Elect me

[otaylor redhat com]

I've been employed by Red Hat since June 1998 to work on GTK+ and
GNOME as part of the Red Hat Advanced Development labs. When I was
hired, I was one of the first few people paid to work full time on
GNOME, and this opportunity to work on free software during the day and
not just from 8pm - 8am was pretty exciting to me.

Since that time, GNOME has come a long way, with 100+ full time
developers and a similar increase in volunteer contributions.  I'm
proud that I've made some contributions along the way, and would like
to be part of the board to make sure GNOME continues to grow by leaps
and bounds.


To describe what I've done with GNOME at Red Hat and before joining
Red Hat:

 * I've co-maintained (with Tim Janik) GTK+ and GLib for about
   three years now. GTK+ and GLib are the foundation libraries
   for GNOME, and I think the integration of the GNOME release
   schedule and development roadmaps with those of GTK+ is
   crucial.

 * I designed and implemented Pango, a system for handling
   of internationalized text that will give GNOME-2.0 the ability
   to work well with practically every language in the world.

 * In addition to my work on GTK+ and Pango, I've made various
   contributions to the code of different parts of the GNOME core -
   from gnome-session to the background-properties capplet to
   bug fixing in GNOME libs. I've also written a number other 
   packages, for example, CORBA::ORBit -  Perl bindings for ORBit, 
   and MemProf.

 * I've been involved in various ways in leadership roles in GNOME -  
   I've helped out with releases, frequently stuck out my opinion on
   gnome-hackers whether asked for or not, and am currently a member
   of the GNOME steering committee

 * As maintainer of GTK+, and working at Red Hat, I've assisted
   various developers interested in moving to GNOME and GTK+, both
   commercial and non-commercial. This kind of advocacy work
   will most likely be an important function of the board.
  

My vision for the GNOME foundation for the next year is:

 * To work with all contributors to make sure that we take full
   advantage of the tremendous amount of resources that we now
   have available to us.

 * To continue to promote and develop GNOME as the desktop (and
   "post-desktop") platform of choice for users; in particular, we 
   should take advantage of the ownership cost advantages and 
   internationalization capabilities we'll have with Pango 
   to promote GNOME globally, including in developing countries.

 * To push GNOME forward as a development platform that not only
   catches up to commercial offerings in ease of use for the developer,
   but surpasses them.


Of course, if experience with the steering committee is a guide, most
of the work of the board of directors will be administrative detail,
rather than such high-flown goals, and I'm quite willing to tackle
that as well.

We still have a lot of work to do, and I think I can make a valuable
contribution to getting this work done if elected to the board of
directors.

Regards,
                                        Owen Taylor