Candidacy (Daniel Veillard)

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

Name:                   Daniel Veillard
Email:                  veillard redhat com
Corporate Affiliation:  Red Hat, Inc.

Summary:

I am French, long time Gnomer and Linux addict, maintainer of
libxml, libxslt and rpmfind. I served on the Gnome Board for two
years and I am used to non-profit organizations and the negociations
needed to reach consensus in a group. I will focuse on the reuse
of standards, internationalization and keeping trust relationship at an
individual level. I think those are needed to keep hacking on Gnome fun
and getting acceptance in new communities. Growing the foundation to
get acceptance by program developpers is the next challenge of the Board.

Full candidacy statement:

  Here are some of the points which I think make my candidacy relevant
considering the work expected to be done in the Gnome Foundation Board:

   - I think I know the Gnome project well, I came in shortly after
     meeting the group during Linux Expo 98 and served on the board since
     it's creation.
   - I have some experience in non-profit organizations, I co-founded
     the first French Linux User Group (Guilde), used to be a W3C 
     employee for 5 years, and served on the Gnome Board for the last
     two years.
   - I don't know if I am an hacker but I am definitely a coder, I am not
     a GUI expert but I designed and wrote libxml and libxslt, I also
     designed and maintain the rpmfind servers and client code. I hold
     a PhD in the field of operating systems and distributed computing.
   - I think I have learnt how to try to get a group to build decisions
     by consensus, I am also used to talk to representant of large
     companies and handle coordination issues.
   - Though I try to avoid too much travels, I can talk to large
     audiences like I did in the past at Web or XML conferences.
   - I am French, consequence as you may have noticed I can be stubborn
     and even sometime convince people to change their mind. 
   - I have managed to grow a community around the libxml2 and libxslt
     libraries, including people using them on other platforms, or 
     developping commercial software.

  Here are the points I promised to focuse on when running for the previous
Board elections [1] [2], and I think they still apply, though the I18N and
standard point are now in place and don't need advocacy anymore:

   - Reuse and respect of standards. I think interoperability and open
     formats are keys to Gnome success. I also think I had some success
     in this respect.
   - Internationalization, this is in my opinion truely important to
     be able to input, render and output seamlessly any language.
   - Keep the trust relationship in the Gnome project at an individual
     level. I can trust a person, not a name or a brand, though I will
     act toward keeping "Gnome" a trusted name.
   - Be strict about Licences, patents, IPR and related issues. For
     example I think the Board should have a rule of not allowing Non
     Disclosure Agreement when one person acts for the Foundation Board.
   - Keep the Board decision process as transparent as possible while
     still being efficient, this can be a real challenge in my experience.
     I think I contributed reasonably to this, by maintaining
     quickly updated minutes for the Board, I appreciated this seems
     to have influenced positively other efforts in Gnome.
   - Keep my independance while trying to guarantee that I will have
     dedicated time for this task. Though I'm now working for Red Hat
     I never had a problem keeping my freedom at the Board level. The
     Board must stay a representation of individuals, companies are
     invited to make suggestions at the Advisory Board level.

  However, I think the challenges now faced by the GNOME project are slowly
shifting. While I hope that at least a core group of people will be reelected
from the previous Board to keep a minimal continuity needed for smooth
operations, we clearly need fresh blood for a number of reasons:

   - there is a new generation of GNOME developpers, new people have joined
     and are very active in the community, they need to get on-Board. For
     example I would prefer to see me not reelected than someone like
     Jeff Waugh being blocked from the board.
   - the board workload itself will have to change, the foundation setup
     is mostly finished, it needs some refinement, but now the bulk of the
     work is not in setting up the foundations but growing the organization,
     financially, in term of awareness, make sure we can pay the salaries
     of our fulltime employee(s), etc...
   - the GNOME project itself is at a turn in its history, with the
     completion of the GNOME2 platform we should gradually shift from a set
     of framework developpers to application developpers. The platform is
     here for the long term we need to make sure it will get maintained but
     the challenge now is to convince application developpers to join
     the project, whether they come from the free software community or
     commercial venture.
   - those changes makes even more crucial some aspects of the communication
     with the community at large, keeping the website accurate and searchable,
     good documentation, conferences like GUADEC with tutorials, etc...
     We need to make the transition from keeping hacking on GNOME fun to
     make hacking *with* GNOME fun (and efficient). It is a different effort.

  In a nutshell the workload is changing, the board in the next years will
be faced with different problems than the previous ones. I may not be the
best and most motivated candidate to achive the new goals, but I can provide
some experience and help doing the transition I perceive necessary.

  More personal informations:

   - Home page http://veillard.com/
   - I'm DV on IRC and nearly always connected on #gnome and LinuxNet

Daniel

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2000-October/msg00020.html
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-November/msg00001.html

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/