Candidacy: Bryan Clark

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Name: Bryan Clark
Email Address: bclark redhat com
Corporate Affiliation: Red Hat

Summary:

I'm located in the US, currently I'm working as an Interaction Designer
for Red Hat in it's Massachusetts office.  I am an active member of the
Usability Team, HIG contributor, and have been organizing the UI-Reviews
for the past ~2 years.  I've seen what a great community GNOME is
starting from being an outsider to working with some of it's core
developers.  My background is mostly academic and leadership roles
within that.

Taking from my background and experience I'd like to do several things
as a part of the Board.

1.  Improve the ability for GNOME to bring new and promising developers
to the GNOME Summit or GUADEC or related conferences so they can meet
the core contributors to the GNOME project.  Meeting the various hackers
face to face is an extremely valuable experience that new hackers need
in order to become more of a core contributor to the project.  I will
push for more funding for this as well as organizing plans to help new
hackers in meeting the right people when they do arrive.

2.  Push for a paid administrator position open to the community to help
manage and improve gnome.org related sites.  I believe the board needs
to more seriously investigate the possibility of having a trusted
administrator who is paid to help with the maintenance of the
technological infrastructure that GNOME uses.

3.  Work to expand and improve the involvement of hackers in educational
institutions.  Currently the road map for students and others wanting to
help in GNOME is unclear from where to start and how to work.  In my own
experience I've seen bright students try to get started hacking but end
up losing drive as there are few places to turn and the community seems
more like a club than anything else.  I'd like to see better
instructions for new hackers, a centralize place on how they can get
started, easier ways for new hackers to share their code with others.
Included in this is the idea of a "research" group where hackers can
actively contribute new code to projects either forks of existing
projects, rewrites or entirely new projects.

Lastly I'd also like to take a much more active role in the Board's
"roadmap", to which I believe having a usability team member included
would be a great service to the community and the board.

Thank You,
~ Bryan Clark