Candidate (Bertrand Guiheneuf)

[Bertrand Guiheneuf <bertrand henzai com>]

* Who I am

I am currently CEO of Henzai, a company dedicated to making 
GNOME the environment of choice in the embedded world. 

I started contributing to Gnome in 1998, and became co-maintainer
of the Gnome ObjectiveC wrapper. I then started to contribute to Balsa, 
and decided that Gnome needed a more powerful Groupware suite. 

I thus started to write a new mail client  in January 1999. Initially 
written in ObjectiveC (module groomf on cvs), Miguel asked me to 
rewrite it in C, and it became gnome-mailer. I finaly renamed it 
Evolution in May 1999. 

Helixcode hired me in December 1999 to continue hacking  on the 
mail part of Evolution. 

I left Helixcode in March to create a new company, Henzai.

During all that time, I spent a lot of time advocating for Gnome in 
Europe and in France in particular. Back in 1998, KDE was by far the
leader on the graphical environment for Linux in Europe. 
I thus started to write journal papers to explain people the benefits
of the long term technical choices made by Gnome. Until recently
I had a monthly article in the main French Linux journal (LinuxMag)
on GNOME programming.

I am also on the board of the main Linux association in France (AFUL)
which helped Gnome in various occasions, in particular GUADEC. 

I think it is extremely important that the Gnome Foundation has 
European representatives, as Europe is still a place where GNOME
is relatively weak. 

Knowing a lot influent people, I think I can efficiently advocate for
Gnome in this side of the world. 


* What I would do :

One of my main goal is to create the european side of the Gnome
foundation. We started this in May, but due to a lack of time (Henzai
was just starting a this time), we had to postpone the creation 
of the European Foundation. 

I would also like to help Gnome to be as independent as possible of
other software requirements. For the moment, Gnome is mainly a graphical
environment for X-window, despite the efforts to make Gtk+ a 
cross-platform library. I'd like GNOME to become the de-facto GUI
environment on all systems, and I want to push it in this direction 
if enough people vote for me. 

Bertrand.