Candidacy: Máirín Duffy

[Máirín Duffy <duffy redhat com>]

Candidacy Announcement

Name:         Máirín Duffy (mizmo)
E-mail:       duffy redhat com
Affiliation:  Fedora & Red Hat, Inc.

Why:

I believe quite strongly in GNOME's design philosophy of simplicity and 
ease-of-use; as an interaction designer I apply the same philosophy to 
my professional work and understand its importance.

I think as a result of following this philosophy, GNOME as a desktop and 
platform is quite solid today and improves quite markedly with every 
release. Where I think we need some work is in applying the same 
principles that govern GNOME's software design to our marketing and 
communication efforts in order to increase awareness of and recognition 
for GNOME.

More specifically, as a Board member I would like to focus on the GNOME 
Brand - the verbal and visual manifestation of what GNOME is all about - 
GNOME's personality. I will continue to drive our brand's definition via 
the brand book (regardless) and once finished, make it easy for others 
to use and spread GNOME by driving the development and organization of 
consistent collateral. I would also love to help in any way I can to 
fully address our trademark concerns so we can confidentially make use 
of our brand.

Background (Who am I?):

I'm an interaction designer with Red Hat. This involves two of the 
things I am most passionate about in life: my belief in the importance 
and inevitability of free and open source software, and my life goal to 
help make computers easier and more pleasant for people to use.

I believe in GNOME and its ability to achieve that goal - I believe that 
GNOME can positively impact the lives of untold numbers of people across 
the world. I am willing to work hard to help make it succeed in that goal.

I've been a GNOME user for quite some time but I've been involved with 
GNOME as a contributor for the past two years or so, mostly in a design 
/ artwork capacity (for example, the recent work around the GNOME brand 
and the wgo redesign, some of which you can see at [1].)

I also serve a leading role in the new Fedora Art Team, where I started 
a mailing list and from that built up a community that recently achieved 
its first major goal of providing theming for the distribution (reached 
in FC6). From this experience I've faced a lot of the trademark issues 
that concern GNOME as well.

I understand that the Board's responsibilities involve dealing with 
issues both strategic and practical. To the practical issues, I offer my 
organizational skills and my dogged determination to get stuff *done*. 
To the strategic, I offer my problem-solving approach: define the 
problem & its scope, brainstorm solutions, try some out, evaluate their 
effectiveness, rinse & repeat and adjust as necessary.

Summary:

I'm an interaction designer with Red Hat, and a member of the GNOME 
community for the past two years. If elected to the Board, I would drive 
efforts to apply GNOME's software design philosophy of simplicity and 
ease-of-use to our marketing and communication efforts via the further 
development of our brand.

Thank you for your consideration. :)

~m

[1] http://mihmo.livejournal.com/