Re: Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Tobias Mueller
On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 8:40 AM, Tobias Mueller mue...@cryptobitch.de wrote: I still enjoy my duties. What do you conciser is your board duties? -- -mvh Oliver Propst ___ 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: Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Ekaterina Gerasimova
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova k...@gnome.org wrote: I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have about what I would bring to the board. Are you interested in continue severing as the Foundation treasurer and in general doing work to keep the foundations finances in order? -- -mvh Oliver Propst ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Carlos Soriano
- Original Message - | Hello Carlos, Hello Sebastien | | On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:13:10AM +0200, Carlos Soriano Sánchez wrote: | - New developers (aka newcomers): How many people do you think are | searching for nice projects to be involved with, live new experiences and | learn at the same time? | We need to reach those people (I was one of them), and the first step is | lowing the barrier to contribution and understanding of the platform. Some | of the most important projects I want to push here are GnomeLove initiative | and gnome-builder as a developer tool for Gnome. | | Good initiative. Thanks :) | | But why do you need to be on the Foundation board to achieve that goal? Not necessarily need, I'm already doing it. But being in the board you have a stronger voice an you can make the board take some decisions to improve this as well. But of course, I could just send an email to the board saying hey, can you take into account this?. But I think that could apply for everything. | | - Platform reaproachment: I think the current platform around Gnome is a | little hidden and difficult to contributors. Initiatives like a Github | mirror have been taken, but they are only partly good or not enough. We | need to think about how to be more approachable by the people who are | already used to other workflows from other open source projects that are | using famous tools like Github for code, issues, and contribution or | Wikimedia for the wiki, toolkits like Node.js, etc. without giving up on | Gnome vision and goals. | | Ditto. Same answer as before. | | - Focus: We need to focus more and more on the important issues that can | make Gnome have a bigger impact. Luckily, what I saw on the last years, is | that Gnome is focused and we are doing well here. But I think there is room | for improvement, taking some decisions to encourage people to do certain | things or for example using more projects from outside Gnome with well | established maintenance and community around it. | | Seems like a good job for the Engagement team. Not all of what I have in mind, but yeah, most part could be delegated to teams, and hope we can help from the board as well taking some decisions on those points. | | - Community: They want to be listen. They want communication. They want to | know how we take decisions. We need to improve that communication while | being focused and loyal to Gnome goals and vision. Example of specific | solutions I have in mind are: | *Encouraging maintainers to create short blog posts communicating | important changes. | | You can write a blog post or start a thread on the desktop-devel list to | try to convince other maintainers. Yep, in my previous blog post on planet Gnome I tried to do that, but hope we can have an agreement on the board for a maintainer guideline recommendations for a wider approach, that could help us to improve this issue. It will be more to answer maintainers questions like How should I communicate this? If I do this change, should I do something to not make the community or users unhappy on the next release? It's okay answer an user like this?, questions that I had myself and I failed to do them the first time, and I already received the backslash... so I hope that developers take them into account to have a better experience with the community and avoid the bad after-feel. | | *Reach an agreement and explain the way we take decisions both in the | projects and in the foundation. | | For the Foundation, I think everything is well explained in the bylaws: | https://www.gnome.org/foundation/governance/attachment/bylaws-2/ I was thinking on something more approachable that could answer some specific questions like: - How do you decide to spend the money? - Why you don't spend money on developers? How the board take those kind of decisions and why. | | *Reach an agreement and explain how to have a voice on Gnome decisions | in the projects and foundation as well. | | To have a voice for the Foundation, discussions can happen on the | foundation-list, every member can run for the elections to have a much | stronger voice during one year. Or discuss things at conferences and | other places (blog, IRC, …). Does it need more explanation? Or does it | need to be changed? for example the Foundation members currently only | vote for candidates, why not also vote for some of the decisions? Is it | that kind of things that you would like to improve? I discussed this in #engamement, and probably I didn't explain well here. My intention is reach an agreement on how decisions are taken for our projects and what to expect from them. A few examples: explain if the designers has a strong voice and maintainers are expected to take them into account, or how we decide when there is a decision that clash between distros or with other DE's, explain to users how they can be part of those decisions, etc. For
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: Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Ekaterina Gerasimova
On 22 May 2015 at 10:40, Oliver Propst oliver.pro...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:06 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova k...@gnome.org wrote: I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have about what I would bring to the board. Are you interested in continue severing as the Foundation treasurer and in general doing work to keep the foundations finances in order? Yes, I will run for treasurer again this year. I would do my best to help keep the Foundation finances in order, regardless of whether I was on the board or not. I also hope that all board members would work actively towards maintaining the Foundation's finances, be it by fundraising, regulating spending or in some other ways too. -mvh Oliver Propst ___ 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: 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
