GNOME Board 2021 Candidacy - Nick Richards

[nick richards <nick nedrichards com>]

Hi there,

Name: Nick Richards
email: nick nedrichards com
Corporate affiliation: Lucid

I’d like to announce my candidacy for the 2021 GNOME Board elections.
I’ve been involved in the GNOME community for a long time (I became a
foundation member in 2012), both as a volunteer and someone paid to
work on GNOME and create products from GNOME. Initially on the design
side whilst working for Intel on products such as Moblin/MeeGo Netbook
but also specifying and selling consulting services at Collabora (did
you know there are medical devices with their interfaces written in
GTK?) before managing product at Endless, where not only did we create
experimental, scalable interfaces using GTK and GNOME (emeus, the
constraints manager in GTK came out of this) but we also did a lot of
work on helping GNOME based computing reach entirely new audiences.
I’m thrilled to see that a lot of those insights have made it to
everyone else in GNOME 40. These days I’m a full time Product Manager
at a Software as a Service company called Lucid and also spend a lot
of my free software volunteering time trying to improve the ecosystem
of apps on Linux as part of the Flatpak and Flathub communities.

I recently saw Allan’s blog post about the evolving role of the GNOME
board of directors
https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2021/05/24/gnome-foundation-board-elections-2021/
and was interested to see that the current board are looking for new
candidates who can bring some different perspectives. I believe that I
can help. Other than my skills as a Product Manager and experience
explaining the value of software (and very specifically the value of
contributing non trivial features into GNOME upstream first) to
non-professional audiences I have also been a trustee of a small
nonprofit in the UK for the last five years so I understand deeply the
responsibilities of trustees and some of the pressures of balancing
impact vs explanation to donors in that ecosystem.

The most urgent challenges I see for the GNOME foundation are binding
more people and organisations into our community who either benefit
from our work already, should benefit from it or are aligned with our
mission and values. Some of this needs to be commercial and expand our
pool of significant donors that can help fund strategic work such as
the accessibility rewrite that for one reason or another hadn’t risen
up the priority list for our existing contributors. We have an
opportunity to help guide the foundation to a position where we can
make more GNOME, have more people making GNOME, and make GNOME work
for more people. Or we can kind of do what we've been doing for a
while which is fun and useful but maybe not as impactful as it could
be.

I would be delighted to discuss anything further on discourse.

Nick Richards