GNOME Foundation Candidacy

[nat ximian com]

Name:		Nat Friedman
Email:		nat ximian com
Affiliation:	Ximian Spacemonkeys

Hey everyone,

This is to announce my candidacy for the GNOME foundation board of
directors.

I've served on the GNOME foundation board as co-chairman along with
Havoc for the last year.  In my candidacy statement twelve months ago,
I talked about some of the things I've done in the past.  If you want
to read my statement from last year, it is here:

http://lists.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-November/msg00022.html

In the last year, here are a few things I have done for GNOME:

	* Chaired and organized most of the foundation board meetings,
	  sharing the chairman role with Havoc.

	* Put together a Summit for GNOME in Boston this July, which
	  about 90 people attended.  This included raising near
	  $15,000, arranging for rooms and facilities, putting
	  together a schedule of speakers, tutorials, meetings, and
	  personally subsidizing travel for a few speakers.

	* Promoted GNOME through a series of talks, including several
	  talks to governments in DC, to LUGs, and to student groups
	  like the ACM.  (I'm distinguishing these from presentations
	  I've done for Ximian.)

	* Resolved the recent membership guidelines dispute, standing
	  up for the rights of those who were rejected for foundation
  	  membership under the previous guidelines.  I pushed the
  	  board to approve my proposed membership guidelines, leading
  	  to the approval of many previously rejected applicants.

	  This did take a little longer than I'd hoped, but I'm pretty
	  happy with the resulting guidelines, which are much more
	  open than before.

There's also a bunch of stuff I've done in the context of my job at
Ximian where GNOME has benefited because I've made decisions with GNOME
in mind.  For example, I organized our artists to create a new set of
GNOME stock icons and release them all publicly, which became the basis
for the GNOME 2 stock icons.  I also lead a team at Ximian, paid for by
Sun, for about 8 months which did a lot of work on GNOME 2, fixing
48.5% of all the P1 and P2 bugs that were closed in the last few months
of the project.

Last year when I ran for the board, I tried to set some goals for
myself for the year, and I achieved some of these (like the summit).  
All in all, I would give myself a B+ for my performance on the board
this last year.  I think I did okay, upheld my duties fairly reliably
and excelled in a few areas.  But I think that a lot was left undone.

During the recent months, it's become clear to me that the foundation
badly needs more resources at its disposal.  We need money to pay
organizers, to donate to hackers, to buy hardware, to maintain our
shared resources like CVS and stuff, and to promote our causes.  GUADEC
needs money to be larger, to be able to fund travel for people who
cannot afford to pay for themselves, and to attract more people.

This was the main point I tried to drive home during the GUADEC
advisory board meeting in Sevilla.

So for 2003, if elected, my goal will be to raise a substantial amount
of money for the foundation so that we can have more resources at our
disposal.  I'm not sure what the target figure will be, but I hope we
can set one soon and work as a board to achieve it.

Anyway, my goal is to continue to work for and represent the GNOME
project.  I hope you'll let me do that for you for another year!  

Vote for me!  Woo! :-)

Best,
Nat