Candidacy: Joachim Noreiko

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

Name: Joachim Noreiko
Email: jnoreiko AT yahoo DOT com
Affiliation: none

In December 2005 I wandered into the GNOME
Documentation Project and stayed. That's the simple
version of why I'm here.

The longer story is that getting involved in GNOME has
actually been frustrating, annoying, and infuriating.
It's had me tearing my hair out and yelling at the
screen. Frankly, I think it's only because of my
bloody-mindedness that I didn't just walk away, on
countless occasions.

Getting involved in GNOME is HARD. The website looks
stagnant and hardly inviting. Dig a little deeper, and
developer.gnome.org shows you documents that date from
2002, about software that no longer exists or has
radically changed since. Mailing lists are strange,
alien places to people who don't come from hacker
culture. The same goes for IRC. When you finally
manage to get someone to at least give you a few tips
to get started, you attach your first patch to
bugzilla... and then nothing happens.

Since December 2005 I've been trying to change all
that. 

I remain a member of the GNOME Documentation Project.
Along with other contributors, I've been working on
bringing our user documentation up to date. I'm
looking at ways to keep it that way, by spreading the
GDP's workload throughout the cycle instead of the
final few weeks of freeze, as this has proved
unfeasible on the two occasions I've been involved.
Looking further ahead, I'll be behind the big push to
update developer documentation once the new
documentation site library.gnome.org goes live.

I'm also a member of the GNOME Web team. I'm
coordinating several of the goals in the www.gnome.org
revamp, and I expect I'll be writing quite a lot of
the content. Our website is our principal way of
attracting new blood, and I hope that when this goes
live it will bring new contributors.

Technical change is complex, because what can seem
trivial often depends on so many other things. That's
why it's taken so long to rebuild our website, and why
the GNOME User Guide is so unwieldy. But social change
is even harder to bring about.

As a board member, I want to work to lower the
barriers to entry that block potential GNOME
contributors. I hope that my work on the website and
documentation will play a part in that, but I also
think more can be done socially. Efforts such as GNOME
Love and Patch Squad need more help, for example.

I want to make GNOME more coherent. I'd like to see
GNOME Certification come about, and that will entail
bringing the HIG up to date. I'd like to see more
GNOME marketing efforts, which will mean more planning
of our release right from the start of the development
cycle.

Perhaps the hardest part of all this will be
encouraging people to work on things that are
necessary, but not that much fun. Coming from the
Documentation Project, I know that not everything is
fun.

Oh, and throughout this, I've tried to respond to
patches that fall under my remit, especially when they
are from new contributors, within a couple of days.
When I can no longer do that, I'll know I've taken too
much on.

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