


to be very honest i think 10 - 20 hours per week at maximum...


 5) Are you okay giving up some of your current GNOME
   responsabilities/activities to join the board? (give up a maintainer
   hat, or hack less, or participate less in a specific team) Or do you
   think it won't be necessary and why?
   (I know it's a bit related to the previous question :-))


I don't think I will be giving away responsibilities or activities since
most of the work I did or do is caught up by my team and maintained by
them... So my role with them is more or less organizational than coding. I
just chip in now and then with some prototypes and bugs for them to look at
and take in if they like.
I plan to do the same thing if elected for board, by motivating community
members to take actions and drive them into solving issues.


 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if
   elected? If yes, which role and why?


No not really, since I would rather observe people taking over these roles
first and learn from their experience



 7) What do you think of the current GNOME Foundation budget? Had you read
 it at least once before reading this mail?
   (it's okay if you didn't look at it before, btw)


I read it a week ago before deciding to run for candidacy (someone tipped me
to do so)  and while I am very surprised by the income and outcome, there
should be a security buffer of 20% at least... This is a point I think
should be discussed by the board and community.

8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about?
   (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-))


Help your app:
 By donating money to your favorite app you get   your name mentioned in a
new Thank you tab in the About dialog of an app.


 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an
   advisory board meeting there)


Yes



 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expresision?


The french bits of the Les Poissons song from the Little Mermaid


 Thanks,

 Vincent

 --
 Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.
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Je vous en prie,

Seif
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Re: Candidacy: Seif Lotfy

[Seif Lotfy]

Hi Olav,


 Hello Seif,

 Reading your motivation I think I understand what you mean, but would
 like to know for sure. As such, I'd appreciate if you could expand some
 more on your motivation. Further, though I think I understand, I'm
 purposely asking very open ended questions (to avoid suggestive ones).

 My goal is not to have a discussion on this with you or others, purely
 to better understand your motivation.


 On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 10:59:35AM +0200, Seif Lotfy wrote:
  Motivation:
 
   My reasons for running for GNOME board are as follows:


   • Encourage more cooperation on design between RH and Canonical.

 What do you mean concretely (design of what)? Why RH and Canonical
 specifically?


 I left out Intel, Nokia, Novell and others because their main focus now is
on Meego which on a design level I do not consider a GNOME project.
Currently RH and Canonical both have started their own design  user
experience to improve the usability of GNOME. Both however seem to be
heading to the same goal but with different designs that could on a shallow
level end up leaving GNOME in an diverging state (Shell vs Unity). Both
should start cooperating on the design level. One could start off with a
design board combining  selected and competent representatives from
community and companies, whose first objective is to rewrite the HIG.



   • Avoid fragmentation by helping to build consensus around a unified
  vision for GNOME's future to prevent a GNOME divergence into 2.30 -and
  GNOME 3 base.

 What do you think is lacking now?


What is lacking is a vision of what GNOME 3 should be. Where is it heading?
Who is the target of the GNOME 3 desktop? How is the current GNOME accepted
by the community. There seems to be some disagreements on several issues
concerning design and technical aspects, which are leading to frictions
between upstream and downstream development.


   • Bring up and fix issues with GNOME that are being ignored or
  shunned.

 Can you list these?


 I will just be frank here...
• Translation shifting from upstream to downstream ?
• Development infrastructure limiting upstream contribution.
• Canonical's Unity development, what does it mean for GNOME ?
• Red Hat's control over GNOME Shell ?
• Meego being a competition or a GNOME sister project ?
• Smaller companies involvement into GNOME decisions
• How much of GNOME is community driven and how much is company driven
• Is the GNOME community forced to assimilate with decisions made by those
companies?
• More...


   • Work on letting GNOME shell be lead by the community.

 Can you expand on what you want changed?


Currently all GNOME Shell decisions are taken by Red Hat, thus limiting the
community's technical as well as design contribution. I suggest starting a
technical board with equal amounts of  representatives of companies as and
community whose members are significantly competent for the roles. Those
should drive the technical development of GNOME Shell forward.



   • I stand for innovation in GNOME.

 What is lacking now, and what do want to do when being part of the
 board?


Recently GNOME has not been attracting many new developers. It is because
its current development state doesn't allow any new innovation to settle in.
GNOME being run mostly by people representing bigger companies no risks are
being taken and thinking out of the box is usually categorized as such.
While understandable it leaves GNOME in a state where a lot of
functionalities are desired but not deployable. Innovations are usually
brought up by smaller companies such as Collabora, Codethink, Landeo, Igalia
and others. We should allow them more responsibilities in decision taking
when it comes to GNOME's emerging technologies.


  Don't hesitate to ask me questions when the lines are open.

 done


Hope I answered your questions.



 --
 Regards,
 Olav
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Re: Candidacy: Seif Lotfy

[Seif Lotfy]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Johannes Schmid j...@jsschmid.de wrote:

 Hi!

   I will just be frank here...
  • Translation shifting from upstream to downstream ?
  • Development infrastructure limiting upstream contribution.
  • Canonical's Unity development, what does it mean for GNOME ?
  • Red Hat's control over GNOME Shell ?
  • Meego being a competition or a GNOME sister project ?
  • Smaller companies involvement into GNOME decisions
  • How much of GNOME is community driven and how much is company driven
  • Is the GNOME community forced to assimilate with decisions made by
  those companies?
  • More...

 OK, you were asked to list them. Anyway, why do you think there are
 true?

 * From my point of view as part of the gtp coordination team I think
 translations are not shifting downstream, we rather solved most of these
 problems and have high-quality upstream translations.


AFAIK there  are quite a few standing issues with GNOME arabic support.

http://wiki.arabeyes.org/Gnome
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/%D8%AC%D9%86%D9%88%D9%85
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420964

These are slightly out of date though.

* Why do you think our infrastructure is limiting?


The development happening on Launchpad (not bazaar) really beats what GNOME
provides in several aspects, starting bug management, blueprinting and
linking with branches. There are a lot of nice projects there that are not
part of GNOME because of the GNOME Infrastructure: GNOME Do, Docky, Getting
Things GNOME... These projects are in their own rights very successful and
used by the community. And by allowing them to deploy per default with GNOME
would just benefit the GNOME community...
The Project leads don't care since they are being deployed downstream now
which is more or less skipping the middle man which is GNOME, who seem to be
conservative in some of these aspects.
I am not saying we should switch to Lauchpad or so. But we need to study and
make an effort into compromising. Having major projects work downstream will
kill GNOME, and pointing fingers will not help.


 * For the company statements IMHO despite I don't know anything about
 the Unity plans I think those arent' true. Could you explain?


I am not saying its true but sooner or later RH will want to deploy GNOME
Shell on the netbooks just like Unity will at some point put an eye on the
desktop... Its naive to asssume both will not try to assume positions in the
netbook and desktop market...


 Thanks,
 Johannes





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Re: Candidacy: Seif Lotfy

[Seif Lotfy]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 10:40 PM, Johannes Schmid j...@jsschmid.de wrote:

 Hi!

  AFAIK there  are quite a few standing issues with GNOME arabic
  support.
 
  http://wiki.arabeyes.org/Gnome
  http://wiki.arabeyes.org/%D8%AC%D9%86%D9%88%D9%85
  https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420964
 
  These are slightly out of date though.

 Hmm, the bugs seem mostly fixed and I don't see what this has to do with
 upstream vs. downstream.

  * Why do you think our infrastructure is limiting?
 
 
  The development happening on Launchpad (not bazaar) really beats what
  GNOME provides in several aspects, starting bug management,
  blueprinting and linking with branches. There are a lot of nice
  projects there that are not part of GNOME because of the GNOME
  Infrastructure: GNOME Do, Docky, Getting Things GNOME... These
  projects are in their own rights very successful and used by the
  community. And by allowing them to deploy per default with GNOME would
  just benefit the GNOME community...
  The Project leads don't care since they are being deployed downstream
  now which is more or less skipping the middle man which is GNOME, who
  seem to be conservative in some of these aspects.
  I am not saying we should switch to Lauchpad or so. But we need to
  study and make an effort into compromising. Having major projects work
  downstream will kill GNOME, and pointing fingers will not help.

 Well, I see your point while I disagree.


  * For the company statements IMHO despite I don't know
  anything about
  the Unity plans I think those arent' true. Could you explain?
 
 
 
  I am not saying its true but sooner or later RH will want to deploy
  GNOME Shell on the netbooks just like Unity will at some point put an
  eye on the desktop... Its naive to asssume both will not try to assume
  positions in the netbook and desktop market...

 It's getting off-topic but would it be wrong to say that one company is
 working upstream while the other company is working downstream? Wouldn't
 the point be to have everyone work upstream? Seems like the new board
 should participate in this discussion regardless who is in the new
 board.


I would love to have the whole community discuss this issue... please wait
for my next mail



 Regards,
 Johannes



Cheers
Seif
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