Thoughts on candidates

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

At Red Hat today we were discussing the fact that there hasn't been
much in the way of comments on this list, so I thought I'd jump in and
campaign for some people I'm considering voting for.

Miguel de Icaza
==

An obvious choice, requires no introduction.

Martin Baulig
==

Martin has always been the first to volunteer for a lot of the
footwork that makes GNOME run; system administration, fooling with
mailing lists and the bug tracker, fixing up CVS, etc. He's an active
participant in mailing lists and provides constructive input to most
threads of importance. So I think he's already doing a lot of the
tasks we're hoping the board will take on. He's also been a GNOME
hacker for a long time, and is firmly committed to free software.

Bart Decrem
==

I posted a longer message about Bart earlier. Summary: Bart is doing
the bulk of board-type work for us already; keeping track of companies
that want to get involved with GNOME, running these elections, drafts
of the charter and bylaws, http://foundation.gnome.org, etc. He's a
lawyer who knows many of the GNOME hackers and is on our side. He's an
excellent consensus builder.

In short he's doing tons of work the board would do and doing it well.
I'd bet everyone who's been working with Bart is voting for him.

Jim Gettys
==

Jim's one of the original X Window System hackers. Since then he's
worked on other stuff you may have heard of; for example editing the
HTTP specification. Jim has been keeping track of the GNOME Project
for quite some time, sending us advice from his years of
experience. He's an accomplished hacker, very familiar with GNOME, and
can contribute his organizational experience with the X Consortium and
the IETF.

Daniel Veillard
==

Daniel is GNOME's XML expert, and brings substantial hacker
credentials as well as experience with standards bodies and
organization from his job at the W3C. He's also a frequent participant
in discussions and has good communication skills. 

Maciej Stachowiak
==

Another person who already plays a strong leadership role in the
project. In addition to hacking Nautilus at Eazel, Maciej hacks on
Guile, the official GNU extension language, and is coordinating the
GNOME 1.4 release along with Jacob. He's been one of the most
important contributors to the current interim steering committee.

Owen Taylor
==

Owen co-maintains the GTK+ toolkit and GLib library we all use every
day. Historically he's also a CORBA and Perl hacker. Owen frequently
takes the lead in running interim steering committee meetings, does a
good portion of the gnome.org administration work, and has the most
sensible advice around on issues technical and non-technical.  I would
elect him as a representative of GLib and GTK+ which form the core of
our development platform, and as one of the strongest de facto leaders
of the project.

John Heard
==

A controversial but IMHO important choice. Several people including
myself already posted mails explaining why. Summary: the role of the
board is to encourage communication and organization within the
project; one of the biggest challenges there is to integrate the Sun
team. John can help with this.

Aside from that, he's no slouch in the credentials department; he's
been involved in UNIX for years, and along with Jim Gettys can no
doubt bring quite a few historical lessons to the board. People with
strong resumes such as John Heard, Jim Gettys, Bart Decrem, Daniel
Veillard will give confidence to organizations thinking of committing
to GNOME technology (including companies that want to help develop,
but maybe more importantly, organizations that want to use the
software).

Dan Mueth
==

Dan leads the GNOME Documentation Project which is perhaps the best
example we have of a GNOME sub-project with excellent communication,
organization, and recruiting. Dan does a great job keeping track of
what needs doing and getting volunteers involved to do it. Dan could
represent the doc project in addition to contributing his
organizational skills.

Ettore Perazzoli
==

Ettore is one of our best hackers and the project lead for the
Evolution suite, one of the biggest apps we're currently
developing. He has a strong commitment to free software, excellent
hacking skills, and the ability to communicate well. Also he's a cool
guy and friends with everybody. I think he'd make a lot of valuable
contributions to the board.

Federico Mena Quintero
==

Federico is the perfectionist among us, and would stand to the end for
quality over release schedules. If he got to make decisions by
himself, I guess we'd be releasing GNOME 2.0 in 2008 ;-), but as part
of the board he'd keep people honest. Federico is of course one of the
GNOME co-founders, and an ex-Red Hat employee in addition to a current
Helix Code employee.

James Henstridge
==

James runs around the project getting things done, hacking code you
may have heard of such as gnorpm, libglade, gnome-python, and Dia.
He's another uber-hacker with who makes sensible judgments on all
sorts of topics. James is always helpful and eager to address any
problems with the software he works on.

George Lebl
==

George is one of the very first GNOME hackers; I don't know exactly
when he appeared, since it was before I did. His panel was one of the
first pieces of GNOME to appear on the screen and has been mutating in
strange ways ever since. Recently he's been hacking on stuff for Eazel
and doing a lot of gnome-libs work. He's also one of the most frequent
contributors to discussions about every aspect of the project and
closely follows what's going on. I'd mention that he hacks on GOB, but
I don't consider that a point in his favor. ;-)


Also, I plan to vote for myself, and you should too ;-) This means
there are 14 people I'm trying to vote for so I'll have to narrow it
down more.

Balance in this list is reasonable:

Affiliations:
  Eazel: Bart, Maciej, Dan, George
  Red Hat: Owen, Havoc
  Helix: Miguel, Ettore, Federico
  W3C: Daniel
  Sun: John
  Compaq: Jim
  SuSE: Martin
  None: James
  
Countries:
  US: Maciej, Dan, George (with Czech tendencies), Owen, Havoc, Jim
  Italy: Ettore
  Mexico: Miguel, Federico
  France: Daniel
  Australia: James
  Germany: Martin
  New Guinea (but living in the US): John
  Belgium (but living in the US): Bart

Anyhow, those are my thoughts so far.

Havoc