My endorsements

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Here is my personal set of endorsements. It's going to look
suspiciously like Havoc and Owen's, but I actually wrote it before
seeing either of theirs. Also, I wrote the whole thing while massively
sleep-deprived, so my descriptions are a bit silly. Well, OK, a lot
silly. I am way too tired to rewrite them now though.

I thought about these picks for a long time, and shuffled around both
the names on my main list and the others I praise below many times. I
think what I came up with would make a strong board for the
foundation, with a balance of skills, geography, corporate
affiliation, corporate non-affiliation, project affiliation, and so
on. 

I think the membership is wise enough to pick 11 good board members
with or without my advice though.

I listed candidates in what I think is a rough order of importance to
have them on the board.

 - Maciej

---------------------

* Miguel de Icaza - The founder of the Gnome project and still our
spiritual leader and whirlwhind of energy, Miguel is essential to the
success of the Foundation and of Gnome itself. Miguel is also the
maintainer of Bonobo, Gnome-libs and many other essential
modules. Without Miguel, we would not be here today with a technically
sound, fully free desktop.

* Havoc Pennington - While some might come close to his coding skills,
few people have done as much as Havoc to hammer out boring but
critical issues like platform compatibility, and to keep everyone
informed of what's going on. He's always been willing to take the lead
on organizational and communication issues.

* Bart Decrem - Bart brings experience with nonprofits, legal savvy,
organizational and negotiating skills, and most importantly an
unwavering ethical vision to the table. Bart has done more than anyone
to make the Foundation possible, both up front gathering community
input and hehind the scenes.

* Dan Mueth - In addition to his work as head of the Gnome
Documentation Project, Dan is a great organizer and has helped bring
many people into the project, both personally and with is work on the
"How to Join the Gnome Project" document. He's also been one of the
most active and effective members of the current steering committee
since he joined mid-stream.

* Owen Taylor - Owen's impeccable taste in code quality and his
expertise on Gtk+, i18n and CORBA issues will serve us well. His
willingness to get into down and dirty organizational work and his
effective technical communication skills speak for themselves.

* Martin Baulig - Martin has always been solid, sensible and
dependable. While wisely avoding most flamewars, he cranks out code
and helps maintain and administrate the Gnome servers. He's truly one
of the people that keeps the gears moving and makes Gnome go. In
addition, Martin works for SuSE and lives in Germany, which means good
communication with the KDE project. And he's done a lot of work to
help organize trade shows and PR in europe.

* Maciej Stachowiak

* Ettore Perazzoli - If you look up "hacker" in the dictionary, you'll
see Ettore's picture. His prolific coding, quality design work and
sensible decision-making have done a lot to improve Gnome. His work as
the lead on Evolution is helping to define what it means to be a
next-generation Gnome application.

* James Henstridge - Our resident Aussie provides not only geographic
diversity, but knowledge of the issues facing language binding authors
and application hackers (through his work on dia and gnome-python,
among other things). In addition he's not affiliated with any of the
major Gnome companies.

* Jim Gettys - Where to begin? Jim is one of the original authors of
the X Window System, and has worked closely with the X Consortium, the
W3C and the IETF. Jim has followed Gnome and often advised us. his
breadth and depth of experience are unmatched, and we'd be foolish to
miss out on the opportunity to have someone of his accomplishments and
stature on the board. He's also learned a lot about all sorts of
standardization processes and that experience will be invaluable as
Gnome matures.

* Daniel Veillard - Daniel's exprience with the W3C and his
willingness to speak out and change things would serve us well. Daniel
is pretty much the main reason we're voting for candidates right now
instead of slates. That says a lot to me about his political skills.



My list has two people with Helix affiliations, two with Red Hat
affiliations and three with Eazel affiliations. I would have preferred
to keep it down to two each, but I honestly think Bart and Dan both
have unique qualifications and I can't very well ask people not to
vote for me. :-)


So that's the 11 people I'd most like to see on the board.

But there are so many amazing candidates, I couldn't bring myself
to just list 11 and leave everyone else out. Here's some other people
that would make great board members:

* John Heard - John represents the multitudes of Sun hackers who have
given us OpenOffice, the biggest single code contribution to free
software ever, and the eager ex-CDE developers who are getting into
all aspects of the code. Honestly, I think we'd be way better off with
him on the board - it's far better to include the mass of Sun hackers
in the process. But I'm not sure the community feels comfortable with
him on the board before our relationship with Sun is more
well-established.

* Elliot Lee - Elliot has written oodles of code and has a wonderfully
sensible perspective these days. He knows low-level details of all
sorts of stuff like no one else. Though rarely described as
"diplomatic", Elliot does get his point across clearly. More
importantly, he's been a major mover and shaker behind the scenes,
doing what it takes to make Gnome happen. The only reason he was not
on my short list was to limit corporate affiliations.

* Raph Levien - Raph is a seasoned and more importantly brilliant
hacker. His years of experience with low-level graphics translate both
to code he works on and excellent relations with the people who are
driving progress in printing and graphics. Raph has also been a huge
part of Gnome's sense of community. He would be in my essential list
above were it not for his nominal Eazel affilition through some
contract work. If you feel as I do that he would easily look past that

* Chris Lahey - Humble, ultra-sensible, always there for his users and
a code machine to boot, Chris is a paragon of Gnome hackerdom. More
importantly, he has a strong moral compass and is unafraid to speak
up for doing the right thing.

* George Lebl - George is eminently sensible and level-headed,
believes strongly in free software, and has been with the Gnome
project from the start. Again, I left him off the list so I could
maximize the number of independent voices. But maybe George would be a
better candidate than me.

* Tuomas Kuosmanen - Tuomas has pretty much defined the current Gnome
look. He's also sensible, friendly, and easy to work with. I probably
would have recommended him except for, once again, the desire to limit
corporate affiliations.

* Arlo Rose - Arlo brings a lot of experience from Apple and other
places to his usability work. Although he has been focusing mostly on
Nautilus so far, Arlo has also revived the Gnome UI group and plans to
do good work with then in the future. Sadly, he works for Eazel and I
didn't feel comfortable recommending any more Eazel candidates.

* Kjartan Maraas - Kjartan has done a lot of great work coordinating
the translation team. Though I didn't put him on my short list of 11
board members, I hope he continues to have a leadership role in Gnome
whether or not he ends up on the board (and indeed the same goes for
Tuomas and Arlo).