Candidacy: Og Maciel

[Og Maciel <ogmaciel gnome org>]

Name: Og Maciel
Mail: ogmaciel gnome org
Nick: OgMaciel
Affl: rPath Inc <http://www.rpath.com/corp/>
Blog: http://ogmaciel.com (en_US) / http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR)


Summary
-------

The GNOME Project has allowed me to take my first steps into the world
of collaborative projects and long nights of translation sprints. Due
to my open minded attitude, I have been able to get involved in many
different projects and work with a great number of interesting people.

My passion is in the community aspect of these projects and how to
better integrate new comers and volunteers with the rest of the
community. I am also extremely interested in how we, the open source
community as a whole, can leverage this immense pool of ideas and
projects, and use it to the benefit of all.

If elected to the board, I will bring in my experience of building
communities and guiding/enabling users to become more active in the
GNOME Project. After all, the GNOME Project IS about people! I will
also push to make accessibility a high priority for the project.

Biography
---------

For the last 60 months I have been deeply involved with the planning
and organization of several open source collaborative projects, mostly
related to the localization and translation for the Brazilian
Portuguese (pt_BR) language.  During this process I eventually became
a "full time" member of several organizations, most notably becoming
the leader for the Ubuntu Brazilian Portuguese Translation Team,
Foresight Linux, Xfce, LXDE and a member for the GNOME Foundation as
well as member of the Localization Steering Committee for MeeGo.

My ideals have always led me to maintain a very generic,
non-distribution specific approach to my projects, which in my opinion
allows for a "create once, use it anywhere" methodology.  For
instance, the Brazilian Portuguese translation process for GNOME was
showing a 73% completion rate prior to the 2.18 release.  I initiated
and organized the collaborative effort between the Brazilian Ubuntu
and GNOME teams that led to the successful completion and release of
GNOME 2.18, completely translated in only a few months.  This process
was a delicate one, since the Ubuntu team had direct access to
Launchpad's Rosetta translation system and were not used to having
their work reviewed by non-Ubuntu staff.  I believe I have played an
important role in keeping everyone's egos out of the equation and
making sure that everyone focused on what was most   important:
delivering a 100% translated product.  When Ubuntu Feisty Fawn was
delivered, it contained our translations from upstream, plus the minor
tweaks needed to accommodate Ubuntu's own code changes.   Moreover,
all the distributions that released GNOME 2.18 were also able to take
advantage of our collaborative effort, another major factor that
attracted our volunteers.

The process described above also served as the jumping point for some
other multi-collaborative projects I have initiated, such as the
unification of a standard and common knowledge repository for
Brazilian localization teams, currently in development and supported
by the GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Documentation Project
Brazilian branches teams!

I have also spearheaded and organized the creation of several
communities and projects, such as the creation of the Ubuntu Brazilian
Documentation Team and Planet Blog aggregator, vital source of
information for the ever so expanding Brazilian presence in the open
source world!  I am also present in pretty much all of the active
Linux distributions communities in Brazil, such as Gentoo, Arch,
Slackware, Fedora, and Debian, to name a few.

As you can see I'm a strong believer in working with people from
different projects, empowering users to become contributors, and
collaboration and sharing of resources. If elected I will strive to
apply the principles mentioned above to every single area that makes
up GNOME and make sure that people are acknowledged for their
contributions and hard work.

Sincerely,
-- 
Og B. Maciel

omaciel foresightlinux org
ogmaciel gnome org
ogmaciel ubuntu com

GPG Keys: D5CFC202

http://www.ogmaciel.com (en_US)
http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR)