Candidacy (Daniel Veillard)

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

  As pointed out in the last Board minutes, it's about time to see
candidacy statements for the next elections, and Board members took
the action [1] to send theirs ASAP if they want to run again in order
to get the election going. So here is mine!

-------------------

   Name:  Daniel Veillard
   Email: daniel veillard com or veillard redhat com
   Affil: working for Red Hat

  Here are some of the points which I think make my candidacy relevant
considering the work expected to be done in the Gnome Foundation Board:

   - I think I know the Gnome project well, while not one of the
     earlier to join, I came in shortly after meeting the group
     during Linux Expo 98. I'm now getting more and more involved with
     the core infrastructure needed for the Gnome documentation
     (and also reused by the KDE project).
   - I have some experience in non-profit organizations, I co-founded
     the first French Linux User Group (Guilde), used to be a W3C 
     employee for 5 years, and served on the Gnome Board for the last year.
   - I don't know if I am an hacker but I am definitely a coder, I am not
     a GUI expert but I designed and wrote libxml and libxslt, I also
     designed and maintain the rpmfind servers and client code. I hold
     a PhD in the field of operating systems and distributed computing.
   - I think I have learnt how to try to get a group to build decisions
     by consensus, I am also used to talk to representant of large
     companies and handle coordination issues.
   - Though I try to avoid too much travels, I can talk to large
     audiences like I did in the past at Web or XML conferences.
     I also already took an important part in hosting 2 conferences.
   - I am French, consequence as you may have noticed I can be stubborn
     and even sometime convince people to change their mind. 

  Here are the points I promised to focuse on when running for the previous
Board elections [2], and I think I will stick to the same axis:

   - Reuse and respect of standards. I think interoperability and open
     formats are keys to Gnome success. I also think I had some success
     in this respect.
   - Internationalization, this is in my opinion truely important to
     be able to input, render and output seamlessly any language.
     Though I hoped to get more work done at this level in the Gnome-1.4
     release, the infrastructure is in place for Gnome-2.0.
   - Keep the trust relationship in the Gnome project at an individual
     level. I can trust a person, not a name or a brand, though I will
     act toward keeping "Gnome" a trusted name.
   - Be strict about Licences, patents, IPR and related issues. For
     example I think the Board should have a rule of not allowing Non
     Disclosure Agreement when one person acts for the Foundation Board.
   - Keep the Board decision process as transparent as possible while
     still being efficient, this can be a real challenge in my experience.
     I think I contributed reasonably to this, by maintaining
     quickly updated minutes for the Board, I appreciated this seems
     to have influenced positively other efforts in Gnome.
   - Keep my independance while trying to guarantee that I will have
     dedicated time for this task. Though I'm now working for Red Hat
     I never had a problem keeping my freedom at the Board level. The
     Board must stay a representation of individuals, companies are
     invited to make suggestions at the Advisory Board level.

  There is another point that I would like to support, it's the development
of "local" Gnome groups. I didn't had the time to work on building an European
branch of the Gnome Foundation, I failed to start that. But I would very
much like to see this started as well as other local Gnome groups (Asia
would make sense). Gnome should not act or be seen as US centric, it's
important to ground this at the organization level.

  In general I hope that at least a core group of people will be reelected
at the Board level, not because I think dictator status is good :-), but
because I think keeping a minimal continuity at the board level is needed
to proceed smoothly. I'm very happy that Tim Ney will in any case help
providing this continuity, I really hope that Havoc will be reelected
because he did a tremendous job running the Board so far !

  More personal informations:

   - Home page http://veillard.com/
   - I'm DV on IRC and nearly always connected on #gnome and LinuxNet

Daniel

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-November/msg00000.html
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2000-October/msg00020.html

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/