Candidacy Daniel Veillard

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

Name:                   Daniel Veillard
Email:                  veillard redhat com
Corporate Affiliation:  Red Hat, Inc.

Summary:

  I am French, long time Gnomer and Linux addict, maintainer of
libxml, libxslt and rpmfind. I served on the Gnome Board for three
years and I am used to non-profit organizations and the negociations
needed to reach consensus in a group. I will focuse on the reuse
of standards, internationalization and keeping trust relationship at an
individual level. I think those are needed to keep hacking on Gnome fun
and getting acceptance in new communities. Growing GNOME presence
worldwide in mindshare, users and developpers is the next challenge
of the Board.

Full candidacy statement:

  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, I came in shortly after
     meeting the group during Linux Expo 98 and served on the board since
     it's creation.
   - 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
     two years.
   - 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 am French, consequence as you may have noticed I can be stubborn
     and even sometime convince people to change their mind. 
   - I have managed to grow a community around the libxml2 and libxslt
     libraries, including related libraries, people using them on other
     platforms, or developping commercial software.
   - I was secretary of the Gnome Foundation for 3 years already from
     2001 to 2003

  The exercise of writing my candidacy statement made me reread the ones
I made for the previous elections I candidated for [1] [2] [3]. I still
think the core points of I want to apply at the Board level still stands:

   - Reuse and respect of standards. I think interoperability and open
     formats are keys to Gnome success no change there.
   - Internationalization, this is in my opinion truely important to
     be able to input, render and output seamlessly any language, this
     is key for the next challenges we are to face.
   - 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 have been working for Red Hat
     for a long time, I started only this year to associate my work and
     the desktop strategy of my company. However I don't expect any trouble
     keeping my independance when representing GNOME. The Board must stay
     a representation of individuals, companies are invited to make
     suggestions at the Advisory Board level.

But things have changed, the key points now are to grow the Gnome/Gtk
developper base and to some extent the public awareness of our free
desktop environment solution.

   - we need to encourage the development of GNOME representations worldwide.
     To preserve our legal status in the United States they cannot be direct
     branches of the Foundation, but we need nonetheless to encourage the
     development of per-nation GNOME groups. We have limited resources but
     we need to provide a framework and basic help to the volunteers willing
     to bootstrap such developments locally.
   - we also need to grow the marketing side of the GNOME Foundation, while
     we don't have the resources of the Mozilla fundation for marketing, 
     looking how Bart Decrem (a previous Gnome Board member) is pushing
     the Firefox message is very interesting. Free Software can reach the
     general audience, not just enterprise and governement agencies but we
     are only starting to discover how to build such a communication.

  More personal informations:

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

Daniel

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2000-October/msg00020.html
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-November/msg00001.html
[3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2002-November/msg00006.html

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/