Candidacy: Ryan Lortie

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

name:          Ryan Lortie
nick:          desrt
affiliation:   Codethink Limited

I am announcing my intention to run as a candidate in the upcoming
election for the board of directors.


(( me ))

I've been around the GNOME project for a bit more than half a decade.  I
started in some rather user-facing parts of the desktop and quickly
moved down the stack.  Recently, I spend most of my days hanging out on
D-Bus and messing around with GLib.  I created GVariant, dconf and
GSettings and have had a hand in some other technologies used in GNOME
such as GVFS, the GIO networking APIs, GDBus, GApplication and many
others.

I've avoided running for the board in the past because I'm the sort of
person who doesn't like meetings and I've always been a bit
disorganised.  I'm generally happier when I'm hacking on something.  I'm
running now because I have a platform (that you may or may not agree
with).


(( the platform ))

The GNOME project is at a singularly interesting point in its history.
We just shocked the world with the level of quality of the GNOME 3.0
release.  Few would disagree that we are going through a period of
growth and change as a project, but it seems that there is some
disagreement on exactly what that means.

For a while the foundation board has largely taken a hands-off approach
when it comes to technical decisions.  In my opinion this has allowed a
number of problems to develop.

I believe that GNOME is in need of strong and coordinated technical
governance, firmly rooted in the structure of the community.  I want to
start a discussion about the best way to make this happen.

I strongly support the GNOME philosophy of maintainers having control
over their own modules.  I believe, however, that this situation
occasionally causes friction when trying to push large changes to the
platform and desktop.  There have also been cases when outsiders to the
project have encountered problems with a particular maintainer and felt
that they have no recourse.  I want to investigate methods by which we
can balance maintainer autonomy with the benefits of more coordinated
technical leadership.

Finally, I'm interested in the strength of GNOME as a community project.
I think community projects are at their best when the power to control
the future of the project lies clearly within the community and not
consolidated within a single entity.  I believe this is another argument
for strong community technical governance.


(( in summary ))

Please don't vote for me because you recognise my name and think that I
wrote some nice software or because the other candidates don't have as
nice of a free t-shirt collection.

I expect the ideas here to be a bit controversial.  I'm happy to provide
clarification on my thoughts.  Please only vote for me if you believe
that I am right.

Thank you