Eleven good candidates

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Having spent quite a bit of time on the hard job of selecting
only eleven candidates, I thought I'd share my thoughts.

A general principle used in picking this list is: the biggest
challenges we'll be facing over the next year are integrating in
the huge increase in resources put into the GNOME project we've
seen recently and maintaining a distinctive and coherent vision
for GNOME.


 Martin Baulig

   Martin is one of the unsung heros of GNOME. He's been around for a
   long time as the coder of GTop and libgtop, but his contributions
   to GNOME go far beyond this: he been instrumental in getting GNOME
   releases out the door, he has organized the GNOME presence at a
   number of shows in Europe and in general has stepped in wherever
   GNOME has needed a hand. 

 Bart Decrem
 
   If you've followed the foundation mailing lists, you've undoubtably
   seen Bart's name. He's spent an enormous amount of time and effort
   over the last 6 months or so getting the GNOME foundation rolling.
   He combines a legal background and experience in organization
   that we don't have elsewhere with an understanding of what 
   GNOME is about that equals that of people who have been involved
   with GNOME much longer.
   
 Miguel de Icaza

   It wouldn't be GNOME without Miguel.

 Jim Gettys

   You know, or should know, Jim as one of the two people behind the X
   windowing system. As probably the earliest large-scale open-source
   project, and one that is still going strong, X isn't be
   a bad model for GNOME. But Jim also has a strong understanding
   of why some things didn't go so well for X and the X consortium
   and will be able make sure we don't fall into those traps.
   His work with standards goes beyond X to also include editing
   HTTP/1.1 for the IETF. In general, he has a level of experience 
   we would be foolish to miss out on.
   
 John Heard
  
   My acquaintance with John Heard is smaller than that I have
   with most other people on this list, but when I've dealt with
   him I've been quite impressed by his grasp of technical and
   non-technical issues for GNOME. John has a breadth of
   management experience that goes considerably beyond that of
   most of the other candidates and this sort of experience on
   the board will be a big help.

   In addition, while the foundation  board is not about
   representing companies, having John on the  board will be a
   great help in getting us over one of the biggest hurdles we'll
   face in the next year - integrating the work of the engineers
   at Sun into GNOME.

 Federico Mena Quintero

   After Miguel, Federico is one of the people most closely
   associated with the GNOME. He is fanatical about code quality,
   but not only that, about Free Software and in general about
   "doing things right". While I'm not sure I'd want an entire
   board of people like Federico, this is an important attitude
   to have represented.

 Dan Mueth
  
   Dan is the current leader of the GNOME documentation project
   and has been doing a excellent job at organizing that large
   group of people. On the board, he would add the point of view
   of all the non-programmer contributors to GNOME.

   I've known Dan for quite a while - in fact, my first contact
   with the Red Hat flavor of Linux was when he showed up to the
   lab where we both worked with a copy of it that he had
   convinced the professor to use to replace an aging HP
   workstation. This was a leap of faith on Dan's part since he
   had virtually no prior experince with Linux but turned out to
   be an excellent decision. I've been consistently impressed
   with Dan's ability to communicate and get things done.
 
 Havoc Pennington

   Havoc is one of the most articulate people I know at
   expressing what GNOME is and where it should be going.  Not
   only that, but he also has no trouble with taking those
   thoughts and commiting them to writing.

 Maciej Stachowiak
    
   Maciej is a real standout among GNOME hackers at being willing
   to tackle the chores of coordination and forming to consensus
   on hard issues. He's been one of the most effective steering
   commitee members, despite being dragged out of bed at 8:00am
   for the biweekly conference calls, including taking on such
   hard jobs as coordinating the GNOME 1.4 release.

   Even if you have no idea how to pronounce his name, you should
   vote for him.

 Owen Taylor

 Daniel Viellard

   Daniel Viellard has been an outspoken member of the GNOME
   commmunity for a long time, but his credentials go
   considerably beyond this to work he has done as an employee of
   the W3c and elsewhere; like Jim Gettys, Daniel Viellard has
   extensive experience in the workings of standards bodies. In
   addition, I think he is an good person to represent the
   European point of view to GNOME and advocate GNOME in Europe.

Many of the names on this list are quite well known, but some of the
others may be less familiar. In particular, if Martin Baulig, Bart
Decrem and and Dan Mueth hadn't caught your eye before, I'd encourage
you to look again at their candidacy statements and reconsider. 


There are also a lot of candidates that also would be fine board
members that I couldn't fit onto the list above. For example,
I'd like to put a word for Elliot Lee. He clearly had the
best candidacy statement, but beyond that, he's been the invisible
hand behind a lot of GNOME since it was created, writing press
releases, coordinating releases and so forth. 

Eleven people is a very small number, and it essential that the group of
people involved in leadership positions in GNOME is larger than simply
that.  In particular, a number of the candidates have special
expertise in important areas beyond coding, such as Kjartan Maraas for
translations, Tuomas Kuosmanen for graphics, and Arlo Rose for UI
design. Whether or not they are elected to the board I think it is
essential that the board work with these leaders to make sure that
GNOME continues to improve in these areas.

Regards,
                                        Owen Taylor