proposing the candidacy of a Christopher Gabriel

[Mark Galassi <rosalia galassi org>]

Dear GNOME Dudes,

I would like to urge Christopher Gabriel (cgabriel softwarelibero org)
to accept being a candidate for the GNOME board, and to urge you to
vote for him.

Chris is a young fellow who was born and raised in Italy.  I have
known him since he was very small, and I can say a few things about
him and give even more information if you are interested.

* He is self-deprecating, probably even more so that George, so even
  though I think he would be a good person to have on the board, I'm
  sure he would not come forward by spontaneously.  Still, I know that
  on the board he would vote for the things he thinks are correct, and
  that I would be happy with  those votes.

* He is completely dedicated to free software, and has been for a long
  time.  He recognizes that the most important thing is software
  freedom, and other aspects (peer reviewed code, high quality code,
  business models...) are nice but not essential.  Even though he is
  young, his roots are in the GNU project.

* He has been on GNOME since some time in the first few months.  He
  travels to conferences (sometimes at his own expense), knows many of
  the GNOME people that way, follows the commits mailing list and
  knows what's going on in the project and who is doing what.  Keeps
  up in some of the IRC channels.

* He has worked with GNOME from many aspects, and made important
  contributions even when they were not sexy.  Examples (not a
  complete list): (a) One of the most hard-core translators, both of
  documentation and of books (he translated Havoc's book into Italian,
  and has translated most of the GNOME docs and program strings).  (b)
  He has written documentation.  (c) He has written GNOME software
  both at the level of widgets (gsdv) and applications (gwsearch and
  others that are used for specific things).  Because of this he is
  aware, at a gut level, of the importance of documentation and
  translation as well as code.

* No affiliation with any company making money from GNOME.

* Official maintainer of a GNU package, so he is in the GNU maintainer
  loop and mailing lists.

* He is one of the most loyal people you will ever meet, and a
  pleasure to have around.

* He is quite European, and is largely responsible for much of the
  free software grass-roots community effort in parts of Italy.

So I recommend that you vote for him even though he does not push
himself on any of the lists and is not a "GNOME big shot".  If you
have him on the board, you will have someone who will remind other
board members of the importance of things that the big shots might not
have in the center of their radar.

---

And who am I to propose someone's candidacy?  In case I need a
qualification for that, I can say that I was the first person to start
using the word "dude" in email back in the 1980s.