Re: More questions for Board candidates
Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? It depends on what you mean by fundraising. I've worked on the Friends of GNOME through my participation in the Engagement Team, and have ideas in that area that I'd be interested in pursuing if I was elected. There have also been a small number of occasions where I've had to ask around for money, such as trying to get sponsors for events I've organised, or for initiatives I have been involved in. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? I think I could do this in the context of the board. That said, I'm not sure I'd be the best choice, as I probably wouldn't be as assertive as some others. Have you ever been in a manager role? I do informal project management as a part of my day-to-day work, but I've never formally managed employees or members of a team. That said, while I don't have direct experience, I do have some relevant experience, and this is something that I am interested in and I think I could be good at. Do you have any experience talking to reporters? Yes - I've given interviews, responded to press queries, and written press releases. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? Yes - this is a subject that I've addressed in talks I've given, and it is also something that I have read and written about a fair bit. Allan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
2015-05-21 23:25 GMT+02:00 Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org: Have you ever done any fundraising? I took an active part on the GNOME vs Groupon's fundraising campaign the GNOME Foundation launched the past year. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? Yes as in making sure the sponsors do actually know why they should trust us and our mission and donate. We can do this is many ways and Jeff's initiative on the Sysadmin's brochure is one of these cases. In the eventuality the funds for the Sysadmin position will end the virtual sponsors should know what has been achieved, how and what have been the benefits of both the community and the representatives of the company / organization itself with their daily use of the GNOME Infrastructure. What I'm comfortable in - summarizing - is asking for money while providing a good rationale (and documentation, past achievements and results of the Board / other GNOME team) about why external entities should donate to our cause. Have you ever been in a manager role? No, but I've been coordinating the GNOME Infrastructure and the GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee since several years now hopefully providing a good service for the GNOME community and membership. Do you have any experience talking to reporters? Some, my personal background includes a degree in law which helped me a lot handling several legal matters we had to face during this term. On this side I was interviewed by the World Trademark Review online magazine [1]. Additionally - if that matters - I've been part of the press myself for several months as a technical freelance writer [2] writing about anything GNU / Linux and FOSS related. Additionally I took part writing / reviewing / co-writing some PRs for the GNOME Foundation back in the days. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? I did in many occasions during conferences I participated in as a speaker. Talks there were technical but I always made sure to introduce my speech mentioning the fact the software / tool in question was completely Open Source and licensed under a free software-compliant license. [1] http://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/Blog/detail.aspx?g=9df9d63a-417f-4a95-88b2-d781008a47f3 [2] http://www.oneopensource.it (italian website) -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator, GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
Le jeudi 21 mai 2015 à 17:25 -0400, Karen Sandler a écrit : I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? Have you ever been in a manager role? Do you have any experience talking to reporters? Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? Short answer: [x] Yes to all Fundraising includes: preparing the campaign for Pitivi, shooting and editing videos for local non-profits (including the Québec equivalent of the FSF+EFF, and a professional symphonic orchestra run by a foundation), possibly some others I'm forgetting (besides everyday business advice, that is). I've also been talking to adboard members and possible sponsors for specific GNOME initiatives, over email/by phone/in person. Talking with reporters: dealt with them on a few occasions, from afar and up close. Co-wrote various press releases. Did press review work for a client where I would monitor what is being said about an entire industry—locally and worldwide—across a few hundred news sources and provide a digest everyday by 7 AM (remember when I had to excuse myself from one of the sessions at GUADEC last year? That was why…). Been in a TV newsroom twice, though not as the one being interviewed in front of the cameras. The rest is pretty much visible on my personal homepage :) ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
Hi Karen, Thanks for your questions! On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? Not really; I have only marginally been exposed to this aspect during my work so far. I have some small experience participating in the organization of local events from when I was in university. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? I believe I would feel comfortable doing this, despite not being something I have a lot of experience with. My level of comfort also would probably depend on the purpose of the sponsorship and how closely I can relate to it. Have you ever been in a manager role? That has never been my job title, though in more recent years I started taking on project/team lead responsibilities. Do you have any experience talking to reporters? Only very little, mostly related to some PR efforts I participated to in my work experience at Endless. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? Yes. In addition to presenting to free software conferences like GUADEC, I have been involved in initiatives from local user groups in Italy, even though not in recent times. I pitched the importance of free software many times and to very different audiences, both in professional and personal settings. Cheers, Cosimo ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
Hi, On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 11:25 PM, Karen Sandler ka...@gnome.org wrote: Have you ever done any fundraising? Only a little, trying to get local sponsors for various local events. For GUADEC this turned into getting a small local company to pay for the pastries. I wouldn't say it's something I'm good at. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? Not really. Have you ever been in a manager role? Yes, both at work and in a volunteer environment. Do you have any experience talking to reporters? A little, mostly talking to local press when I was manning a booth at various events or when I was advertising an event I was organising. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? Yes, I have had several occasions to do that, for instance with groups of students at the University where I have taught, or at some non-software related events where I was at the booth of my local LUG. This is also a topic I like to bring up when I meet new people and they ask me what I do for a living, which happens quite often. -- Alexandre Franke ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
Hi Karen, - Original Message - | I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has | been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board | have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to | answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few | people on the board have some background in these areas... | | Have you ever done any fundraising? No | | Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? I think it would be challenging for me, given that I never did it. | | Have you ever been in a manager role? No | | Do you have any experience talking to reporters? No | | Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is | important? Only socially, like I guess most of us sometime did :) | | karen | | | ___ | foundation-list mailing list | foundation-list@gnome.org | https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list | As you can see, I wouldn't be the best in this role on the board, although I like to learn and improve my skills and I would like to try this as well. Cheers, Carlos Soriano ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
Hi Karen, Thanks for your questions. Responses inline: Have you ever done any fundraising? Yes, although not on such a scale as I would expect a GNOME director will have to take on. More like a few small fundraisers for various charities and perhaps more recently, some of you may remember that I managed to raise funds to attend the GSoC summit in San Jose from Edinburgh. I had initially accepted that invitation with absolutely no idea whatsoever how I would be able finance any of it, but I never doubted for a second that things would fall to place - which they did :D I am fairly confident that the demands of fundraising for GNOME are not likely to be a big a learning curve, as long there is a strong team of motivated people involved. Overall, I am very keen to work with others to develop fundraising strategies, so we can better support the work of the GNOME community and I would be keen to do my bit to ensure we make measurable progress on this front. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? Absolutely. We at GNOME all work hard, collectively investing the skills and ideas which build this project into something which sponsors are desperate to be associated with. If elected, then I feel it would be my duty to work on behalf of those contributing members who form GNOME and I would feel very comfortable negotiating favourable terms on behalf of the community. Have you ever been in a manager role? I won't list out my CV ;-) but the short answer is: in various ways, yes… Mostly through charity, campaigns and advocacy volunteer work, but I also freelanced professionally in events before I came to Edinburgh which had me supervising others at times, as well as going through all the fun of having to be responsible for my own accounts. I could probably go on about this but I am reluctant to overdo it without further prompting. Just to say, I have a fair understanding of where my skills, abilities and interests lie. Please free to ask me to elaborate or clarify anything if you are particularly interested in finding out about, though! Do you have any experience talking to reporters? A little bit: I was interviewed by the BBC for news at 6 when Nicola Sturgeon was elected leader of the SNP and also recently quoted in the student newspaper regarding wellbeing at the College of Science and Engineering. Overall, I probably still need to polish up for this sort of thing but I am quite lucky in that I am able to access some relevant training, where I am. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? Yes, a quite few times now. The most recent one was a presentation at EdLUG about GNOME accessibility. Again, I still feel like I need to practice but that last talk went pretty well by all accounts and people seemed to be really engaged, asking lots more questions than I had expected they might, which was very encouraging. Thanks again for these questions! Magdalen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
More questions for Board candidates
I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? Have you ever been in a manager role? Do you have any experience talking to reporters? Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
Hi, On 05/21/2015 02:25 PM, Karen Sandler wrote: I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? Yes. I've been a technical resource during both fund-raising and acquisition stages of multiple start-ups. I've also done deep dives with potential investors. Determining what technology to focus on can be crucial to fund-raising. I do not have experience sourcing new income (with the exception of the Builder crowd-funding), however this is something I'm increasingly interested in. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? I am. I'm comfortable discovering the reasons it is in their best interest to do so. It's not always obvious how important our stack is to various current and potential sponsors. Have you ever been in a manager role? I have not, other than my time as a maintainer of various projects. While these are different roles, encouragement and fostering growth are key to the success of either. Do you have any experience talking to reporters? To a degree. My experience has been with ensuring they have the information necessary to write articles and less about press releases. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? I regularly take part in both Free and Open Source software outreach in the San Francisco area. I've spoken to small (a couple people) and large (100+ people) and am comfortable with both. Thanks! -- Christian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 05:25:51PM -0400, Karen Sandler wrote: I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? Yes, in various aspects, including conference sponsorship and donations to organizations. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? Yes. The worst you can hear is no. (Well, if you're too annoying with an existing sponsor you can lose them, but reasonable and infrequent requests don't normally constitute too annoying.) Have you ever been in a manager role? I've never been a people-manager, but I've been in technical leadership roles and provided direction and support to large groups of people. More generally, I've been in roles where I need to think about people, business, and products, in addition to technology. (I currently have such a role.) Do you have any experience talking to reporters? Some. As part of addressing the Groupon issue, I helped work with the press to publicize GNOME's fundraising and legal campaign. I've also done small-scale press interviews/articles/etc, though only on the scale of LWN rather than CNN. :) Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? Yes. I've given presentations and speeches (both formal and informal), as well as various writings and emails, on topics including software patents, licensing, DRM, the DMCA, FOSS, and many other similar issues. I also generally make a point of saying Free Software, or at the very least FOSS, rather than just Open Source. - Josh Triplett ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: More questions for Board candidates
On Thu, 2015-05-21 at 17:25 -0400, Karen Sandler wrote: I have a few questions for the candidates too. I agree with what has been said by Jeff and Josh that it's important that people on the board have a diverse skillset, so I wouldn't expect all board members to answer yes on these, but I think it's good to know if at least a few people on the board have some background in these areas... Have you ever done any fundraising? Yes. For the last year and a half, I was involved with a group trying to open a grocery cooperative in my neighborhood. We sold over a thousand shares to neighbors and raised a million dollars, making it the fastest growing co-op startup in the country. That work is still ongoing, though I've taken a more passive role lately. I'm very proud of the work we did. I also drum up sponsorship for the Open Help Conference every year. It's not a lot of money, comparatively, but it's a lot of work to make it happen and not drain my pocketbook. Are you comfortable asking sponsors for money? I'm more comfortable with it now than I was five years ago. Honestly, it's not my favorite thing to do. I'd rather do conference logistics and let somebody else track down money. But I can do it, and I do do it. Have you ever been in a manager role? I've been in a project lead role, where I've been responsible for telling people what to do. But I've never been in a role where I'm responsible for performance evaluations. Do you have any experience talking to reporters? A bit. I was interviewed a few times for the co-op, and participated in some press conferences. Have you ever talked to a group of people about why software freedom is important? I haven't done it in a formal setting, such as a presentation. But I've frequently talked to groups of friends or colleagues about why I care about free software, and why they should as well. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
Le lundi 19 mai 2014 à 11:19 -0700, Jim Nelson a écrit : Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) I tend to think that corporate donations are desirable for many reasons. I doubt I need to go at length here to point out that a handful of corps with marketing/charity/RD budgets are easier to target and convince than a thousand individuals working hard to earn every penny, that GNOME needs an ecosystem that includes not just hobbyists but also people who are paid to do maintenance professionally, and so on and so forth. I don't yet have a magical answer for an easy new funding model for GNOME (if it was so easy, there wouldn't be any problems to fix), but as part of my duties I would like to brainstorm and explore new venues. Just from the top of my head: - Check the possibility for grants from public institutions and look into corporate sponsors from outside our traditional circles, instead of limiting ourselves to our current corporate ecosystem. - Humble Indie Bundle-style in-app-store donations system, though there was some legal/technical problem with that idea, I forgot which, maybe someone here remembers? Otherwise I ought to ask hughsie again. - Online services for individuals - Out-of-the-box fundraising schemes. We might have some surprises there. However funny that might sound at first glance, I've seen golf tournaments (and other event types) providing massive amounts of funds to some non-profits. - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story - Untapped potential, like the privacy fundraising initiative - Other fancy ideas that may arise ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
Hiya Jim! On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org wrote: Hello everyone, Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) Corporate sponsorship tends to bring in a lot of money in and it is always beneficial to be able to increase that. If you wanted to do grass roots based fundraising, that would require setting up a better donation system than we have now. We can definitely do better, and the board has had some discussions about alternative systems last year. Some people have suggested using flattr or some other method of micro-payments that could bring in revenue. I think I threw out something about tying donations to bug fixes. You could setup marketing calls to various companies who might be using our stack and ask for donations that way for smaller amounts like 1000 dollars or 5000 dollars. In general, they do okay, but they won't be very large. You need to grow the audience to really take advantage of that strategy. Another idea might be to take advantage of funding opportunities like grants from the government or companies. We don't necessarily have to make a technology argument, we could focus on programs like OPW or our underlying philosophy of freedom. We are after all a philanthropic organization, we could make that argument. Here is a grant application from JP Morgan as an example: http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Corporate-Responsibility/grant-programs Of course this one is corporate, but I'm sure we can find others. Another idea is to fundraise at conferences, and not necessarily our tech ones. Most of fundraising is about making 1:1 connections and then making a compelling argument. sri -- Jim ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 23:08 +0200, oliverp wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 11:19 -0700, Jim Nelson wrote: Hello everyone, My questions for the candidates is: Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) Good question, thanks for asking. I think the first priority for the Board must be to focus on stabilizing the current sensitization. make sure invoices are paid for the OPW etc. Then I think much work can be done together with the community in both areas you mention (corporate sponsorship and personal donations). Long term, more methods can be considered. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote: I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a Foundation, even with an ED, we have lim limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most effectively. I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative founders which has informed some of my views on it. http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started a discussion [1] about how the Foundation can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added the post it to the wiki). I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team want to collaborate closely with the Board in this. 1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html 2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
In my previous email responding to Kat, I touched on this very subject. First and foremost we need to determine two things: 1) How much money we are currently spending on what, and what is truly needed. 2) How much money is currently coming in, and from where - this should be broken down into categories - individual donations, and at least the top 5-10 corporate donors ought to be listed along with how much they have been and are giving. Then we should move on to determining how we can raise donations from individuals and small businesses. Donors should not have to search the website to figure out how to do so - a small, but prominent link to 'Contribute to GNOME!' would not be out of place on the site. Currently it takes at least 3 clicks to arrive at a site where you can donate - and your only choice for doing so is via paypal. Why don't we accept other payment options? Is it just that nobody has bothered to set it up? If that is the case, we should be asking for help doing so. At the very least, we should accept payments from google, facebook and amazon, and we should at least consider accepting bitcoins as well. Finally, there are other funding options available online - a quick search reveals numerous websites with ideas on how to more effectively raise funds. Utilizing every tool available to us to raise money from individuals should be our first priority. Only after we have fully explored these options should we go back to asking for yet more corporate money. Emily Gonyer On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:28 AM, oliverp oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48 +0200, oliverp wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 22:02 -0400, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote: I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a Foundation, even with an ED, we have lim limited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most effectively. I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative founders which has informed some of my views on it. http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source That is a great article thanks for sharing! The Engagement Team have started a discussion [1] about how the Foundation can become more effective in the fundraising, and as part of that effort set-up a wiki page [2] with some resources on the subject (have added the post it to the wiki). I hope you are interested in joining this effort, the Engagement Team want to collaborate closely with the Board in this. 1https://mail.gnome.org/archives/engagement-list/2014-April/msg00052.html 2https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement/FriendsOfGNOME/HowWeCanImprove ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
Hi Jim On 2014-05-19 11:19, Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org wrote: Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) I think that corporate donations are an effective way to raise funds for the Foundation, as they traditionally have dwarfed personal donations. While personal donations are secondary in terms of absolute value, the sheer number of individual donors is an indication of the high level of support from a wide range of people. Perhaps there is room for a middle ground, where interested parties (individuals or companies) could contribute to specific goals, and interested maintainers or contributors could pick up tasks and work on improving GNOME based on the goal ideas. To me, this is somewhere between the current fundraising campaigns, such as those for accessibility and privacy, and the idea of bug bounties. I think that the idea might have too much overhead, but it could work well at getting both new contributors and donors involved in the project. I am sure that there are lots of potential problems with it, but I hope the idea can spark some discussion. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
Hi. On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:19:37AM -0700, Jim Nelson wrote: Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) Reducing costs; although I think it is quite obvious that you cannot spend money that you don't receive. I see potential in various areas, such as our Friends of GNOME programme, the travel budget, or the people we pay for GNOME related work. Right now, we ship donors' gifts from the US. That's probably not the most economical option, esp. when sending things to our European donors. We could scale down travel support or have a policy that covers, say, up to 80% by default. Also, while we need committed people to do work for us, I'm not entirely convinced that we need to pay a salary. We could try to get committed community members to take over responsibility before thinking of hiring someone to do it for us. I don't think we can scale down much further now, though ;-) As for sources of income, I think we need to make it attractive for people to give (personal) donations first, before thinking of scaling up or expanding in other areas. That includes being able to receive money via something not Paypal or reaching out to our donors and tell them what we've done with the money they gave us. Cheers, Tobi ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates: finances
- Original Message - From: Jim Nelson j...@yorba.org To: Foundation List foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 2:19:37 PM Subject: Questions for the candidates: finances Hello everyone, First, I'd like to voice my support for Dave Neary's question. I also believe finding an executive director may be the most important task for the incoming board. From some earlier discussion it sounds like the other defining task will be stabilizing GNOME's finances. Others have asked questions about improving the foundation's financial situation, but almost every response is about locating more corporate sponsorship and increasing personal donations. My concern is that those paths are well-trod and potentially lean, and that novel ways of financing should be explored. At least one candidate (Emily Gonyer) stated a desire to ween GNOME off of corporate sponsorship. My questions for the candidates is: Aside from corporate sponsorship and personal donations, what area(s) would you investigate to increase and stabilize GNOME's finances? (Or do you feel these two methods are the only or best way to achieve this goal?) I think we can do more with organization sponsorship and individual donations than we are doing right now. We have a product that is naturally of interest to a lot of consumers and corporate users, and of interest to hardware and application developers to be compatible with. We also have technology that is of interest to people to build their own products with or create services around. When it became known that the GNOME Foundation was in a difficult financial situation, we received an unprecedented number of individual donations. These were previously untapped donors who are very supportive of GNOME. I think we should aim to increase how much we get in private donations, and we can do that by reporting to our donors how their money is being used and having yearly fundraising campaigns. We need to dedicate our fundraising energy to these two sources because they are complimentary to the goals we have for advancing our technology. As a Foundation, even with an ED, we have lim ited resources, so we need to consider how to allocate them most effectively. I'd like to share a great article about fundraising by the Ada Initiative founders which has informed some of my views on it. http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-ada-initiative-founders-on-funding-activism-for-women-in-open-source Thanks, Marina -- Jim ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some questions for the candidates
Tobias: On 06/ 7/13 04:51 AM, Tobias Mueller wrote: On 06.06.2013 23:04, Brian Cameron wrote: Advisory board members are encouraged to join when there is clear value in doing so. What work has been done over the past year to increase this value or effectively communicate such values? Off the top of my hat, I don't know any actions that were done pro-actively to increase value for the advisory board. But I may well be corrected. We are primarily a Free Software community, after all. So the bigger part of our focus shall be our community and our software. I would say that the Annual Report is a primary vehicle for communicating value, which is why it has always been important to make sure that existing and potential advisory board members get copies to help them justify their contributions with their management. I have noticed the GNOME Foundation continues to do a good job in making the report, but it has always a struggle to put together. The GNOME Foundation has always done very work-intensive and professional-looking glossy reports thanks to volunteer effort. Using it to effectively helping advisory board members understand the value and values of the community is a hard thing to properly attract advisory board membership, and this only one aspect of what such reports need to do. If you have any suggestions as to how to increase the value, I am confident that all current and running members of the board are interested to hear them. Or better: Seeing them implemented ;-) I do not have any particular suggestions beyond keep up the good work with marketing efforts like the Annual Report and FoG programs. I was more just curious to hear more about the relations between the board and advisory board these days and to generally discuss. --- Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some questions for the candidates
Hi :) On 06.06.2013 23:04, Brian Cameron wrote: Advisory board members are encouraged to join when there is clear value in doing so. What work has been done over the past year to increase this value or effectively communicate such values? Spontaneously, I remember that proper user testing was a desire which was addressed by relevant members of the community at an in person meeting¹. I did not lead that effort and I neither did nor do know the details of that; I hope that someone more knowledgeable chimes in if you have any further questions. But IIRC the user testing still running. Off the top of my hat, I don't know any actions that were done pro-actively to increase value for the advisory board. But I may well be corrected. We are primarily a Free Software community, after all. So the bigger part of our focus shall be our community and our software. If you have any suggestions as to how to increase the value, I am confident that all current and running members of the board are interested to hear them. Or better: Seeing them implemented ;-) Cheers, Tobi ¹ https://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20130122 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some questions for the candidates
Tobias: On 06/ 5/13 05:39 PM, Tobias Mueller wrote: Can you be an advocate for more corporate support? Yes. We should try to find out what it is that keeps companies from joining the advisory board, despite recent years being economically tough. Another area is better service to sponsors for our conferences. We had some discussions in the advisory board that will hopefully continue to identify areas of improvement. Advisory board members are encouraged to join when there is clear value in doing so. What work has been done over the past year to increase this value or effectively communicate such values? For example, how many times have advisory board members had issues where membership helped to resolve their problem? What efforts have been made to include advisory board members in Foundation event planning (e.g. Hackfests) and making sure that such events have clear benefits to advisory board member needs? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Some questions for the candidates
Hello folks, What are your plans to encourage and enable participation by more women in the GNOME community? How do you plan to support the demand for accessibility infrastructure opened up by recent changes in the environment such as Debian's inclusion of text to speech in its installer? Orca and atk are great, but they haven't gotten as much love recently as they did before Oracle RIF'd the Sun developers supporting them. Can you be an advocate for more corporate support? Such corporate support has been waning in recent years. There are many enterprise companies who, intentionally or inadvertently, are benefiting from GNOME in their environment. Shining a light on these situations and encouraging a sense of social responsibility will help our community to grow and thrive. Thank you for your service, C.J. Adams-Collier ccoll...@gnome.org +1 360 298 7790 signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Some questions for the candidates
Hi :) On 02.06.2013 16:11, C.J. Adams-Collier KF7BMP wrote: What are your plans to encourage and enable participation by more women in the GNOME community? I don't have any. Besides continuing our Outreach Program for Women which I think is running great (thanks to everyone involved). It has even been adopted by various other organisations. How do you plan to support the demand for accessibility infrastructure opened up by recent changes in the environment such as Debian's inclusion of text to speech in its installer? Hm. We just had a fund raiser for accessibility. From my limited understanding I assume that we are fairly good at providing accessibility. I welcome any efforts towards enhancing that support as I believe that it is important provide Free Software to everybody, regardless of their abilities. Can you be an advocate for more corporate support? Yes. We should try to find out what it is that keeps companies from joining the advisory board, despite recent years being economically tough. Another area is better service to sponsors for our conferences. We had some discussions in the advisory board that will hopefully continue to identify areas of improvement. Cheers, Tobi signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
On 06/01/2010 02:30 PM, Vincent Untz 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? When you asked me this previous years, I've ended up not running. However, as I want to focus on upstream and downstream relationship this year, talking with advisory board partners while on the board as part of that will be what I'll do. 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) I've helped organize release parties in the Gothenburg area for GNOME and Ubuntu in order to bring more excitement around those projects and connect local free software people. I've also been trying to push GNOME marketing stuff, and at other times, others have pushed me. 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? What I found it difficult with the GCDS conference was that even though they were co-localized, from my experience, interaction between the teams were not as common as it could have been. KDE people went to KDE talks, GNOME people went to GNOME talks... And people are lazy and hang out with their old buddies anyway. Do I still think it's worth another shot and are willing to help it happen? Sure, but we need to make sure to keep those social bits in mind. 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) 10 hours per week. 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 would give up some of the GNOME website hacking if we got new, kickass contributors so I could lean back and just point in the air. ;) 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? For president, I don't have enough experience, and know others I would like to see fill that role. Treasurer means I would need to keep good track of cash, so no. Secretary, yes, if needed. 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) Being frank here. No, I did not read it before (it is slightly tricky to find). 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) We need a sysadmin next year too, so I would say that. However, in the long run, it would probably be better to have enough breathing room to fund that through other means. Asking for help with funding for printed material (including t-shirts) for local events and events box is a good idea I think. 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) Of course. 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression? Le français est la langue des dieux [1] 1. http://translate.google.com/#en|fr|French%20is%20the%20language%20of%20gods - Andreas ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 23:30 +0200, Vincent Untz 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? It's mostly the responsabilities associated with the position (insert Spiderman quote). When in contact with corporation, I usually list my credentials (GNOME developer, developer at Red Hat), even when contacting companies on behalf of my GNOME projects. The reason is simple, it adds more weight to my arguments. I would probably be able to get to the same type of answers from the people I discuss with, but would also be able to present them more readily on behalf of the Foundation. 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) Helped in the organisation of the GUADEC in Birmingham (wettest GUADEC ever, and it poured for 4 days when we were in Sevilla), and organising the FreeFA tournament on a couple of occasions. 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 wasn't too fond of the clique aspect at GCDS, but if commitments are already made, then we'll make sure it happens. We'd still need to discuss the repercussions (financial, social and technical) from GCDS before diving into another co-hosting in the future. 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) I would expect to be able to give it a day of work a week. 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 you have to be on the board to do that (thanks Ross!), and I hope it won't be necessary for my case. And I really don't mind people implementing my ideas for me. Delegating is what a maintainer should do :) 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? I already have ideas on who I'd like to be president, if we are both elected. And accounting isn't my forte :) 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) As I mentioned in my candidacy, I think we have margin for growth through partnerships with other companies (that might not even have Free Software, or GNOME relations). I did not look at the breakdown of the budget beyond that. 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) See 7), and my candidacy. 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) Yes. I wanted to make a joke about visiting the museum of torture on the Sunday, but realised it was an Amsterdam attraction :) 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression? Allez les Bleus! :) Cheers ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
Vincent, Those are very good questions. See my reply in lines. 2010/6/2 Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org 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? I will continue doing what I am doing now to contribute to GNOME, continue grow the GNOME in Asian countries and local Beijing GNOME Users Group, even I am not in the board. Join the board means more responsibility and higher view of how to run the GNOME Foundation. Spread the latest news to my areas as well as provide feedback to board at the first time. 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) - Bring the GNOME to Asia. Start to build GNOME.Asia Summit, from Beijing to HoChiMinh, this year go to Taiwan. - Build local GNOME community, like Beijing GNOME Users Group. - Encourage students to work on GNOME projects under Gsoc - Find sponsors for GNOME.Asia 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? From the event organizing perspective, that's good to share the sponsors and cost, get all the people with the same interests together. Form the project and platform's perspective, that's helpful for both KDE and GNOME's future road map. 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) I can work 20% of the working hour with my manager's support. Also, I can use my spare time if needed. Currently, I work 10 hours on GNOME.Asia and Beijing GNOME Users Group each week. I can expect that I will spend more time if was able to join the board. 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 know if I will give up some responsibilities, but I am sure I will give up some of my spare time. 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? I am OK with any role which is needed. 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) Yes, I read it several times. I think It is very transparent and well documented. I like the way to run the Foundation. 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) I am thinking about GNOME store. I am planning to bring GNOME store in Asian countries. We can start from China, put GNOME store on line and on the third party online shopping website like Taobao, ebay etc. I am currently still thinking about the detail of implement this idea. 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) Yes, I plan to go GUADEC. Plus I have submit a talk in GUADEC. 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression? Ha, I need Google translate's help to answer this question: Bonjour Thanks, Emily Thanks, Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
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. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list Je vous en prie, Seif ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
2010/6/2 Seif Lotfy s...@lotfy.com: 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. I'm not sure what you mean by a 20% security buffer. We do have money in the bank that would get us through a difficult time period. (How much time depends on whether we kept running as usual or whether we scaled back.) Given that buffer, our goal is to use the money we bring in every year in activities that support our mission. (Thanks to Vincent for asking this question, I hope it prompts lots more people to read to read the GNOME Foundation budget and goals and give feedback.) Stormy ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:30 PM, Vincent Untz vu...@gnome.org wrote: 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? I guess it's one of those scenarios where if you're not fully committed to an idea/project then it is hard for you to make it a priority. I mean, anyone should be able to lend a helping hand to the Board, but when people have other things happening in their lives, no matter how well intentioned they may be, things they are not directly involved with sort fall by the way side. I feel that once I'm 100% involved with the Board duties, I will be able to work on the those ideas and get feedback from the other Board members. 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) In my case it would be advocacy. I happen to live in an area with a very rich open source environment, with lots of companies (Red Hat, rPath, to name a few) doing some direct work to bring this technology to the world. There are several local user groups covering pretty much all the popular environments and programming languages, who meet at regular dates throughout the year. I try to attend some of them and when I do, I always make sure to wear my GNOME hat. So I get to talk to a lot of people and tell them about the GNOME project, what it stands for, and point them to the area that they may be interested in helping, etc. 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 was there when the first one took place and I felt that it was a great step toward bring the 2 communities closer together! I feel that we have so much to offer to one another and by holding co-located events we can shorten the gap between us. I'd also love to see Xfce and LXDE people join us and maybe have a series of discussion boards where we could hear what other developers/hackers are working on and see if there's anything in common that we can work together and avoid redundancy. Obviously, there's a balance that we have to keep in mind so that community specific sessions are scheduled to avoid making a co-located event too generic. After all, one of the main points of Akademy and GUADEC is to present and have discussions about the future of each project. 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) I should be able to spend an average of 12-14 hours/week 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 :-)) When I decided to run for the board I made a commitment to the GNOME community. If I am elected I will most definitely pass the torch of some of the other projects I'm currently involved with so that I can completely focus on being a good member and do a good job together with my fellow Board members. Short answer: yes, I am ok with passing on some of my responsibilities to join the board! 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? I would be very interested in serving as the secretary. I feel that this role allows for a very clear and complete view of how the board operates! Some people may see some of the tasks as tedious (taking notes, writing minutes, etc) but I see it as a great opportunity to learn the ins and outs of how the Board and the entire community works! 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 have read the last 2 budgets and the first thing I have to say is that it is a very clear and well documented piece of document, so I tip my hat to the treasurer for a great job! One thing that comes to mind is: couldn't we have sponsored more local hackfests? Would it be possible to have more of them in different parts of the globe? It is my goal to learn everything about out budget so that I can better understand the overall financial situation of the entire project and hopefully be able to contribute with any insight I may come across to the marketing team! 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11
Re: A few questions for the candidates
Em Ter, 2010-06-01 às 23:30 +0200, Vincent Untz escreveu: Hi, Hi Vincent, hi all. 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? Indeed I can help GNOME even not being in the board. That's what I already do. The point is that I think I can help *more* by being part of it. Why? Because I'd discuss directly in a small team that can actually get things done (that's why that team exists btw). 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) This is already answered in my candidacy ;) I'll paste here: I contribute to GNOME in - code, translation - spreading GNOME: I'm always giving talks in Brazil about GNOME and how to contribute. - kind of coordinate GNOME Brazil: motivating users, managing Planet, managing mailing lists, etc - now that you mentioned it, I remembered: I'm also trying to find a way to Brazilian people donate money to the Foundation in a 'more brazilian way'. 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? Personally, I'm not a big fan of this. Of course, I can live with that. I think if we need to work together with other teams, we could do that in a hackfest for example. GUADEC is the GNOME event, it's kind weird to meet people around wearing kde shirts :) 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) I think 10h-15h a week. 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'm aware of this, for sure. The area I could leave is translation, once Brazilian team currently has great man power. 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? I'd prefer not to pick any of these positions right now. As I'd be a new director, I think I need first to learn how things work in these areas. I'd be happy to work in general activities, like to be close to the Marketing team. 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 think it's a bit confusing. Perhaps with GNUCash effort going on things become easier to read and understand. 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) Maybe not answering directly your question, but: I think we should be more aggressive asking for donations directly in the desktop. gnome-about should do this job for us. This is related to a thread started yesterday in marketing list (which I've replied). 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 expression? I pass... :( Thanks, Vincent Cheers, -- Jonh Wendell http://www.bani.com.br ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
A few questions for the candidates
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? 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) 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? 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) 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 :-)) 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? 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) 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression? Thanks, 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 few questions for the candidates
Vincent: 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? Several tasks that I work on for the board are, in fact, things I could do if I weren't on the board. If I am not elected, I anticipate that I would continue participating on GNOME marketing, legal, and other areas. As a board member I act as Stormy's manager and as secretary. I would unlikely be in a position to continue providing these sorts of services to the board if I were not a board member. 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) I have organized or helped to organize several GNOME events including the GNOME Usability hackfest and GNOME.Asia (3 years running). I also tend to be involved with getting things done on the GNOME Marketing, Usability, legal, and the new developing world mailing lists. 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 think that free software communities should work together to battle our true competition, those proprietary desktops. I think co-located events helps with fostering this attitude and cross-platform solutions. 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) I currently spend about 8-12 hours per week working on Foundation activities. I anticipate this will continue. 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 have found that I hack less since serving on the board, but I still find time to co-maintain GDM, work on multimedia, and work in other areas on the desktop. 6) Will you be interested in being treasurer, president or secretary if elected? If yes, which role and why? If elected, I anticipate I will serve as secretary again. Though I would consider a different position if someone else really wants to be secretary. 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) Last year there was a real concern about the budget and how The GNOME Foundation would be able to continue covering costs associated with having Stormy as an employee. I think the work done over the past year to raise funds by doubling the advisory board fees, improving Friends of GNOME, and the great work done to find sponsors for various events and projects has put The GNOME Foundation in a good position moving forward. 8) What do you think our next fundraising campaign should be about? (I'd love to not read 11 times the same answer, thanks :-)) I think The GNOME Foundation should do a Friends of GNOME outreach program to GNOME users. Statistics show that most people who donate are users, not developers. However, we have never effectively done a marketing campaign directed towards our usres. 9) Will you be at GUADEC this year? (there's a board meeting and an advisory board meeting there) Yes, I plan to be there. 10) Make or break question: what's your favorite french expression? Tu n'as rien de mieux à faire? Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: A few questions for the candidates
On Tue, 2010-06-01 at 23:30 +0200, Vincent Untz 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... Hi Vincent, 10 questions is more than a few, I'm glad you were not treasurer this year! I just wanted to reply quick that I am traveling on business in Taiwan and about to head out for the day and may not have an opportunity to respond right away as I fly back first ting tomorrow as well. As soon as I can I will be happy to respond to your questions. Thank you. Paul ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
Hi, (just want to start by thanking the membership elections committee for the organization of the elections! Make sure to hug them when you meet them) Apologies for the length of some answers ;-) And more apologies for sending this late (it was stuck in my drafts folder for way too long) Le vendredi 29 mai 2009, à 18:17 +0100, Susana Pereira a écrit : 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? This is so a hard question because it's hard to remember what I did as a board member ;-) (not because I didn't do anything, nor because I did so many things -- simply because I don't remember everything) I think helping some hackfests happen is probably one of the best things. I'm also happy about some background work that was done around the GNOME infrastructure, although I'm not sure I should get credited for this. 2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? (not a new candidate) 3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? The most difficult thing would probably be that it will drain my energy at some times. Ice cream can help, I heard. (or being less active for a few days) 4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? I've been on the Foundation Board since 2006, and I would think it's my main experience here. But I've also chaired some teams in GNOME (membership committee and release team, mainly). Not quite sure what to reply here: it's a bit like the first question, where I don't remember a specific example. However, I believe I can be a good board member because I'm full of love for our project and I'm dedicated to it. Also because it seems some friends of mine think I'm doing a good job there (but then, maybe they don't want to hurt me :-)) (The What single change... question sounds like question 5 below, so not replying here) 5. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy where you think you can contribute as a change agent ? Change agent? Hrm. Honestly, it's hard to say what I can contribute as a change agent since I've been in the board in the past few years and I don't plan any big focus change in what I'd do. (not saying things have been perfect -- changes should certainly happen, but I'd find it weird to start playing that role only now, for the elections and not earlier) 6. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members. I think I used to think yes. And I'm now not so sure. I mean, there are things that might make sense (in the way we spend our money, like for travel sponsorship, as Germán mentions) and things that we already do (like gnome.org address, blog on blogs.gnome.org, and possibly various other things) But on the other hand... I saw some people apply for membership only because they wanted a gnome.org address, and not because they care about the Foundation. And this makes me a bit sad (not blaming the people, though: I can understand why you'd want to have a gnome.org address after contributing for 5 years...). Going back to the travel sponsorship example: I'd very much prefer to have the best-qualified person for a specific topic getting sponsored even if he's not a member, than a random member. Because in the end, it's better for the project that this best-qualified person goes to the event. Being a member of the Foundation is about wanting to be part of an organization that helps the GNOME project achieve its goals, and in some way, it's about publicly showing your love for the project. Or something like this ;-) It's not about expecting to receive something. And we don't require anything in exchange: membership is free, you only have to fill a form with details once, and then quickly fill it every two years. So, in general, I would reply no. But there are cases where the membership is a criteria that helps decide if people can access some resources because we need a criteria for this and we have no other objective criteria (eg, to have a blog on blogs.gnome.org). And there might be cases where we can offer things to members which just make sense for members (eg, some automatically generated PDF for GNOME business cards, if anybody feels like working on something like this). 7. Do you have any plans on how can the board help bring
Re: Questions for the candidates
On 06/09/2009 11:31 PM, Behdad Esfahbod wrote: What do you think GNOME should do to support the broader cause of free/libre software, and the freedom of computer users? I think the look, our source code is Free Software argument has lost a lot of appeal in where GNOME has headed in the past and continues to head. Free-ness is just one of the multiple reasons why GNOME is Good. Usability, a11y, i18n, etc are equally important. So I don't think GNOME can afford supporting the free/libre software cause more than, say, FSF does. Reading this after a good night's sleep, I think I didn't exactly write what I mean. What I mean is: While freedom is not our only selling point from a marketing point of view, it's perhaps the most important ingredient of how GNOME works, and we should embrace it where we can. I support GNOME's involvement with the broader cause of software freedom. I like us get more involved in issues like software patents or DRM, perhaps by partnering with FSF. Thinking about it with my board hat on though, chances of that happening will be much much higher if FSF just asked us. We never got any request, and well, been busy enough with other stuff. behdad On the freedom side however, that's where GNOME cares. A lot. Open standards, open formats, no lock-in, etc, are *very* important to achieve our goals of usability, a11y, etc, and I like to see GNOME work more closely with FSF and other parties on fighting against free standards issues as well as freedom of owning one's data. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
Hi Everyone, I'm late to the party; man, did I ever know elections can be so exhausting? And so much fun?! Oh wait, I don't mean this one. I mean the Iran presidential elections on Friday later this week... Normally that even doesn't change my schedule, but for reasons that are better postponed to a PGO blogpost, it ate ALL of my weekend and is still giving me a fuzzy feeling this week. Anyway, I apologize for replying so late. I was counting the number of people who have replied to da Q's and it always looked like a couple or so. Time flies... So here we go. Questions - 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? As I noted in the previous threads, I think the current board had a very productive balance. Things where not falling on the floor anymore, no one felt burned out, and I personally felt very happy being on the board. Now, that's mostly because of all the trouble Stormy took off the board's shoulder, but also because as a board we developed simple rules and tricks to improve our own productivity, and that's what I like to see carried forward into this term. I give three examples: - In previous boards (specially when there were 11 seats), there was this problem where decisions couldn't be made on time because not enough directors replied to a proposal. Durin the 2007 board we developed, and during 2008 we perfected, this protocol of replying with whatever comments we may have, but include one of +1, -1, or +0 as our binding vote. When a decision receives four +1's, the proposer automatically takes that as an approval and moves on. More recently we even started replying +1=1, then next person would do +1=2, etc. You get the idea. Problem solved. - Da board typically meets every other week. In the past there have been times where people misremembered which week we were in is it the off week or the on?, or totally forgot the meeting, or had the wrong week in their calendar because we ended up canceling a meeting because only two people called in... Anyway, to solve that, in one such meeting, we decided that I'll send a meeting reminder on the Monday of the week we are supposed to meet. I added a reminder to my calendar and have been sending the reminders, asking Meeting this week. Who'll be there? New agenda items? And that simple one-line email every other week did it. Now when we meet we know who is supposed to be there and who can't make it. Problem solved. - I understand that it has been accepted for a board member to be away from board happenings for an extended period of time. But in the recent while, we've developed an expectation of people notifying the other board members if they cannot commit their fair share to the board for a period of weeks, and that has been very helpful not blocking on individuals and getting things done. Again, problem solved. To summarize, while it feels so good to think oh great, seven of these 10 slaves^Wcandidates will become directors and then everything is their problem to fix, it's simply not how it happens. We don't have any superpowers. At least I dont :-). What I can offer however is 1) keeping the board functional no matter how busy I am, and 2) offering my judgment. 2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? Haha, don't have to answer this one :-D. Poor new guys. 3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? I've only been on the board for 2.5 years now, but when you think about it: I started as a first-timer in a board that had decision-making problems, 6 months in the treasurer resigned, and two months later the president. Same year I guess, I dropped the ball on the ECMA34 press release thing. And while jdub and other directors saved my a** by never pointing fingers at me, it left a deep mark on my mind. I like to think that I've learned a lot from that experience. And then, the board work is simply much lighter these days, thanks to Rosanna and Stormy taking over most of the non-hacker-friendly tasks. So I find the actual work quite pleasing these days. The biggest problem is still finding time for it. I recently started a part-time MBA program on the side. So my *free* time is definitely nonexistent. However, in the 6 weeks that I've been in the program, I find myself Getting more Things Done. And when I look at it, it's obvious why: when I don't have much time at my hand, I actually weight things first before committing time to them. That has resulted in *way* less procrastinating. And let me assure you,
Re: Questions for the candidates
I'd like to add an optional tenth question: 10. If the foundation built a bike shed, An european or an african one ? what color would you paint the roof? Red no blue argh ! ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
Hi Jorge, Jorge O. Castro wrote: I've never served on a board or any kind of governing body before, so my first answer would be what would people want the goals to be? Do you think that your experience with Ubuntu has given you some insight onto what you will be able to achieve as a board member? What I expect is that the board will be transparent enough so that it is obvious to people when I am being effective at my job; as such when I make a mistake I expect to know it relatively quickly so I can fix it. Do you have any suggestions about how to increase transparency without increasing workload? 4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? I've not been involved in a non-profit before. Perhaps you can find an example from your role in the Ubuntu community? A time when you had to affect change, how you went about it, and what was the outcome? I would like to see the Foundation be more aggressive with GNOME consumers like distros and other organizations for participation and funds. I would like more aggressive campaigning to ISVs, ODMs, OSVs, etc. on why they want to be part of GNOME and why they want to build on our platform. I have strong opinions on GNOME as a platform (see below). What change in approach would you suggest to get us to improve in this area? I know, having done some of this in the past, that getting commitments of time money from ISDs is not straightforward. Even trying to get complaints which they might have isn't easy. How do you think this fits with the typical time commitments of a board member (10 to 20 hours per week, I'd guess)? Whatever issues we have with the platform we need find it and fix it, I would start by asking non-GNOME developers why they don't choose to develop on our platform, and then fix those problems. We hear third-party developers complaining[1] about problems all the time (and they have so for years), but are we really making an effort to fix this? Do you need to be on the board to help with this or drive this agenda? It sounds like the kind of thing we have wanted to do with GNOME Mobile for quite a while. The difficulty as I've said is getting people who actually use the platform to figure out what needs doing/changing/fixing, and there's another issue - developers of commercial applications go where there's a market. There's an iPhone market for apps. There's a market for windows applications. There's a thriving market for Mac applications. There's a market for enterprise web and server applications on Linux. There's no market for graphical Linux applications. So you need to identify: - Large group of users of Linux/GNOME based platforms - Common set of APIs that developers can use to develop complete applications across that range of platforms Our problems are: - Many GNOME based platforms, but no communication to users or developers that the platforms in common - No information on size of user base - No easy way to deliver software across all the platforms - No complete set of APIs that are shared by all which allow a developer to write an application that'll work everywhere. The nearest thing a mobile developer has to that is Java. Android is trying to address that issue. And iPhone has ignored the many platforms problem to create one kick-ass product that lots of people want. * Transparency. Enough said about this, it's a requirement. * Governance. I don't mean in a boring rulebook kind of way, but are GNOME communities set up to handle things like conflict resolution, resource handling, etc. * Marketing. The word needs to be out there. * Culture. I like it how when I meet a new GNOME person I've never met that we already share many values by default. It should always be like this. * Barrier-breaking. There are people out there wanting to be involved in GNOME but don't know how or they are shy or they think their ideas will be ridiculed, etc. etc. The onus is on us to ensure that people have the opportunity to work on something they care about and be successful. Aside from transparency and maybe governance, which of those needs you to be on the board to start working on it? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
On 05/29/2009 01:17 PM, Susana Pereira wrote: 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? I was not previously member of the board. 2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? I would say T: time. Getting things done when they should be and/or making sure they can be. This include updating the rest of the board or members of things in progress, including the various stages. But seriously, do we need to spend time on that? I think we can have a more straightforward way to do things and get then done. 3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? To be honest, I have no idea. Maybe everything. I'm a passionate hacker, and the board is a non-hacker duty. So that would be a change. 4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? I don't have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits. Gotta have to start somewhere. I think my motivation is what will make me a good board member. 5. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy where you think you can contribute as a change agent ? Change agent? Looks like one want a revolution. I'm not here for that, at least not a quick one. I think that at first, like any of the runner for the election that have never been elected, bring in new eyes, new ideas as how I can contribute. 6. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members. First I see foundation members being mostly left out of the decisions. One of the things that could be done is to increase their involvement by having a foundation-member mailing list, with moderators (just in case) and no public archive that would be used to really discuss the matters that the members have. This is one idea. As to be more useful to members, it is harder to say. Beside the sponsorship for GUADEC, I see little that the Foundation can do for individuals. For corporate members, that's the role of the advisory board. 7. Do you have any plans on how can the board help bring the GNOME platform and desktop in the top of opensource desktop and mobile application development? The foundation could work more to bring on board more major industry partners (several of them are already on the advisory board), educating and informing. I have seen companies that seem to (be willing to) use GNOME and Gtk for their (mobile) platform, and I had never heard of them before (nor did other people that are actually in the field). These are the one that should be approached by the Foundation. 8. Do you think the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME projects get enough representation at events? If not, how would you fix that? No. How to fix that? Better coordinate with the local members and figure out of way to help them. The GNOME Event Box has played a pivotal role in representing GNOME on shows and event, and I think it has gone around the world several time by now. To fix that, I'd start by collecting the calendar of the event with real data, like attendance, target audience, needs, and start from there. 9. What, in your view, are the top 5 requirements (from a strategic perspective) for the GNOME communities world-wide ? Without particular order: -Presence: represent GNOME at local events (FLOSS or not) As answered in question 8, that's a place where the Foundation can and should help. Of course this might lead to tough decision due to the limited resources. -Openness: be open to new contributors, new ideas. It is the contributors that make the project alive and kicking. -Friendliness: make sure there is friendliness. One of the great asset of the Free Software in general is that it is founded on communities and that even if some compete in some aspect, they still share the same goal: going forward. And for that there is friendly cooperation. And it must be added, friendliness with other FLOSS communities, including for the competing desktop. (I still believe that the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, GUADEC joint with aKademy is a great idea as to would help foster a collaboration on the foundations of Free Desktops) -Proximity: be close geographically to the people. That mean more local groups with more local events (a group can be
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Questions: -- 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? Not applicable. 2. For outgoing board members: What achievement can you point to during your term that you're proud of, and why? Not applicable. 3. For outgoing board members: What can you point to in your own performance that you are unhappy with? Can you give details? Not applicable. 4. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? To increase the transparency of processes and information coming from the board. Whenever it were not possible to make them public, at least mention the number of activities being kept private (in order to compare or obtain a ratio of public versus private information). Keep track of activities related to Gnome funded or not by the Foundation and help people to make them public as soon as they happen. Specially, get and publish reports of activities funded when they take place. Report the activities done as a board member in a similar fashion that our Executive Director. Probably not as frequent as her, but once every two weeks or at least once a month. 5. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? I have been one of the directors of a six-year long project involving 13 Chilean universities, and it requires consensus through communication and trade-offs and a lot of patience. I want to improve the transparency about the work as board director. I feel that people who have not been involved in board has not a very clear idea about the duties and the common tasks. Probably are too obvious that nobody talks about it, but if people ask what a Executive Director does, why not trying to do the same as a board member? If there is a gap, I want to fill it. 6. Can you give an example of a time when you had trouble working with individuals in the community in the past? What were the circumstances, what did you do to resolve the situation, were you happy with the outcome? I can not recall a situation where I had a trouble with individuals in the community (I infer we are talking Gnome's community). I does not mean I will not have it. However, I think in most cases this is a matter of communication. 7. Can you describe a team project that you successfully started and led? How did you handle it when people thought something should be done a different way? I founded the first (and currently the biggest) FLOSS/Linux conference in Chile and I organized the first three events with the same base team, but I had to deal with different kind of moods of our FLOSS local community. If I could change something, I would change the name of the conference. 8. Can you describe a time when someone promised you they'd do something and they didn't deliver on time? How did you handle it? If there is no feedback (even if requested), I try to figure out by alternative paths if a communication has taken place or if there is any issue involved. It must be done nicely, because there are people and sensibilities involved, but, on the other hand, you want the things done. 9. Often life gets in the way of some of our responsibilities. In the past, have you signed up for something and then not had time to do it? How did you handle that situation? Yes, both successfully and unsuccessfully. As I stated before, this is a matter of communication. Let people know what are you doing, what are your timings and what problems are you facing; that helps to keep the situation under control. The problem happens when nobody receive any feedback in a reasonable period of time. 10. One of the board's roles is to interact with the advisory board and the sponsoring companies. Do you have experience giving regular updates to management or outside people? Do you have experience asking for money or sponsors for an event? Can you describe those experiences? Several questions in one. Yes, at work in projects funded by foreign resources. When I have been asked for getting funds from sponsors, I have started trying to reduce costs before and maximizing (as much as possible) the budget available and then evaluating possible sponsors according to what is needed. I have organized several events and I helped to several others and the funding model may change according the place. Getting sponsor will depend of the grade of relationship between organizers, venue and companies. I do not think I can extrapolate my local experience to North America, Europe, Asia,
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Hello, 10 questions are being selected and will be sent to this list as soon as possible. Those who have already answered can put their answers on the wiki. I'm sorry for any inconveniences this may have caused. --- Susana On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Alberto Ruiz ar...@gnome.org wrote: To be honest... even reading all the answers is a hard task... :/ Next year let's stick to 10. 2009/5/29 Brian Cameron brian.came...@sun.com: The final list of candidates for the upcoming elections is available here: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2009/candidates.html We will now start a series of discussions amongst the candidates. Thanks to all the people who participated by submitting their questions! This year's list of questions is a bit longer than in previous elections. However, with a longer list, we hope to cover all of the questions our community has in just one thread and one list. We ask you to answer as many as you can. Without further ado, let's begin the discussion. Thanks for doing this. My answers to these questions can be found on my Wiki candidate page: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Elections2009/BrianCameron I think it is easier to maintain the answers there if that is okay. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Hi, Brian Cameron wrote: I think it is easier to maintain the answers there if that is okay. One of the things I've liked in the past is the right to reply - a candidate answers a question, and someone bounces back with a follow-up or another candidate manifests his disagreement, and a debate ensues. That kind of thing can't happen in a wiki. I would really prefer the membership team to cut down the list of questions to between 5 and 10, and have everything happen on the mailing list. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Hi Dave, On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: (...) I would really prefer the membership team to cut down the list of questions to between 5 and 10, and have everything happen on the mailing list. You're totally right, I'm sorry if it's taking some time but the short list will be sent as soon as possible. I only mentioned the wiki because some candidates already answered all the questions and so they can store the answers that are not on the short list in there. Cheers, Susana Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Questions for the candidates
Hello, Here is the updated list of questions. Hopefully, this one will let us discuss important issues without taking too much time from our candidates. You can find the list of candidates for the upcoming elections here: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2009/candidates.html Questions - 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? 2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? 3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? 4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? 5. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy where you think you can contribute as a change agent ? 6. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members. 7. Do you have any plans on how can the board help bring the GNOME platform and desktop in the top of opensource desktop and mobile application development? 8. Do you think the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME projects get enough representation at events? If not, how would you fix that? 9. What, in your view, are the top 5 requirements (from a strategic perspective) for the GNOME communities world-wide ? Let's begin the discussion. Cheers, Susana ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
I'd like to add an optional tenth question: 10. If the foundation built a bike shed, what color would you paint the roof? D ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
Great answer. Next? D On 5/29/09 3:21 PM, Andy Tai wrote: Shouldn't the candidates be expected to oppose the foundation building this, as it is a misuse of the foundation's resources? On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:25 AM, David Bolterd...@gnome.org wrote: I'd like to add an optional tenth question: 10. If the foundation built a bike shed, what color would you paint the roof? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates
I will leave the answers to the original 24 questions on my Wiki in case anybody wants to read. http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Elections2009/BrianCameron Following are my answers to the abbreviated list of questions: Questions - 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? Working with the Foundation CEO, Stormy Peters, has been the most exciting development in the past term of the GNOME Foundation. As Stormy learns her way around the GNOME community and the board further adjusts to having more employees, I think there will be a lot of opportunities to get things done in the next term. A lot has been done to develop a stronger Foundation, especially in the areas of marketing and travel planning. We need to continue to develop strong teams of volunteers to help with getting tasks done and getting people more involved with the GNOME community. 2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? I think the most important goal is to make myself available to get tasks presented to the board completed in a timely fashion, and to take responsibility for enough tasks that my contributions adds value to the process. Goals include: * I would like to fill the role of an officer in the next term, perhaps as treasurer or secretary. * Continue working in a management capacity with Stormy. * Work to improve the transparency of board activities and to help develop a stronger Foundation which provides more significant services to members and the overall GNOME community. * Getting the Foundation more focused on process improvement so that we deliver the highest quality desktop with minimal effort. * Continue making GNOME events successful. * To foster a stronger community of volunteers to help with making GNOME the best desktop for users needs and to better encourage new people to get involved with the community 3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? Although I have had some experience in the past term with organizing events, it is something that is new to me. I plan to focus energy on getting more involved with event planning in the next term. Since many events are annual, I think that my experience on the board for the past term will help. 4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? I have served in the past term on the GNOME Foundation board. I think the single-most important change I want to affect in the next term is to revitalize the Foundation by helping to build a stronger marketing community and to enhance what it means to be a part of the Foundation. I frequently brain-storm with Stormy about these topics, and there has already been discussion about these ideas on the marketing-list. However, there is much more to do. Adding additional structure to the Foundation so that it is easier for members to gain recognition for their work, and to develop new opportunities for volunteers to engage in the community. 5. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy where you think you can contribute as a change agent ? I think that developing a stronger marketing and usability communities is a critical area of work right now within the GNOME community. As we approach GNOME 3.0, a lot of our focus and strategy should be based on input from the marketing and usability teams. With new technologies such as clutter, it is important to focus on things like the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and make sure GNOME has a solid base. 6. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members. I think that it is important for the Foundation to explore new ways to provide services and value to Foundation members. The Foundation needs to ensure the community is provided with the tools that people need to further improve the community. For example, marketing materials so that community members can get more directly involved with marketing. Likewise, there are opportunities to develop teams of volunteers to get things done, such as system administration. Developing such teams and providing volunteers with ways to gain recognition in the community are important. Also, we need to improve process and infrastructure so that board
Re: Questions for the candidates
My answers to the original 24 questions are available on Wiki: http://tinyurl.com/ksy8o3 And the answers to the abbreviated list are the following: Questions - 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? Not applicable. 2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? To increase the transparency of processes and information coming from the board. Whenever it were not possible to make them public, at least mention the number of activities being kept private (in order to compare or obtain a ratio of public versus private information). Keep track of activities related to Gnome funded or not by the Foundation and help people to make them public as soon as they happen. Specially, get and publish reports of activities funded when they take place. Report the activities done as a board member in a similar fashion that our Executive Director. Probably not as frequent as her, but once every two weeks or at least once a month. 3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? It will sound naive, but at this moment, I can see as the most difficult part the synchronization for meetings, in particular, phone meetings. I use only cell-phone at home, but I hope I will compensate through VoIP. 4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? I have been one of the directors of a six-year long project involving 13 Chilean universities, and it requires consensus through communication and trade-offs and a lot of patience. I want to improve the transparency about the work as board director. I feel that people who have not been involved in board has not a very clear idea about the duties and the common tasks. Probably are too obvious that nobody talks about it, but if people ask what a Executive Director does, why not trying to do the same as a board member? If there is a gap, I want to fill it. 5. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy where you think you can contribute as a change agent ? Communication and transparency. As I said in my statement, I think the communication from board to community has improved over the years. But there is room for improvements. Lastly, our Executive Director have been writing weekly about her work, the board members could do the same (by turns or another method). It is good to see the things are moving forward, not matter if slowly or quickly. Without feedback, it is hard to evaluate it. As an outsider point of view, I would like to have available for free scrutiny as much information as possible from our Foundation. I have never been a director before, hence I lack of details in this matter (if this is feasible or reasonable). I can contribute filling this gap. I do think there is privacy involved when some member of the advisory board or external entity ask for it in the middle of a negotiation. But, once it happened, I can work to give a detailed explanation of the process taken and not only the results. 6. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members. It think something is going on in that direction: giving higher priority to Foundation member's when somebody ask for sponsorship. It is not set in stone, but it helps people to realize that if they deserve to be sponsored, then they contribute enough to be a member. Also, I am aware there are contributors who do not feel contributing enough or still they does not feel as involved in the community as they expect, specially when they compares themselves against the most vocals or our rock stars. This is specially true in local communities that spread Gnome around their countries but still they feel in the limbo. 7. Do you have any plans on how can the board help bring the GNOME platform and desktop in the top of opensource desktop and mobile application development? I think it is important to empower the marketing team in order to have a consistent way of communication at different levels (user, management, and development). 8. Do you think the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME projects get enough representation at events? If not, how would you fix that? I am biased, but in those events I have knowledge in SouthAmerica, Gnome has a good representation.
Re: Questions for the candidates
Hey, On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 18:17 +0100, Susana Pereira wrote: Questions - 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? I would like to keep seeing more participation, enabling current contributors to get more involved, such is the case of the refresh in the membership committee and the new travel committee. Also, keeping good communication with a broader public (yes, I'm thinking Latin America here). 2. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? 3. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? Trying to get more involved with the Board without losing focus in stuff, I constantly try to sit down and think about what I'm currently doing in my life in general to be aware of how much free time and focus I have to offer for new tasks or current ones. 4. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? I've been working with local groups, had a chance to resurrect a local lug in 2006 and until 2008 were I stopped actively coordinating activies there, and of course my Board work for the last 6 months. I think I'll be a good member because I have the time needed (based on my experience so far), I trust my communication skills and feel that now that I had the last 6 months as 'training' I can do a great job from day 1. A concrete thing to affect could be enabling more people to get more involved with the Foundation or with the Project itself. 5. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy where you think you can contribute as a change agent ? I don't feel like I'm a specialized agent and hence could revolutionize a concrete area, but I have interest for this period (like I said in my Candidacy mail) in marketing, fundraising, working with committees (and enabling new contribution oportunities) and trying to get out a second GNOME LA Tour. 6. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members. I think we can try to make our communication channels more evident, so people can feel more confident to approach the Foundation to try to get sponsorship (in money or just institutional backup) for activities. Like Germán said, local groups around here usually feel a lot distant from the most visible people in our community, language barrier and other stuff usually discourages them to try to get closer. Although we all know most of us are quite friendly, this is something we just find out after having been together for a certain time. 7. Do you have any plans on how can the board help bring the GNOME platform and desktop in the top of opensource desktop and mobile application development? Helping define our set of offers for such markets would be a key factor for that. Also, trying to get our software to run and being more hackable in more platforms (yes, I mean Windows) will inevitably get us more developers and spotlight than just being limited to unix systems. This has been key to Python, Django, etc and I think we should start thinking on that also. 8. Do you think the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME projects get enough representation at events? If not, how would you fix that? I don't know too many big conferences, but where I have been to (EncuentroLinux in Chile, Latinoware in Brasil) there has been a good number of people working as a local GNOME group. I think this is linked somewhat with the previous question, I can imagine local GNOME groups being more agressive in their promotion of the project if they could offer something to Windows developers or users. For example promoting Evince as a good PDF reader for Windows or gEdit. 9. What, in your view, are the top 5 requirements (from a strategic perspective) for the GNOME communities world-wide ? I'm reading this as communities (hence user groups or promotion groups not development of/or business), I think most of us could agree that we could use more of: 1. defining our offer of products more precisely (software, solutions); 2. having more 'instant deliverables' for users and developers, for example downloading a .exe of Evince or a .exe of the complete PyGTK bundle to show your Windows friend how cool and good our software is; 3. promoting get-together local events, where people can start to know
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Hi Susan, Susana Pereira wrote: snip 24. Is there anything else you think is important to tell us but which you feel has not been covered by the previous questions? Wasn't there a plan to choose the 10 best out of all the questions? I can imagine answering 24 questions will take a lot of time. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Another possibility is that you start replying to the questions you want to reply on your candidate wiki page. That way, you can answer one question at once, take the time you want, proofread the day after, etc. Hi Dave, On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:16 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Wasn't there a plan to choose the 10 best out of all the questions? I can imagine answering 24 questions will take a lot of time. Yes, I understand it is a big, time consuming list. The reasoning for sending it this way is that in last elections the membership committee sent 10 questions, and then many people started new threads sending their own questions which is more confusing than having a single list. Of course that we can pick 10 questions and re-send only those. It was not my intention to cause too much of a burden to our candidates. I just think that, as you can see here[1] , people really like to see their own questions answered. [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2007-November/thread.html Cheers, Susana Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Hi Susan, Susana Pereira wrote: Yes, I understand it is a big, time consuming list. The reasoning for sending it this way is that in last elections the membership committee sent 10 questions, and then many people started new threads sending their own questions which is more confusing than having a single list. Last year, right after the candidates list closed, Bruno posted a list of 10 questions which, presumably, the committee came up with: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2007-November/msg00153.html There was no gathering filtering of questions, so if people had questions that the membership committee hadn't thought of, they felt like they hadn't had a chance to ask them. Nothing will stop people asking other questions, or reacting to answers, but at least with this filter synthesis you can avoid duplicates ensure you're asking the most relevant/popular questions. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Last year, right after the candidates list closed, Bruno posted a list of 10 questions which, presumably, the committee came up with: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2007-November/msg00153.html There was no gathering filtering of questions, so if people had questions that the membership committee hadn't thought of, they felt like they hadn't had a chance to ask them. If memory serves right, the context of the questions have always been picked from the discussions off the planet and various GNOME lists. -- http://www.gutenberg.net - Fine literature digitally re-published http://www.plos.org - Public Library of Science http://www.creativecommons.org - Flexible copyright for creative work ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
The final list of candidates for the upcoming elections is available here: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2009/candidates.html We will now start a series of discussions amongst the candidates. Thanks to all the people who participated by submitting their questions! This year's list of questions is a bit longer than in previous elections. However, with a longer list, we hope to cover all of the questions our community has in just one thread and one list. We ask you to answer as many as you can. Without further ado, let's begin the discussion. Thanks for doing this. My answers to these questions can be found on my Wiki candidate page: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Elections2009/BrianCameron I think it is easier to maintain the answers there if that is okay. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
To be honest... even reading all the answers is a hard task... :/ Next year let's stick to 10. 2009/5/29 Brian Cameron brian.came...@sun.com: The final list of candidates for the upcoming elections is available here: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2009/candidates.html We will now start a series of discussions amongst the candidates. Thanks to all the people who participated by submitting their questions! This year's list of questions is a bit longer than in previous elections. However, with a longer list, we hope to cover all of the questions our community has in just one thread and one list. We ask you to answer as many as you can. Without further ado, let's begin the discussion. Thanks for doing this. My answers to these questions can be found on my Wiki candidate page: http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Elections2009/BrianCameron I think it is easier to maintain the answers there if that is okay. Brian ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Hello, The final list of candidates for the upcoming elections is available here: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2009/candidates.html We will now start a series of discussions amongst the candidates. Thanks to all the people who participated by submitting their questions! This year's list of questions is a bit longer than in previous elections. However, with a longer list, we hope to cover all of the questions our community has in just one thread and one list. We ask you to answer as many as you can. Without further ado, let's begin the discussion. Questions: -- 1. For outgoing board members: what have been the upsides/good things from your previous stint at the Board which you would like to see carried forward into this term ? 2. For outgoing board members: What achievement can you point to during your term that you're proud of, and why? 3. For outgoing board members: What can you point to in your own performance that you are unhappy with? Can you give details? 4. If you are a new candidate: what specific SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)) goals would you like to put for yourself? Or, in other words, how would you like to measure yourself and, let others know how you are doing ? 5. Do you have any experience on management teams or boards at non-profits? If so, can you give an example of a change you affected in that role? If not, what makes you think that you will be a good board member? What single change do you want to affect during your term? 6. Can you give an example of a time when you had trouble working with individuals in the community in the past? What were the circumstances, what did you do to resolve the situation, were you happy with the outcome? 7. Can you describe a team project that you successfully started and led? How did you handle it when people thought something should be done a different way? 8. Can you describe a time when someone promised you they'd do something and they didn't deliver on time? How did you handle it? 9. Often life gets in the way of some of our responsibilities. In the past, have you signed up for something and then not had time to do it? How did you handle that situation? 10. One of the board's roles is to interact with the advisory board and the sponsoring companies. Do you have experience giving regular updates to management or outside people? Do you have experience asking for money or sponsors for an event? Can you describe those experiences? 11. What part of being a board member do you think will be most difficult for you? How do you plan to compensate for that? 12. What are the specific areas of the Foundation's focus and strategy where you think you can contribute as a change agent ? 13. Do you think we need to make the being a member of the Foundation feel more valuable, and how do you think we should do that? What would you change about the Foundation to make it more useful to members. 14. Do you have any plans on how can the board help bring the GNOME platform and desktop in the top of opensource desktop and mobile application development? 15. Many governments offer electronic services to citizens and companies that require the use of non-free software (like IE for web services, or the use of a bundled MS Access runtime database, etc.) My particular peeve is with the Canadian government, which is terrible for this. Do you plan any advocacy for getting governments to accept Gnome (and FOSS in general) users as first-class citizens? 16. Bugzilla is very slow at times. How will you address this infrastructure problem? 17. What level of transparency do you believe the board should have in its inner workings regarding the members? How much financial transparency should the foundation have? How much procedural and administrative transparency? 18. Are you happy with the Foundation's current budget? If not, how would you change it? 19. Do you think the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME projects get enough representation at events? If not, how would you fix that? 20. Do you think GNOME has a good relationship with the distributions? If not, how would you change it? 21. Do you think GNOME has enough events (hackfests, GUADEC and local events)? If not, how would you get funding and volunteers to have more? 22. It is the nature of Board(s) to be seen by the members as an overlord figure for strategy whereas the tactical aspect comes across from a number of voices - do you have any plans to address this situation ? 23. What, in your view, are the top 5 requirements (from a strategic perspective) for the GNOME communities world-wide ? 24. Is there anything else you think is important to tell us but which you feel has not been covered by the previous questions? -- We wish you all the best of luck, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:11 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Alan Cox wrote: I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to $100,000 or more. Manpower is expensive :) American manpower is expensive. French manpower is equally expensive. And British manpower too. American manpower on the coasts is expensive. People in the middle of the country enjoy the same quality of life for roughly half the income. It's slightly higher in the big cities, but even Chicago is still much cheaper than, say, LA. The price of non-American manpower will depend in part on the exchange rate of the dollar with the respective currency. And right now, the dollar won't get you as much in Europe as it used to. A director, perhaps, is good to have in the Boston area. But a sysadmin could be living anywhere. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Nov 30, 2007 2:30 PM, Philip Van Hoof [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think the foundation could setup (orchestrate) meetings (or interops or however you want to call them) with the different teams. Gather the right people and put them together from time to times. I agree 100% with this, and it is part of mycampaign. I'm not talking about fancy meetings but casual get togethers with no fancy catering. A group of individuals who share the same interests and have the expertise to solve a given issue. Think of what happened during GUADEC when a bunch of guys went out for lunch(?) and hacked on webkit. 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: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 12:15 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from now on: o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU. o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell! Please feel the sarcasm. If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned favouritism, we might as well just stop at all. This is a completely straw man argument Philip. By restricting competition through favoritism we actually kill innovation. There are times when we will endorse already dominant ideologies that are in-line with our own and reject those that are dangerous, but I have never seen the board stray from our partner neutrality by pushing for something that hasn't already proved itself. i.e The board isn't going to come up with its own license and office format and push those as the one true way of doing things. To that effect if a company is interested or individuals wanted to put together a training program they could come to us and request we overview the course for endorsement and rights to use our trademarks. There are always these details to consider and there are consequences to even the smallest detail. I'm going to call you out here. You come to us with a set of questions which I can sum up to - If elected will you get the board to fund my pet projects? I'll give you this Philip, you have some nice high level ideas. What you lack is the details to get there - the step by step map that considers all the consequences and routes around them. I learned a great deal about this when I went to speak to Representative Barney Frank. I was helping push the Education For All Act which would provide US aid funding for a basic level of education to children around the world. Representative Frank turned around and said that all sounds really good but how do we get there? Where do the funds come from? What is your plan? Lesson learned - it is all about how you get there and not just the end results. If a project is worthwhile it will prove itself by getting itself off the ground and be able to sustain itself. The foundation comes in when such projects need a little push to get to the next level. A project should not rely solely on the Foundation because, lets face it, our resources are limited and there are a number of good project out there that could use our help. We are going to go for the ones that have a high probability of success and give us the biggest bang for our buck. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
GNOME is based on a philosophy, but it is not just a philosophy. It is a project to develop and maintain a desktop environment. A technical project has to make specific technical decisions. It can't favor all the options that fit the philosophy; often it has to choose an avenue and follow it. Whatever the choices, some might call them favoritism, but that's tough. Choosing can't be avoided. GNOME is a desktop environment, but it is not just a desktop environment. It is also based on a philosophy of free software and freedom. That philosophy sometimes yields specific ethical reasons for making specific technical choices. To someone who thinks only in terms of technology, these might seem like favoritism, but favoring the ethical (or what leads to it) over the unethical is right and proper. The sort of favoritism that would be improper is to make a decision for the sake of profit (rather than the success of GNOME and the triumph of freedom). ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hi, Sorry, I'll reply briefly because my free time is limited today. I hope it will be understandable :-) Le vendredi 30 novembre 2007, à 02:51 +0100, Philip Van Hoof a écrit : Hi there, The questions: o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if elected vote to spend this money on important projects? Hrm. I wouldn't say we have a lot of money, but well, let's answer your questions :-) Being mostly interested in mobile targets and GNOME Mobile, I could certainly come up with some projects that might both increase deployment of our GNOME technologies on mobile devices and increase the amount of contributors. Both reasons are, I think, part of the reason why our Foundation exists. - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target) - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta) - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+ - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+ - Improve the existing Win32 target of Gtk+ We can do it, but it costs a lot and I'm not sure that's the best way to use our money. If we get some funding for those things, then that'd be great. If you really want this to happen, you can help by looking for funds. Note that having a business development person could help here too... - Employ a maintainer and/or additional developers for Gtk+'s development This has been discussed this year (there's a thread on gtk-devel-list and there was a discussion at GUADEC). The consensus was that it was not the best way to help GTK+. - Pay people to travel to schools and universities to educate students about GNOME (serious educating, not just doing cheap presentations) I don't think that's the right way to do it. The right way is to work with people teaching there. We've started doing this this year, but it needs more help to get results. Volunteers are welcome, contacts in universities are welcome. - ... (for making these decisions we need people who'll make real and hard decisions) o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam I've no strong opinion, so yes, why not. But then, why GNOME Mobile and not GNOME. Also, related to this, I'd more interested in seeing a GNOME Certification to certify applications (we've talked about this a few years ago already). Again, we need a group of people to dive into this and see what should be done to make this happen. o. How are you planning to help the GNOME community overcome the fact that we have relatively few technical leadership? Can you elaborate on this? - By waiting for the integration our softwares to turn into something that looks a lot like that O.S. called CHA-OS? - By letting companies like Nokia, Novell, ... set our goals? I think this is what's happening right now. Might be fine imo. I'd love to have more details on all this. How are they setting our goals? Isn't their goals our goals too anyway? etc. Note that, however, our users sometimes get confused by this: o. People thinking that Miguel De Icaza, Novell and GNOME are one entity. (I love your work Miguel, don't get me wrong. A lot of GNOME people do) o. Too late announcing of GNOME developers joining the OOXML discussions (I think it's great that we are among the people defining this, don't get me wrong. But our technical leadership, the one that we lack, should have made our position clear to the audience (our users) before getting Slashdotted by the religious ones in the land of freesoftware. This is not really about technical leadership, but about how GNOME is seen from the outside. Having one really strong leader would help fix those issues, but fixing our communication is also a reasonable way to achieve this. And it's probably easier :-) How to fix our communication is an interesting topic. I have no magical answer for this, and I'd welcome input. We can of course communicate better (the foundation blog Jeff created can help). We can make people known to the outside, so that the GNOME = Miguel feeling disappears (GNOME Journal interview, etc.). Also, the website rework can play a big role here. I can see the Foundation coordinating all this, but I it's not a topic that is 100% Foundation: it's really about the whole project. (and everybody can help, I know, I'm repeating this every now and then) I think that we are having quite a handicap by this, and that we should do something about it. This year. How will you do that? What is your strategy? Notes on my mind: o. Technical leadership != one person dictatorship, we can work with
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hi, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. But the foundation could publish a syllabus and some sample exams, and then licence training institutes and companies to offer the training (with quality control of the training course) - in the way LPI does. In fact, this would be a decent follow-on from the idea that Andy Oram proposed (don't have the link right now) about having quizzes at the bottom of documentation pages to ensure that the material is understandable and that the lessons to be learned are absorbed by the reader - both to help the reader validate their learning, and to get live feedback on documentation quality to identify areas in need of improvement. All of this stuff could do with what Edd Dumbill suggested some time ago - an editor dedicated to maintaining, organising, and improving GNOME's developer documentation. One more thing we don't really have the budget for (yet) :) 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: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 18:42 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote: Hi, As warned about earlier in this election (by someone with better foresight than I have), when there isn't an organized call for questions people will fire off zillions of them at random. This puts an unreasonable burden on not only the candidates who feel obligated to spend time responding to an unbounded and haphazard collection of interrogations, but also similarly burdens the general community with too much email. You also find people asking additional questions based on misunderstandings due to the fact that they simply weren't able to keep up with all the other email (I have seen this in multiple threads, not just this one.) What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? This was a simple issue with the Membership Committee practice this year. It could still be fixed this year too, but seems questions keep coming as long as voting is open :). Anyway, for next year, MC will make sure this doesn't happen, and board will make sure to double check it! behdad Elijah [With apologies to Philip--it wasn't really his fault since no one asked the general membership for questions in an organized fashion...but while his email probably makes some interesting points it very much qualifies as excessively long and spurred my comments.] -- 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: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. But the foundation could publish a syllabus and some sample exams, and then licence training institutes and companies to offer the training (with quality control of the training course) - in the way LPI does. Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. I totally agree with him about being against partnering with an entity over another. The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of free problems from stuff like this. I imagine fountains of FUD on every corner. I really don't like the idea. In fact, this would be a decent follow-on from the idea that Andy Oram proposed (don't have the link right now) about having quizzes at the bottom of documentation pages to ensure that the material is understandable and that the lessons to be learned are absorbed by the reader - both to help the reader validate their learning, and to get live feedback on documentation quality to identify areas in need of improvement. This sounds like a nice idea, like a GNOMEpardy :). I think it could take a good ammount of work to ellaborate those questions however. Consider that we would also have to create and maintain some infrastructure for this. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from now on: o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU. o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell! Please feel the sarcasm. If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned favouritism, we might as well just stop at all. The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of free problems from stuff like this. Name one that any one of our technology decisions doesn't have, My project creates opinions from people who prefer MAPI over IMAP, web clients over normal E-mail, XMPP over SMTP, ... Lot's of free problems. Realism! I imagine fountains of FUD on every corner. That's unavoidable for anything we do. -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:11:15 +0100 Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alan Cox wrote: I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to $100,000 or more. Manpower is expensive :) American manpower is expensive. French manpower is equally expensive. And British manpower too. Even more so. Especially compared to Brazil, India and Eastern Europe. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On 12/1/07, Philip Van Hoof [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: On 12/1/07, Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism. Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from now on: No, you are misinterpretaing my words, it's quite different to talk about choosing GPL over $something-else and choosing place-X over place-Y. On the current context, choosing to endorse place-X's training courses would imply that we are helping them make profit. Choosing GPL or supporting ODF is a totally different matter. o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU. o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell! Please feel the sarcasm. If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned favouritism, we might as well just stop at all. The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of free problems from stuff like this. Name one that any one of our technology decisions doesn't have, My project creates opinions from people who prefer MAPI over IMAP, web clients over normal E-mail, XMPP over SMTP, ... Different matter, I don't think Tinymail could be a source of the same type of problems I'm thinking of. To clarify, I'm thinking more about the social implicances of such decision, lots of people would think we are discriminating some and favouring others, among other things. The quality of what we endorse also worries me a lot, we can try really hard to watch over the quality of the courses or training but it's impossible to guarantee 100% quality, hence we would end with people having papers that have our sign saying yes, this guy knows how to hack GNOME stuff and they don't necessarily would even know how to apt-get something. Lot's of free problems. Realism! I imagine fountains of FUD on every corner. That's unavoidable for anything we do. Nope, I don't think nobody has raised any kind of FUD about a lot of things we do. As an example, let's take Boston Summit: nobody accuses us of favouring Boston because it's just a hacker meeting, no one is making money with it directly. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hey On 11/30/07, Bastian, Waldo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Interesting, I feel that anyway certifications tend to get worth nothing when people start taking them just to pass them, but still I see your point of letting people not in GNOME but users of GNOME's technology to prove they know that stuff. Certification implemented as training could be a different matter, as long as the real juice of the thing is the training. I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. thanks for your comment, Diego ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 20:28 +, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote: Hey On 11/30/07, Bastian, Waldo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Interesting, I feel that anyway certifications tend to get worth nothing when people start taking them just to pass them, but still I see your point of letting people not in GNOME but users of GNOME's technology to prove they know that stuff. Certification implemented as training could be a different matter, as long as the real juice of the thing is the training. I still don't think Foundation should get involved into saying place X is an approbed training center, I fear that would go beyond its scope. I also fear it would lead to favoritism though I am all for helping out a company develop course-ware I am very much opposed to partnering with one entity over another. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
quote who=Elijah Newren What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? Work with the Membership Committee to document their practices and make sure they perform them more consistently in future years. During the current term, I have already made that you won't have to deal with this again for 18 months. :-) - Jeff -- GNOME.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australia http://live.gnome.org/Melbourne2008 Itanium: A synthetic market-group tested plasticised square. - Jamie Wilkinson ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
Hey On 11/30/07, Elijah Newren [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, (...) What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? I can only think of asking for question much sooner or proposing some topics under which to fill questions. But honestly, I don't know if anything could guarantee people participating more *before* this period. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
Hi, As warned about earlier in this election (by someone with better foresight than I have), when there isn't an organized call for questions people will fire off zillions of them at random. This puts an unreasonable burden on not only the candidates who feel obligated to spend time responding to an unbounded and haphazard collection of interrogations, but also similarly burdens the general community with too much email. You also find people asking additional questions based on misunderstandings due to the fact that they simply weren't able to keep up with all the other email (I have seen this in multiple threads, not just this one.) What will you as a candidate do to make sure we avoid this mess in the future? Elijah [With apologies to Philip--it wasn't really his fault since no one asked the general membership for questions in an organized fashion...but while his email probably makes some interesting points it very much qualifies as excessively long and spurred my comments.] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for the candidates [Was: Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates]
quote who=Jeff Waugh Work with the Membership Committee to document their practices and make sure they perform them more consistently in future years. Miss one word and it changes the entire tone... and help make sure. They have done a great job this year, though as a result of numerous changes to the volunteer team a couple of things have been dropped on the floor (such as question gathering from the community and linking to the election rules in the announcement). Easy to fix for the future. It's generally a pretty thankless task, so... thanks to the membership committee! :-) - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australiahttp://lca2008.linux.org.au/ You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run. - Kenny Rogers, The Gambler ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
RE: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 20:30 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: I think the foundation could setup (orchestrate) meetings (or interops or however you want to call them) with the different teams. Gather the right people and put them together from time to times. The foundation tries to do that, and you will see more of these meeting this coming year. Note however that while the board tries to be proactive in proposing meetings, foundation members / hackers are the ones who should ask foundation / board for funding. I don't remember ever seeing any such proposal from your side. For reference, GNOME Foundation this year funded a java-gnome summit and an a11y summit. As I said, expect more next year. -- 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: Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hi, Philip Van Hoof wrote: o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if elected vote to spend this money on important projects? I just want to put this in perspective: the foundation has $200,000 in the bank, with guaranteed income of $100,000 a year approx. One employee costs at least $70,000 per year, and depending on the role up to $100,000 or more. Manpower is expensive :) - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target) - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta) - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+ - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+ There are some good project ideas there, and there are certainly bodies who might be prepared to subsidise them. Someone (?) needs to go hunt for money for one or more of those projects to make them happen. 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: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 00:43 -0800, Bastian, Waldo wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Exactly. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Indeed. -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 02:51 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote: Hi there, The questions: o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if elected vote to spend this money on important projects? Being mostly interested in mobile targets and GNOME Mobile, I could certainly come up with some projects that might both increase deployment of our GNOME technologies on mobile devices and increase the amount of contributors. Both reasons are, I think, part of the reason why our Foundation exists. - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target) - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta) - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+ - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+ - Improve the existing Win32 target of Gtk+ - Employ a maintainer and/or additional developers for Gtk+'s development So your questions come from the false notion that the Foundation has plenty of money. While we are better off than years past we are in no way flush with resources. We are looking at hiring a full time administrator and perhaps an admin at some point but doing so will be scrutinized to make sure we are properly allocating our resources. For the above scenarios Philip presents, I don't think these types of spending are in the Foundation's interest in funding as he puts it. Helping out when asked by a developer with hardware, contacts with relevant companies or funding to attend conferences are more in-line with how we should allocate resources. Even then a developer would have to come with a detailed proposal which shows the benefits of such expenditures. There are a million things we can put resources into but we only have a limited amount to go around so we need to carefully select which expenditures will give us the most bang for the buck as they say. - Pay people to travel to schools and universities to educate students about GNOME (serious educating, not just doing cheap presentations) Again we should fund peoples travels but creating jobs can lead to major issues. First and foremost is we don't have the money to do this. The second is, jobs, outside of the day to day administration of the Foundation would create conflict with people in the community who don't get payed. Even the job of system administration could cause conflict and the benefits need to be weighed in light of these issues. In other words leave most of the hiring up to the various companies that use GNOME and only hire within the Foundation after careful consideration of the issues. - ... (for making these decisions we need people who'll make real and hard decisions) And even hard decisions some may not like to hear. o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam It is hard to have an opinion on a title. Who is going to make this exam? What does it certify? Does it conflict with our partners programs or favor one partner over another? o. How are you planning to help the GNOME community overcome the fact that we have relatively few technical leadership? I think we have huge technical leadership. I think leaders pop up every day in different areas. I think the Board's role in developing leaders in general is to identify potential leaders and help them contribute to GNOME through resources like travel and conference sponsorship, by delegating tasks to them and by providing other resources such as hardware/hosting to those who can not procure it themselves. - By waiting for the integration our softwares to turn into something that looks a lot like that O.S. called CHA-OS? I have no idea what you are asking here. - By letting companies like Nokia, Novell, ... set our goals? I think this is what's happening right now. Might be fine imo. Well it is individuals within those companies along with individuals who don't have corporate ties who set direction. Add into the mix the wider Free/Open communities which sets various norms and a more dynamic picture emerges on how GNOME direction is set. Note that, however, our users sometimes get confused by this: o. People thinking that Miguel De Icaza, Novell and GNOME are one entity. (I love your work Miguel, don't get me wrong. A lot of GNOME people do) Some people will think what they want to think and you will never be able to change their views however we could be more transparent than press releases and meeting notes. o. Too late announcing of GNOME developers joining the OOXML discussions (I think it's great that we are among the people defining this, don't get me wrong. But our technical
RE: Money spending, questions for the candidates
On Fri, 2007-11-30 at 00:43 -0800, Bastian, Waldo wrote: o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam If the examination is offered by a third party, then I would say they are violating the trademark guidelines :). But if you suggest that GNOME via the Foundation could offer a certification, I wouldn't like to see that, sadly certifications tend to mean nothing with time due to people taking them just to pass the test. I think it would be more healthy to have easier ways for contributors to show their work and prove how much they have given to the project, hence showing their possible employer that they surely rock. Although the company that I work for surely employs a few rock stars, more often a project team or company is just looking for someone who knows how to use GTK+ widgets (think bellcurve). I believe the objective here would be to make it easier for commercial companies to develop solutions based on GNOME and part of the problem that such companies face is finding developers that are familiar with the technology. Reducing that hurdle will help to make the technology more popular. I don't think the Foundation should offer certification itself but maybe it could work together with an existing institute on expanding its training offerings around Gnome technology. Just my 2 ct. Cheers, Waldo Waldo, this was a very astute observation. Thanks. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Money spending, questions for the candidates
Hi there, The questions: o. Given that the Foundation of GNOME has plenty of money, will you if elected vote to spend this money on important projects? Being mostly interested in mobile targets and GNOME Mobile, I could certainly come up with some projects that might both increase deployment of our GNOME technologies on mobile devices and increase the amount of contributors. Both reasons are, I think, part of the reason why our Foundation exists. - Development on language bindings, like a binding generator for for example Android and other mobile targets (plenty of our components don't require Gtk+ yet could run on this target) - Funding development on development tools (like the new Anjuta) - Development on a WinCE port of Gtk+ - Development on a P.I.P.S. (Symbian with POSIX) port of Gtk+ - Improve the existing Win32 target of Gtk+ - Employ a maintainer and/or additional developers for Gtk+'s development - Pay people to travel to schools and universities to educate students about GNOME (serious educating, not just doing cheap presentations) - ... (for making these decisions we need people who'll make real and hard decisions) o. What is your opinion on an examination that could carry the title: GNOME Mobile certified software developer exam o. How are you planning to help the GNOME community overcome the fact that we have relatively few technical leadership? - By waiting for the integration our softwares to turn into something that looks a lot like that O.S. called CHA-OS? - By letting companies like Nokia, Novell, ... set our goals? I think this is what's happening right now. Might be fine imo. Note that, however, our users sometimes get confused by this: o. People thinking that Miguel De Icaza, Novell and GNOME are one entity. (I love your work Miguel, don't get me wrong. A lot of GNOME people do) o. Too late announcing of GNOME developers joining the OOXML discussions (I think it's great that we are among the people defining this, don't get me wrong. But our technical leadership, the one that we lack, should have made our position clear to the audience (our users) before getting Slashdotted by the religious ones in the land of freesoftware. I think that we are having quite a handicap by this, and that we should do something about it. This year. How will you do that? What is your strategy? Notes on my mind: o. Technical leadership != one person dictatorship, we can work with committees too. Let's be open minded in stead of the I'm against everything point of view. If the right people are in that committee, nobody will be against anything. o. I'm still hoping for GMAE/GNOME Mobile to be(come) that committee for mobile related components. Why not do ... o. one for the Desktop o. one for the translators and documentation writers o. one for that futuristic Online Desktop o. one for the language bindings and development tools o. On importance level: I think that without such technical leadership, GNOME will fragment into a huge amount of unconnected projects. I think this will eventually render most our components irrelevant. I don't want to end with panic-speech but I just did. I'll continue my philosophic text with ... passion We are a bunch of passionate people. I've met a lot of the other developers at conferences and my conclusion is that our average level of passion is high. With our combined passion, I think we can compete with any big player on this planet. I believe it has always been passion that made the final difference in technology It would be a waste to steer ourselves to irrelevance. I think we can be both passionate and successful. And if not, let's die trying. (now that's a good conclusion, no?) ps. I hereby promise I will try not to make such long philosophic E-mails anymore. You must be insane for reading all of it! -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 16:31 +0100, Anne Østergaard wrote: On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 09:48 -0500, John (J5) Palmieri wrote: On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 23:52 +0100, Anne Østergaard wrote: 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? No Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? Yes Can you accept competing official ISO standards? Yes, as long as they are open and free of intellectual property concerns. It is then up to the developers what direction they wish to go in. The board should not set technical direction but rather reflect the will of the community while offering moral guidance as well as advice from expert advisers. If they are fully interoperable there might not be a legal problem, but rather a political problem for the society about the costs. Well in that case we will also have an other situation to deal with, in the case where the dominant standard has near monopoly status. Then it becomes a question about monopoly versus free and open competition. We have all seen that even with a clear cut monopoly case in The European Court of Justice recently, it is not easy to have the loosing part change its conduct. Even if it eventually does so, it will take an awful long time and it will probably not be to 100%. You are completely correct and I think the community can make the right choices here that 6 elected people can not. I do however think the foundation is well within it's power to make statements based on community experts recommendations but for the most part should let things be settled in the community. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 23:52 +0100, Anne Østergaard wrote: 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? No Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? Yes Can you accept competing official ISO standards? Yes, as long as they are open and free of intellectual property concerns. It is then up to the developers what direction they wish to go in. The board should not set technical direction but rather reflect the will of the community while offering moral guidance as well as advice from expert advisers. 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? If it is not free and open then the board should not endorse it. However that is not to say the board should not engage working groups which are working on such non-free standards. If it is in our interest we should provide the resources to shift such standards in the free and open direction. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
On Mon, 2007-11-26 at 09:48 -0500, John (J5) Palmieri wrote: On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 23:52 +0100, Anne Østergaard wrote: 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? No Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? Yes Can you accept competing official ISO standards? Yes, as long as they are open and free of intellectual property concerns. It is then up to the developers what direction they wish to go in. The board should not set technical direction but rather reflect the will of the community while offering moral guidance as well as advice from expert advisers. If they are fully interoperable there might not be a legal problem, but rather a political problem for the society about the costs. Well in that case we will also have an other situation to deal with, in the case where the dominant standard has near monopoly status. Then it becomes a question about monopoly versus free and open competition. We have all seen that even with a clear cut monopoly case in The European Court of Justice recently, it is not easy to have the loosing part change its conduct. Even if it eventually does so, it will take an awful long time and it will probably not be to 100%. Anne ___ 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: 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
Questions to the candidates
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? Will you attend at least 90% of the board calls? 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? Kind regards Anne ___ 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: 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: 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
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
[1] What are your plans to answer the question put forward at the last GUADEC about Why should one become a member of the GNOME Foundation ? I don't think we should be trying to sell foundation membership. I became a member of the foundation because that makes me feel part of the project and that makes me proud of it. Would you be in a position to elaborate on your plans/projects to make membership more interesting for the GNOME Community ? I don't have any immediate plans in that direction, no. [2] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda right now ? Gnome website and online documentations. As someone fairly new to the project without technical involvement, I find it extremely hard to find my way around the project. I found it through to gnome-love and a bunch of other lists, but just because someone told me about them. What will you do more or better than the previous boards ? I aim to be more effective on issues that need constant follow-up and communications. [3] How do you manage your time and that of others ? I am very responsible myself. And I am used to pinging others to get the job done. Are you good at working with others including those who might have a differing opinion than yours and try to reach consensus and agree on actions ? I am very open to hearing other's ideas, trying to understand their point of views clearly and making them understand mine, but finally I walk by the majority's opinion. [4] How are you going to manage your current contributions to GNOME once you become a Board Member ? At the moment I do not have much contributions to GNOME other than enthusiasm. I plan to help in the GUADEC organization again this year. Once in the board I will still help there, in other capacities. [5] What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the coming year OLPC is the single most important market this year IMO. and what do you feel you can do to help GNOME achieve better presence ? This is a great opportunity to take a look back and ask all our plenty of translation teams how we can help their kids be more productive through the use of OLPC. Right now, some GNOME hackers are targeting OLPC for a port of their application, but we are not actively developing for that. I think OLPC is doing a lot of innovation, and GNOME can be a bigger part of it. [6] What are your plans to encourage and mentor contributions to GNOME from Latin America, Africa and Asia ?How would you increase community participation ? An effective way would be to get in touch with the translator teams, contact the right people, find out their needs, invite them to GUADEC and give them questioners to spread out among the potential GNOME contributors that they know and finally get them involved in GNOME. In such countries, school and universities are very important targets too. We have to find proper links to help us introduce GNOME to more students who will be the most effective and fast spreaders of it. I believe students will be pretty good bug reporters to begin with and we can find some good developers and contributors among them. [7] What areas do you see lacking currently in a complete Free Software Desktop ? What would your role be (should you be elected) in addressing the issues ? I am more an end user of GNOME. What I see lacking in my day to day work is a bug-free and handy email client. That's not really something the board wants to make decisions about I guess. [8] What are your planned activities to promote use of GNOME in small and medium business environments which potentially deliver many users to GNOME ? I don't have a plan. I will leave it to other, experienced, board members and do my best to transforms those plans into actions. [9] What sources of funds do you as a Board Member (should you be elected) try to establish ? What areas do you think require most fund-love ? I cannot think of any new sources of funds, but I think hiring the bizdev will greatly boost the financial situation. [10] Please rank your interests: * GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business and individual * GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items (nationally and internationally) * GNOME legal issues like Copyright and Patents * GNOME finances and fund raising * Alliance with other organisations 1) GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items (nationally and internationally) 2) GNOME finances and fund raising 3) GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business and individual 4) Alliance with other organisations 5) GNOME legal issues like Copyright and Patents [11] How much familiar are you with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME ? How much do you follow and participate in the main GNOME mailing lists ? I read the Planet I am on marketing-list, gnome-journal-list, foundation-list gnome-love mail list. Though I don't read/reply
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
quote who=Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay [1] What are your plans to answer the question put forward at the last GUADEC about Why should one become a member of the GNOME Foundation ? Would you be in a position to elaborate on your plans/projects to make membership more interesting for the GNOME Community ? I don't think membership should be mandatory to contribute to GNOME on any level in the community, but must be for organisational participation in the GNOME Foundation (such as voting or running for election to the Board). I don't think we need to make membership shiny (such as providing oodles of irrelevant benefits to members), because membership ought to be a mark of pride, not a coupon club. That said, membership comes with some relevant benefits that are useful and/or important, such as access to some GNOME services (email aliases and soon, Jabber accounts -- there are some things I need to fix before Jabber accounts can be generally available to members though). I do think we need to do a better job of letting GNOME contributors know that they can participate in the organisation that supports and represents them by becoming members. Based upon the responsibilities expressed in our charter, the GNOME Foundation can and likely will make decisions that affect the entire community, so it is important to be a member. [2] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda right now ? What will you do more or better than the previous boards ? Our immediate #1 priority is to hire a bizdev director, who will focus on funding opportunities for the Foundation, and maintain relationships with companies and organisations around the world. This will be a major contribution from the GNOME Foundation to the project, and to all of the organisations that rely on us, from major distributors to local consultancies, government deployments to individual developers. That said, I think there's an important point to be made here: If during the course of one year, the GNOME Foundation Board manages our resources wisely and usefully, and represents the project well, then it has succeeded. There will always be opportunities to go beyond that, but with those opportunities come risks. This is not to say that the Board should slack off for a year, but I do think it's important to balance grandiose schemes with our core mission: support and representation of the GNOME community... I do realise I'm saying that with a reputation for taking on ambitious goals. :-) I hope this answer has an impact on how you vote: Elect candidates you know, who you've worked with in the community, and who represent your values and aspirations for the project. Elect candidates you can easily approach about issues that matter to you. Shared values and trust are ultimately the most important things about the Board. [3] How do you manage your time and that of others ? Are you good at working with others including those who might have a differing opinion than yours and try to reach consensus and agree on actions ? I've had a very hard time making Board meetings at 05:00 in the latter part of this year, due to changes in my schedule and work commitments. I'm not happy about that, as I've held myself to much higher standards in the past -- I'm hoping we'll be able to negotiate a better time if I'm elected this year, but I'm used to my timezone being the odd one out. :-) The second part of the question is more interesting. When 95% of our values and vision are shared, differing points of view on that last 5% can sometimes be tough, but ultimately extremely satisfying, because (and this may sound odd) they are often at the most philosophical edges of what we share. On the odd occasion, the Board agrees to build a bikeshed but can't agree on the colour, but these instances are thankfully rare. I value vigorous discussion among Board members, because it demonstrates that we are passionate about what we're doing, that the desires and values of the community are in our minds, and that we value getting it right. It's hard doing that in a distributed organisation, and sometimes we get cranky at each other, but I think it's worth it. Last year I wrote about the difference between decision-oriented people (decisive) and discussion-oriented people (consultative). That still plays an important part in how I approach issues. I have the capacity for both, but lean towards the latter. [4] How are you going to manage your current contributions to GNOME once you become a Board Member ? Since passing the release management baton, I have been able to spend more time on system administration issues (in particular, making our mail server rock the casbah), but in many ways my current contributions to GNOME are in one way or another related to the Board. [5] What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the coming year and what do you feel you can do to help GNOME achieve better presence ? There are a number of markets
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 17:00 +, Joachim Noreiko wrote: I notice that most recent minutes on the website are December 2005. Do you want to fix that and ask me again? ;) Could the board just ask the foundation's administration assistant to keep that list of meeting minutes updated, please? -- Murray Cumming [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: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 12:53 +0530, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote: [1] What are your plans to answer the question put forward at the last GUADEC about Why should one become a member of the GNOME Foundation ? I think the current offerings: being able to vote for elections and to get a @gnome.org address are quite attractive to someone passionate about GNOME. Much of our problem here I guess is the not-in-the-face application page and the very slow response time. To improve that, others have already suggested, and I did too a while ago. Offering membership to anyone with lots of bug activity, those who get CVS access, and apply for financial support, etc. will help there. Also, I'm fine, and actually support limiting any financial/costly support to foundation members. E.g. sending people to conferences, or sending them the event box should be limited to foundation members. BUT, only if we have a application process that is so fast that one can become a member as needed, if they qualify. More than that, I don't think there's much more we can offer, nor do I think that it's a problem. Would you be in a position to elaborate on your plans/projects to make membership more interesting for the GNOME Community ? I will pursue the above changes if I get on Board, yes. The recent change of lowering the contribution requirements is already toward these goals. Making sure that the queue is kept very short is next. I think we can do that. [2] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda right now ? The online store + the website revamp. The website is on track and progressing fast, thanks to Quim. The online store however doesn't seem to be on target right now. That's something to look into fast IMO. These two components put together define our existence on the web, and that's becoming more and more important every day. We have cool blogs, we have cool artists, we have cool software. We need to let everyone know about them. What will you do more or better than the previous boards ? Not having been on board, I really can't tell. And given the current board, I'm not sure there's anything I can do better honestly. But I can promise my dedication, and the same work quality that I put in other things that I do. [3] How do you manage your time and that of others ? I'm getting better at this, although starting a full-time job did pressure my earlier habits. Right now, I use mails in my inbox inside Evo and tabs open in Firefox (two applications that I have to kill and restart with my limited memory...) to hold my short-term and immediate TODO items, and Google calendar for the longer term events. I'm most productive over IRC and email, although I can handle infrequent phone meetings. Are you good at working with others including those who might have a differing opinion than yours and try to reach consensus and agree on actions ? I am. I love free software for the working-with-others part, and have been doing that on technical terms very successfully. On the less technical grounds, I understand that there may not be one true way, and I'm ready to compromise, and to respect a consensus. [4] How are you going to manage your current contributions to GNOME once you become a Board Member ? My maintenance duties take a very small part of my time, and are easy to manage. Development and bug fixing however is what takes most of my time. I'm lucky enough to do much of of these as part of my day job at Red Hat. I'm allowed to spend a reasonable amount of my day time on board matters, if elected. If more time needed, I have to find an afternoon or a few hours from the weekend. Both are fine. [5] What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the coming year and what do you feel you can do to help GNOME achieve better presence ? OLPC definitely, and also more embedded devices. We are fortunatley in pretty good contact with OLPC. The board can make sure that OLPC test systems are sent to strategic GNOME developers that may not be interested in asking for one personally. People working on presence, power management, tagging, etc. [6] What are your plans to encourage and mentor contributions to GNOME from Latin America, Africa and Asia ? How would you increase community participation ? We are pretty on track for Latin America from what I see. As for Africa and Asia, I think we should identify passionate people there, and bring them to GUADEC, and send people there to run small events. That seems like the best way to let people there know we are interested in having them and pass the message. If we manage to attract enough people to start a local community, it's downhill from there. [7] What areas do you see lacking currently in a complete Free Software Desktop ? What would your role be (should you be elected) in addressing the issues ? Multimedia I would say. Now this is a very special issue. We cannot approach it the easy
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
--- Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Board does not directly get involved in the technicalities I'd actually like to stop there and ask: why not? Certainly getting involved with the board shouldn't require technical knowledge. But there is a need to plan the development of Gnome, and I'm not sure who is doing this. The last few releases have lacked direction, features are added without consideration of their integration into the desktop and future development, and hard decisions are not being taken. If not the board, then who? [1] What are your plans to answer the question put forward at the last GUADEC about Why should one become a member of the GNOME Foundation ? Would you be in a position to elaborate on your plans/projects to make membership more interesting for the GNOME Community I really don't know. I've been a member of the Foundation for some months and other than a warm fuzzy feeling I don't know what it's done for me. As a Foundation member I'd like to feel that I'm a small part of the community and organization that plans and steers Gnome development. I'm hoping that the single news page we're planning as part of the redevelopment of www.gnome.org will bring more information about what the Foundation does to Gnome contributors and beyond. [2] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda right now ? What will you do more or better than the previous boards ? I notice that most recent minutes on the website are December 2005. Do you want to fix that and ask me again? ;) More recent material I've been able to find doesn't really mean much to me as an ordinary Gnome contributor. It would seem that the Foundation needs to do more to keep Gnome contributors informed. [3] How do you manage your time and that of others ? Are you good at working with others including those who might have a differing opinion than yours and try to reach consensus and agree on actions ? I tend to have several things at the front of my to-do list, and pick one in accordance to how much time I know I have to spend in front of Gnome. But my work tends to fork off in different directions when I start to find bugs in the app I'm working on. As for teamwork and disagreements, I'm always willing to look at things from another person's point of view and reconsider whether my idea is the best approach. But there'll be times when after discussion, I stand firm. (See me Quim debating the secondary navbar for wgo, for example.) [4] How are you going to manage your current contributions to GNOME once you become a Board Member ? With difficulty, if the GDP doesn't get new recruits. I don't want work on documentation or the website to slip. Attracting writers to free software projects is hard. We're not providing the right environment for them. [5] What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the coming year and what do you feel you can do to help GNOME achieve better presence ? It would be really nice if some of Gnome's markets were nearer to me so I could have direct experience of them... From what I read, our best 'way in' seems to be government and public bodies at the moment. I'd like us to get to a point where a Gnome-based OS is a serious alternative for home users, but I don't see that happening this year. [6] What are your plans to encourage and mentor contributions to GNOME from Latin America, Africa and Asia ? How would you increase community participation ? All I can say about this issue is that I've previously noticed the large gaps over these areas on the world map of Gnome contributors. Our translations for languages such as Portuguese, Thai, or Punjabi (to pick a few) looks to be pretty good, so what's missing? Perhaps a translated www.gnome.org will help, and lowering barriers to all contributors regardless where they come from. [7] What areas do you see lacking currently in a complete Free Software Desktop ? What would your role be (should you be elected) in addressing the issues ? I feel Gnome is squeezed in on two sides. We sit above X11, whose legacy issues hold us back, and GTK, which doesn't fully serve our needs. Between us and the users, distros rebrand and override what we produce. And in the middle, there's us. Our file system stuff doesn't let us do things that users expect, like shortcuts, or opened documents keeping up with a moved file. Our HIG is out of step with current work, and too many parts of the desktop have been allowed to grow without proper foundation in the desktop as a whole. I'm often astounded to discover new features planned for Gnome which I would have assumed to be part of it already: Network Manager informing my chat and IRC apps that I'm disconnected, for example. My role in these... I had hoped that this cycle I would find the time to get some work on the HIG started. But lots of user manuals have come out of the woodwork, and not enough of the Gnome Web redevelopment
Re: Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
oh dear please keep the candidate discussion OFF foundation-announce thanks, Wayne On 11/22/06, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, The list of candidates for the elections are available here: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2006/candidates.html With this mail, one hopes to start off the series of discussions amongst the candidates in the fray for the Board. The underlying vein in the series of questions is that they are *not* technology (ie hacker/developer) centric. The Board does not directly get involved in the technicalities, the bunch of questions are more board-related. In the spirit of the 2003 mail from Telsa Gwynne the questions are mostly positive in nature. The first question is from Baris (via a discussion/chat on IRC) *** BEGIN QUESTIONS *** [1] What are your plans to answer the question put forward at the last GUADEC about Why should one become a member of the GNOME Foundation ? Would you be in a position to elaborate on your plans/projects to make membership more interesting for the GNOME Community ? [2] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda right now ? What will you do more or better than the previous boards ? [3] How do you manage your time and that of others ? Are you good at working with others including those who might have a differing opinion than yours and try to reach consensus and agree on actions ? [4] How are you going to manage your current contributions to GNOME once you become a Board Member ? [5] What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the coming year and what do you feel you can do to help GNOME achieve better presence ? [6] What are your plans to encourage and mentor contributions to GNOME from Latin America, Africa and Asia ? How would you increase community participation ? [7] What areas do you see lacking currently in a complete Free Software Desktop ? What would your role be (should you be elected) in addressing the issues ? [8] What are your planned activities to promote use of GNOME in small and medium business environments which potentially deliver many users to GNOME ? [9] What sources of funds do you as a Board Member (should you be elected) try to establish ? What areas do you think require most fund-love ? [10] Please rank your interests: * GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business and individual * GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items (nationally and internationally) * GNOME legal issues like Copyright and Patents * GNOME finances and fund raising * Alliance with other organisations [11] How much familiar are you with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME ? How much do you follow and participate in the main GNOME mailing lists ? [12] Can you elaborate about your plans to provide the Board with a focus that steers development choices and works with allied organisations in order to define and adapt (and or adopt) standards ? *** END QUESTIONS *** Let the discussions begin ... Regards Sankarshan -- From Untruth, lead me to the Truth, From Darkness, Lead me towards the Light, From Death, Lead me to Life Eternal. ___ foundation-announce mailing list foundation-announce@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Questions for the candidates - let's start the discussion(s)
Hi, The list of candidates for the elections are available here: http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2006/candidates.html With this mail, one hopes to start off the series of discussions amongst the candidates in the fray for the Board. The underlying vein in the series of questions is that they are *not* technology (ie hacker/developer) centric. The Board does not directly get involved in the technicalities, the bunch of questions are more board-related. In the spirit of the 2003 mail from Telsa Gwynne the questions are mostly positive in nature. The first question is from Baris (via a discussion/chat on IRC) *** BEGIN QUESTIONS *** [1] What are your plans to answer the question put forward at the last GUADEC about Why should one become a member of the GNOME Foundation ? Would you be in a position to elaborate on your plans/projects to make membership more interesting for the GNOME Community ? [2] What do you think is the most important item on the Board's agenda right now ? What will you do more or better than the previous boards ? [3] How do you manage your time and that of others ? Are you good at working with others including those who might have a differing opinion than yours and try to reach consensus and agree on actions ? [4] How are you going to manage your current contributions to GNOME once you become a Board Member ? [5] What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the coming year and what do you feel you can do to help GNOME achieve better presence ? [6] What are your plans to encourage and mentor contributions to GNOME from Latin America, Africa and Asia ? How would you increase community participation ? [7] What areas do you see lacking currently in a complete Free Software Desktop ? What would your role be (should you be elected) in addressing the issues ? [8] What are your planned activities to promote use of GNOME in small and medium business environments which potentially deliver many users to GNOME ? [9] What sources of funds do you as a Board Member (should you be elected) try to establish ? What areas do you think require most fund-love ? [10] Please rank your interests: * GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business and individual * GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items (nationally and internationally) * GNOME legal issues like Copyright and Patents * GNOME finances and fund raising * Alliance with other organisations [11] How much familiar are you with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME ? How much do you follow and participate in the main GNOME mailing lists ? [12] Can you elaborate about your plans to provide the Board with a focus that steers development choices and works with allied organisations in order to define and adapt (and or adopt) standards ? *** END QUESTIONS *** Let the discussions begin ... Regards Sankarshan -- From Untruth, lead me to the Truth, From Darkness, Lead me towards the Light, From Death, Lead me to Life Eternal. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
1. How much time can you dedicate to the board each week? I can spend a total of 5 hours easily. 4. Explain how you expect to meet you goals. If we manage to make the board more open, which seems to be agreed as a most by almost all candidates, then I don't see the baord work much different that other happenings in the project. We set goals, discuss, find interested people, decide/delegate. Like we are all already doing in other aspects of the project. 6. Please assess GNOME: a. What are its strengths The healthy community, the freedom, the timely release process, the usability/accessibility/internationalization/localization. b. What are its weaknesses Lack of decision-making power in the project as a whole. Lack of progress in areas that no individual cares enough to spend time on. So web pages may stay out of date for years, or the commits list broken for months. c. What are its opportunities I see a lot of opportunities for GNOME on small devices, also in educational and governmental institutaions. They are of course all known. And there's also the long-term goal of taking over the desktop market :). d. What are its threats Main treat I see is the software patents. 7. Name the best album you purchased in the last year. Dan Bern (Dan Bern): http://danbern.com/discography.html#danbern --behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American Language ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
Hi there, En/na Curtis Hovey ha escrit: 1. How much time can you dedicate to the board each week? In the first half of 2006 I will be part time dedicated to GUADEC coordination - http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/node/164 . Part of this time can drop easily to board related tasks. 2. How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and less the next? I'm self-employed and I work from home. I 'only' need to negotiate scheduler with my partner and my son (I take care of him mainly afternoons, so her mother can work also). 3. Please rank your interests: a. GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business, and individuals b. GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items nationally and internationally c. GNOME legal issues like copyright and patents d. GNOME finances and fund raising e. Alliance with other organizations. Answered in the 'official' questions. 4. Explain how you expect to meet you goals. Being pragmatical defining the goals. Sometimes an organisation needs to dream in order to move forward. The good thing about GNOME is that the community is full of dreamers. This means the board don't need to dream but to be pragmatical an efficient, finishing what has been started and not starting (yet) what can't be properly finished. 6. Please assess GNOME: a. What are its strengths Products (desktop GTK+ apps), community, vision, philosophy, gnu, brand, art, i18n b. What are its weaknesses identity, dependency of distros, public voice, gnome.org, welcoming newbies, distance from users, opacity, foundation, board, sound, games c. What are its opportunities FOSS reference, public corporate big deployments and migrations, accessibility, multilingüism, triumph of standards, freedesktop.org, P2P, FOAF, Web 2.0. d. What are its threats division, corporativisation, hidden agendas, misuse of resources, patents, winning the empire becoming the empire 7. Name the best album you purchased in the last year. gtk-gnutella -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
Questions 1, 2, 3 and 5 answered in previous mail. 4. Explain how you expect to meet you goals. * I will more effectively communicate the role and scope of the Board among the directors, Foundation members and Advisory Board. * I will encourage the adoption of an elected executive as part of the Foundation's constitution. * I will continue to evangelise and represent the GNOME community as best I can. 6. Please assess GNOME: Tough one. Not going to do a complete SWOT analysis here, just the basics! a. What are its strengths * Awesome community and organisational structure * Excellent relationships with distributors and other organisations * Predictable and reliable release schedule * Deeply ingrained culture of attention to user experience and design * Universal Access - usability, accessibility, internationalisation b. What are its weaknesses Being good enough, a little bit more secure than the competition and Free (beer and speech) won't win the difficult 'middle sector' of the market. c. What are its opportunities cf. Project Topaz (or really, 10x10) presentation from GUADEC 2005. d. What are its threats The changing desktop market and vicious competitors armed to the hilt with patents. 7. Name the best album you purchased in the last year. Well, I really enjoyed Love.Angel.Music.Baby by Gwen Stefani. But the *best* album I bought in the last year was actually one I repurchased because I gave the original to a friend. To Hal and Bacharach (1998), a tribute album to Hal David and Burt Bacharach by a bunch of Aussie artists and bands. It is *awesome*. Two standout tracks: The Whitlams - I'll Never Fall In Love Again The Avalanches - Do You Know The Way To San Jose - Jeff -- Ubuntu USA Europe Tour: Oct-Nov 2005http://wiki.ubuntu.com/3BT Everything I knew about TCP/IP I had downloaded the same day I started hacking the net code. - Alan Cox ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to the candidates
Hi, On sam, 2005-11-19 at 09:04 -0500, Curtis Hovey wrote: 1. How much time can you dedicate to the board each week? My time is quite flexible. But I think I can give ~1 hour per day. There are obviously some days where I won't be able to have time for the board, and some other where I'll have more time. It also depends on what kind of activity is needed: it's easier to answer some mails than to talk with lawyers, eg :-) 2. How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and less the next? Pasted from [1]: Sure I can. This will of course have an impact on my other contributions, but this is already how I'm working. 3. Please rank your interests: a. GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small business, and individuals b. GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items nationally and internationally c. GNOME legal issues like copyright and patents d. GNOME finances and fund raising e. Alliance with other organizations. Pasted from [1]: All of the items are important for the Foundation :-) Here's how I rank them, as in here's what I'm most interested in: b, a, e, d, c 4. Explain how you expect to meet you goals. I certainly expect other people to meet most of my goals :-) The idea is really to get people more involved in what the Foundation is doing. In [1], I talked about having more things discussed on foundation-list and about having someone help with events everywhere in the world (I wrote someone, but a small team would work too ;-)). I'll also continue to spread the word about GNOME in France (and french-speaking countries, if I can), but I'll do this even if I'm not elected :-) 5. Name one of your accomplishments if you have ever served on the board. I was not on the board. 6. Please assess GNOME: a. What are its strengths + Its community. + Its philosophy. + How we (at least try to) care about a lot of stuff: translations, documentation, accessibility, etc. (although we could certainly do a good job) + Love :-) b. What are its weaknesses + I feel we should see our users more and make them happier. I've written something about this: http://www.vuntz.net/journal/2005/10/19/328-make-it-fun + we should make simple tasks more visible so that new contributors can try to get involved more easily. And review their work asap. I have no magic solution for this, though. c. What are its opportunities I believe GNOME can be used in a lot of places (think big deployments, but also really smaller ones). Having a lot of users will bring us more contributors (as Quim previously noted). I also think having the GNOME technologies used in some other places (like what Nokia is doing) can only improve our work. d. What are its threats So, I'm not sure about threats. But there are clearly some difficulties, like convincing our future users to switch to GNOME :-) Also, pasted from [1]: I don't see real threats, but some difficulties: formats that are not open, hardware with closed specification, etc. 7. Name the best album you purchased in the last year. Ah, easy: La Grand-Messe (Les Cowboys Fringants) [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2005-November/msg00101.html Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
