GNOME Foundation Board candidacy: Seif Lotfy

[Seif Lotfy <seif lotfy com>]

Name: Seif Lotfy

EMail: seif lotfy com

Affiliation: Collabora Ltd.

Since 2007, through ever-increasing code-contributions, I have been actively involved in the GNOME developer community.

During the last six months, I have been working much more closely with the design team, by participating in some of Allan Day's "Every Detail Matters" tasks and programming several prototypes for the design team. At the moment, I am working together with Allan and Emily, my Summer of Code student, on the clocks application.

Currently, I spend nearly 50% of my working time on GNOME-related projects, thanks to Collabora. I also spend a lot of my time working on deploying Zeitgeist into some smaller projects like Gedit (the dashboard plugin), which greatly benefited from design collaboration with Hylke Bons and Garrett LeSage.

Sometimes misunderstandings and miscommunication happen in the community, especially between different teams who may share similar goals but different viewpoints. This blurred vision was evident in mailing-lists over the past few weeks. (Thankfully Olav did a great job moderating the lists to not let it get too out-of-hand.) 

I believe vague development and design decisions are harmful for the current developers involved in GNOME. If elected to the board, I will push for focusing efforts in solving communication and community issues, and plan to:

1) Improve communication between designers and developers, by pushing for a more transparent design/technical decision process, with the goal of developing trust in each others decisions. I firmly believe in having GNOME teams in agreement on crucial issues of design and development.

2) Explore the idea of a community task-force to examine and resolve personal issues, to ensure stellar communication and rapor within the community.

3) Push for more accountability of paid GNOME developers via the growth of their modules and sub-communities. 

4) Increase and maintain our contributor base, by encouraging and expanding intiatives such as Allan Day's "Every Detail Matters", in order to include additional GNOME-related projects.

5) Push for an initiative to empower observers and users of GNOME to easily contribute back to the project.

6) Push for raising awareness of the importance of the social capital of GNOME within the different teams. We are trying to deliver a product, but we are a community first, thus we need to invest time into not only growing but maintaining our community.

As I have personally experienced similar miscommunication over the years, I have worked hard to solve those issues with orther community participants and different developer teams.

If elected to the board, I can offer my unique background to help bridge the gap between community participants amongst diverse teams to help forge a unified vision and strengthen GNOME as a whole. 

Thanks,

Seif