Candidacy: Nat Friedman

[Nat Friedman <nat ximian com>]

Name:          Nat Friedman
Email:         nat ximian com
Affiliation:   Novell, Inc.  Baby.

Summary:

Vote for me because I care deeply about the success of the foundation,
GNOME, and the open source dekstop; because I've devoted the last five
years of my life to advancing the Linux desktop; because I believe
that we are engaged in a peaceful and bloodless revolution to end
poverty, hunger and disempowerment; and because I will keep pushing
until we have won.

Also in some circles I am known as "the lambada king."

Full statement:

I served as chairman of the GNOME Foundation's board for the last
year.  In my 2002 candidacy statement, I summarized my achievements
for the previous year:
   
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2002-November/msg00011.html

In the last twelve months, I did the following things:

    * Chaired and ran those board meetings I was able to attend,
      which, due to recent industry events, was a few less than I'd
      hoped.

    * Recruited two new advisory board members for the GNOME
      foundation.

    * Developed a number of GNOME case studies; shared those with the
      board; I'm in the process of being able to announce those.

    * Raised money to cover the travel expenses of some individuals at
      GUADEC.

    * Ran probably the most successful GNOME advisory board meeting of
      all time, in Dublin in June.

    * Led a short-lived for-fun project called Dashboard
      (nat.org/dashboard).

    * Sold Ximian to Novell, which has given us a lot more resources
      for GNOME, Mozilla and OpenOffice.

    * Flew around the world evangelizing open source desktops, and
      GNOME in particular.

    * Planned and oversaw the release of Ximian Desktop 2,
      which I think helped get people to think seriously about
      OpenOffice as a usable and integrated part of the GNOME desktop.
      You can read the release notes for that here:

       
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2003-June/msg00034.html

And I cheered on the sidelines as Jim Gettys led the charge to get
the Bitstream Vera fonts open sourced.

Reading over my candidacy statement for last year, I still agree with
what I said there, goal-wise.  The foundation needs more money so it
can help the project better, and the foundation needs to make better
use of the money it has.  

Substantial improvements need to be made to our fundraising processes.
We've started some of that this year, with Friends of GNOME and more
aggressive recruitment of advisory board members.  This can be
improved further.  The Mozilla foundation charges more than 10x what
we do per year for membership.  We also could reallocate our cash
disbursement to greater advantage to the project.

Next year, I plan to push harder on our fundraising efforts, and have
more of the cash directly and visibly benefit the project; bounty
hunts, paying for web site work, flying hackers to conferences,
subsidizing summits, and so on.

Feel the love,
Nat