Re: Additional questions for the board candidates
I guess it's the board's job to make sure that some kind of leadership exists, but it's definitely not the board's place to make that kind of decision. Otherwise someone would be asking prospective board members whether they though Mono should be added to the bindings, and Beagle to the platform. Most technical questions are technical issues, and there is no need for the board to concern itself with them. But this one is an exception. Although the question is technical in form, the issue is more legal and political than technical. It concerns questions such as the impact of possible patents. Thus, it is a really a matter of GNOME legal policy. I think this is precisely the kind of question which the board should decide. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Questions to answer
On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 20:26 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors? What will you do more or better than previous years Boards have done? Why am I running? Because I need the exercise. (-: More seriously, I am running because I am passionately involved in GNOME and Free Software, and want to help it succeed. I aim to help create a great Desktop, and I can contribute positively to the board. 2) How familiar are you with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME? How much do you follow and participate in the main GNOME mailing lists? Very. I follow mailing lists, planets, and irc. I also have good relationships with a lot of people in the various GNOME sub-communities, and follow what they are working on. 3) What sources of funds do you as a candiate try do establish? And what will you spend it on? Not counting revenue from the shop and Friends of GNOME. Think more like the recent move by Mozilla or a subscription based bounty system. (olafura from gnomedesktop.org) I think that looking for general revenue for GNOME is the wrong approach. While we have had a lot of luck raising general purpose funds with the Friends of GNOME program, we have had even more luck raising money for specific purposes. One of the initiatives I would drive the on the board this year is a fund raising drive around our ISV platform. There is a heck of a lot of external interest in seeing this move forward, and I believe we can do a good job. 4) Gnome is mostly a european and US based project, but seems to have some following in Latin America and India. How will you as a candidate grow the contribution base, especially in Asia, Africa and South America? (olafura from gnomedesktop.org) These are two different questions, so I will answer them separately. I actually have a feeling that GNOME has a healthy presence in those regions. We should definitely encourage the work done locally there, and the board has previously sponsored flying people to Latin America. Or in general what would you do to increase community participation in the GNOME community and GNOME elections? Make sure that people know that the GNOME foundation is relevant to them. One of the strengths (I feel) of the GNOME community is that we are diffuse, and thus you do not have to be part of the 'core' group to do something interesting. There are a lot of other projects that have a lot of life and momentum on their own. If we can prove to them that we're relevant to their efforts, they'll join. Also, we should hold an annual membership drive. 5) The board meets for one hour every two weeks to discuss a handful of issues. Thus, it is very important that the board can very quickly and concisely discuss each topic and come to consensus on each item for discussion. Are you good at working with others, who sometimes have very differing opinions than you do, to reach consensus and agree on actions? How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and less the next? I have the time to work on the board, and have done so in the past. It would be part of my job at work to make sure that the board functions well. 6) Do you consider yourself diplomatic? Would you make a good representative for the GNOME Foundation to the Membership, media, public, and organizations and corporations the GNOME Foundation works with? I try hard to be diplomatic, and I hope others think of me that way. 7) What do you see as current threats to the future of a complete Free Software desktop? And what would you like the GNOME Foundation to be doing to address these issues? Lack of execution and focus. We have put ourselves in a great position to become the premiere desktop -- we now need to follow through! I am really quite optimistic about our chances, though. The other major threat to a Free Software Desktop is Software patents. That is a big issue that all free software projects need to work on together. 8) What one problem could you hope to solve this year? The very first problem that the board is going to have is that of staffing. Since Tim has moved on, we are going to need to hire someone immediately to take care of the administrative details. Having been involved with a large number of hires at Red Hat, I am qualified to do this. Additionally, we need to push our ISV platform. This is one of the biggest issues facing us, and as big an effort as getting GNOME 2.0 out was. We should start another group to work on this (similar to the release team) and for this to be a big project-wide initiative. 9) 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. These are all
Re: Questions to answer
On 11/25/05, Jonathan Blandford [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Additionally, we need to push our ISV platform. This is one of the biggest issues facing us, and as big an effort as getting GNOME 2.0 out was. We should start another group to work on this (similar to the release team) and for this to be a big project-wide initiative. I think that would rock. It may be worth noting that Brian has been pushing in this area[1], Murray tried to help push it along[2], and Federico is making noise in the area as well[3], all of which is great. Brian and Murray have been putting together some draft/preliminary Interface Specification notes on the wiki (which I've looked over, but I'm not really that qualified to help out in this area). So I think along with your work there'd be at least a few easy candidates who could be suckered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hnominated/appointed to be part of such a team. ;-) Cheers, Elijah [1] http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/yippi?entry=gnome_summit, http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2005-July/msg00162.html [2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-August/msg3.html [3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/release-team/2005-November/msg00075.html ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
The changing of the board
The changing of the board: I have been thinking that it might be an advantage to the Foundation if the next board in fact took their seats immediately after the final announcement of the list of candidates elected this year. An overlapping period I think is not really necessary as I have a feeling that there will be sufficient continuation/ ways to ask concrete advice if needed. It has also been mentioned that it might be a good idea if the new elected board constituted itself directly after the election and pointed out it's chairman, vice chairman, secretary and treasurer and may be press spokesperson etc. Jeff has mentioned this and I agree with him. (May be others have expressed these kind of thoughts too- then I apologise for not mentioning there names.) What do you think about my two suggestions? Anne -- Anne Østergaard [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ 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: Additional questions for the board candidates
On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, Philip Van Hoof wrote: First question: How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should GNOME do with fd.org? I strongly support standards in general, and fd.o in particular. But I also believe that if a standard is the right one, GNOME developers will pick it up automatically. No need to push that. About what should GNOME do with fd.o, I guess fd.o is no one other than GNOME, KDE, and a few others. So basically GNOME is partly fd.o. Second question: What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? We are already cooperating with KDE developers in various aspects. I know I'm doing myself. I will invite them to our conferences, yes. They are welcome to submit as many talk proposals as they want, and I'm generally positive about accepting them. I do not follow KDE news personally, but now I think maybe I should reald Planet KDE. It's KDE that we can copy from without any legal problems after all! Third question: In my opinion, GNOME lacks strong leadership that steers development choices and standards. We have no Linus Torvalds (oh I forget a lot important kernel developers of today, it's not the point -- I picked the most famous one and everybody knows this guy and understands his role as a kernel developer, right?). It's getting increasingly hard for a novice desktop developer to know which desktop standard will succeed and which will not. It's getting increasingly difficult to achieve getting things that will influence other components done. Amongst them are clipboard standards and infrastructure, configuration standards and infrastructure, desktop (presence) notification but also programming environments and languages like C#, Python and Java and the language bindings (which ones belong in the 'official' GNOME distribution -- for commercial software developers this is an extremely important question: Do we support .NET or we don't? Do we support Java or we don't? There's no clarity). And D-BUS is moving forward rapidly. This will introduce a lot new such standards. Even D-BUS itself is such a standard of which it hasn't been said that it's the IPC for a typical modern GNOME application. Or is it ORBit-2? D-COP? I guess nobody knows. Yet there's no real leadership telling the GNOME app developers what direction to go. And there's many questions and even more exciting new technologies being developed today. A very interesting such technology is Galago (desktop notification specification). There's many others (and I'm not going to list all of them just to please their developers). And it's growing rapidly in numbers. I can imagine companies that would like to target the GNOME desktop, while developing solutions for their customers, would like this type of leadership to happen. Yet I can imagine a lot Free Software GNOME developers dislike any form of leadership. It's not a simple problem to solve. Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? Some of the issues you raise, like D-BUS, are making a healthy progress in GNOME IMO. It's a matter of time and resources before we get it replace all our IPC. Other ones, like the status of Mono in the project, is exactly the kind of thing that the board needs to ensure is resolved. Note that I said the board needs to ensure is resolved, not that the board should resolve. The FSF may be very helful in resolving the legal issues, should we ask them. Fourth question (finally a non programmer question! :p): Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project for the GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve yourself in the One Laptop Per Child concept? Yes, it's an important project for GNOME, and GNOME in general benefits from this involvement in all aspects. Other than all the publicity that GNOME can gain from OLPC, I think getting our software to run on a restricted environment like the green machine is a huge improvement on our performance. Without becoming too technical, I like working on that direction. As for how to get myself involved, for now I'm trusting Jim Gettys as GNOME's contact to the project. --behdad http://behdad.org/ Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill -- Dan Bern, New American
