Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 08:42 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board. > > Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. > Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. > > Data and information might be different. > For me - a GNOME foundation member > > Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks after. > Because maybe the event is already close or over. Thanks for expressing your concern about getting timely reports from the board, I understand that this is important for transparency and helps people to feel confident and well represented. In the past, I can recall going without any updates for many months and this can be frustrating, and I think the last few years have been much better by comparison. I would love to be able to promise to do better if elected, but as I have never served on the GNOME board before I am honestly not familiar with the obstacles to getting the minutes out in a timely manner. On the other hand, I am very familiar with circumstance of being suddenly swamped with urgent responsibilities, and I can understand that situations arise which cause one to fall behind on reporting ones activities. I think the most that we can expect of any board is that they do their best, and I am thankful that in times when their efforts as volunteers has been stretched thin, they have been able to prioritize on getting things done, even if we do not always get timely reports as a result. In all honesty I can only promise that we will do our best to be transparent and report in a timely manner, as I am sure other boards have made efforts, and have not always been as successful in this as recent boards have. Best Regards, -Tristan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? > Thanks for raising this interesting and unexpected question. I do think that the limited resources we have at our disposal, such as compute resources for our infrastructure and CI and travel to conferences and hackfests are quite crucial to our mission, and it is probably in our interest as an organization to increase rather than decrease. However, we could see more efforts in being conscientious about how we use the resources we do use, and in our choices in terms of travel options and compute resources. Unfortunately having a limited budget implies reduced freedom of choice, it might make more environmental sense for attendees to a conference who live on the same continent to travel by train, but if that is more expensive, this would mean that we sponsor less contributors overall. Asides from how we use our own resources, we may be able to make some impact as a publicly visible organization with sponsors. For instance, if there were some way for us to commend or endorse some of our more environmentally friendly sponsors via the friends of GNOME programme (or similar), it may at least contribute to a trend of incentivizing companies to be more environmentally friendly, at the same time as being good publicity for sponsors who may choose to participate in such a "clean computing" campaign for instance. Of course a campaign like this would require a lot more thinking and work than my brief brainstorm reply here, just trying to throw something creative out there to chew on. Perhaps this could be material for a focus group to consider too, I'm sure that if some volunteers were to create such a group to focus on this, the GNOME board will be happy to discuss and support initiatives they come up with for environmental friendliness. Cheers, -Tristan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Board of Directors Elections 2019 - Candidacy - Tristan Van Berkom
Name: Tristan Van Berkom E-Mail: t...@gnome.org Corporate affiliation: Codethink IRC: tristan Dear foundation, I would like to announce my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation board of directors in this election. I have been a GNOME contributor for well over 15 years now in the capacity of a developer, and have been a maintainer and core developer on various projects including Glade, GTK, Evolution and now BuildStream. I have spent the larger part of my career in startup companies and have some entrepreneurial experience, as such I hope that my spirit of ambition and experience starting initiatives from the ground up can be a useful addition to the board. I do not have the experience of serving on a board for any non profit organization, so if I am elected, I expect to lean on current and previous board members for assistance in getting familiar with the tasks and duties expected of me. I'd like to thank our previous boards for putting their efforts into ironing out the necessary policies and ensuring that we are a strong and healthy organization. Their efforts have allowed us to thrive as a community, and to focus on the fun part of making software that works very well and is a pleasure to use. While I have been happy with others filling this role, after many years working within and around GNOME I cannot help but be emotionally invested in the overall success of the project, and would like to do my part in every way I can to help GNOME continue as a successful project. In my vision of GNOME, I believe that we need to recognize that while our community remains volunteer driven, we need to maintain strong ties with the rest of the software industry. I believe that Free Software thrives when individuals and corporations alike converge on a common set of goals and realize that we can create something more resilient and powerful when working in collaboration and in the open. We need the participation of companies who embrace our software stack to build their own interesting products, and help us to push our software to the limits of perfection, by both providing more engineering work and also by providing use case scenarios we had not considered ourselves. If I am elected, I hope to further this vision by ensuring GNOME is perceived as a safe place to contribute for individuals and companies, work towards building strong ties in the software industry, and hopefully further diversify our contributor base. Thanks, -Tristan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
