Candidacy Nomination - John Heard

[John Heard <john heard Eng Sun COM>]

Hi Everyone,

I would like to put myself forward as a nominee for the GNOME Foundation
board of directors. Being responsible for much of what Sun is doing with
GNOME, I consider that I can bring a variety of contributions to the
GNOME Foundation and the GNOME Project as a whole.

Thanks
John   

Introduction
------------

Name: John Heard
Email: jheard eng sun com
Employer: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Menlo Park, USA

I am the manager of architecture and strategy for the group in Sun which
does much of the core client side software. These areas include the
Solaris desktop environment, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice,
Mozilla/Netscape.

I am responsible for managing the Sun GNOME Project work and was
responsible for effecting the decision by Sun to join the GNOME Project
and adopt it as the future User Environment of the Solaris operating
system. 

My responsibility also includes managing the strategies for the
OpenOffice.org initiative. This included getting the Sun management to
choose the GNU Public Licenses as the mechanism by which the technology
would be released as open source (ie. compatibility with the GNOME
Project). I am driving the migration of the OpenOffice.org technology to
become Bonobo and GTK+ based within Sun and thus core pieces of a
comprehensive GNOME platform for everyone.

Recently, I have been driving the work towards setting up a GNOME
project to add accessibility capability into GNOME so that GNOME will
become the platform of choice for people with disabilities and also for
future generation GNOME devices which do not have traditional desktop
interaction mechanisms (ie. keyboard/mouse/screen).

Have been working with several members(Miguel, Nat, Bart, etc.) of the
GNOME community to help out in the establishment of the GNOME
Foundation.

History
-------

Have been with Sun Microsystems for over 14 years as an engineer and
manager in various roles and in various countries. I joined Sun because
it did(and still does) great things for open systems and continues to
have many really great people who really believe in open systems. It
also develops good products that are based upon these tenets. 

I have worked on a wide variety of areas, including porting work on
System 7 to a PDP-11/23(trust me, I was very young then). Building
uni-processor and multiprocessor hardware systems and associated OS work
starting with the Z80, then NS32032, and on with the Motorola 68k. I
have also worked on the Human Genome project by porting a suite of
genome applications to unix from VAX/VMS. I was also the lead for
several large Java projects - one delivering a commercial PPV video
server system for a cable and telco operator in New Zealand.

I was the co-founder and co-architect of a broadband telco company in my
home country, New Zealand. (http://www.citylink.co.nz), and a
co-founding trustee for the 20/20 Communications Trust
(http://www.2020.org.nz) which has successfully been equiping schools
with free internet access.

I studied Computer Science and Physics to post graduate levels at Otago
University, New Zealand.


Summary
-------

Name: John Heard
Email: jheard eng sun com
Employer: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Menlo Park, USA

+ Initiated and manage the Sun GNOME Project

+ Initiated and manage the OpenOffice.org initiative and making it a
fully integrated part of the GNOME Office suite

+ Working to establish the GNOME Accessibility project

+ Participant in the establishment of the GNOME Foundation on behalf of
the Sun GNOME team, working closely with quite a few GNOME members.

+ A 14+ year open systems "bigot" in Sun (with T-shirts to prove it :-))