Candidacy - Havoc Pennington

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

IMO GNOME has been humming along really well recently. The thing I
like best is the huge range of people working on things pretty
autonomously - we have the translation team, docs team, usability
team, release team, all of these building up their own communities and
getting stuff done. GNOME 2 is moving forward nicely, now that we're
finally focused on it. Lots of real problems getting fixed.

Looking at the last year and current status, some things I expect the
board to be concerned with this year:

 - finally finishing the incorporation process, working on things like 
   bylaws; Tim's help is essential here
 - licensing and patent issues
 - getting events organized on a regular basis, more often than GUADEC
   once a year
 - dealing with press releases, trade show attendance, media
   questions, and other such stuff
 - improving our relationship with interested companies, and helping 
   them contribute to GNOME
 - working on problems that won't be solved via hacking, such as 
   the "get some decent free fonts" problem we've been involved
   with this year

I don't think the board will be involved in too many
getting-the-work-done kind of details, other than appointing release
teams and letting them do their job. That hands-off approach seems to
be working really well for GNOME 2. 

I could offer continuity from the previous board to the new one, and
some good contacts and history to help with doing the things mentioned
above. I think I only missed one or two board meetings this year, and
generally try to do a good job. I believe GNOME and free software have
a big future, but I like to focus on the practical steps it'll take to
get us there.

Havoc