Candidacy: Owen Taylor

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Summary:

I'd like to use the experience I have in the technical and
organizational side of GNOME to continue the good work the
 current board has done in moving things forward smoothly,
sort out remaining sticky areas, promote cooperation with 
other parts of the free software world to solve problems 
for users, and expand the visibility of GNOME in the broader 
computing world.

Introduction and background:

I've been working at Red Hat on GTK+ and GNOME since 1998 
and using and hacking on free software for just over 10 years 
now. I won't claim to have had the vision to see how far
Linux, GTK+, and GNOME would have come by now, but I'm glad 
to have played a part in getting them there.

Contributions to GNOME:

* I've been one of the lead maintainers for the GTK+ 
  toolkit since 1997, and also designed and implemented
  the Pango text layout library. Over the last four
  years, I've coordinated two major releases of GTK+
  with contributions from hundreds of developers.

* I've been closely involved with GNOME system 
  administration, doing coordination, routine maintenance,
  and the occasional 6am drive in to the collocation
  facility on Sunday morning.
  
* I was a member of the steering committee that did the 
  original organization for the GNOME foundation, and
  of the GNOME foundation board for the first year.

A few of the directions for GNOME I'd like to see in 
the next year.

* More interaction with the broader technical community;
  we need to promote GNOME technology and also keep
  abreast of developments elsewhere.

  The board can help here by encouraging and even sponsoring
  GNOME hackers to attend non-GNOME technical conferences,
  by inviting non-GNOME people to GNOME events, and by
  generally acting as a liaison and contact point.

* A clear roadmap for where we are going with the development
  environment. C has worked well for us in the past, but
  shouldn't be the only standard choice. We need to make
  GNOME a compelling development environment both for
  GNOME developers and external developers.

  The board can help here by organizing people to work
  on such a roadmap, and making sure it gets written.

* An active and open system administration team so that
  we can harness more of the knowledgeable and talented
  people in this area.

  I've posted plans for this recently to foundation-list;
  what needs doing now is officially blessing it, making
  sure it has the resources necessary, and keeping track
  of the status.

* Growth. We've gotten good at producing a well-designed,
  self-contained desktop. We need to grow out and tackle
  problems - performance, sound, multimedia, performance, 
  advanced graphics, security - that we can't solve at the 
  desktop level in isolation. We'll have to get better at
  external communication, and even better at internal 
  communication.