A couple background bits [was: Re: Attendance record of current board members]

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Bart Decrem wrote:

> Also, I want to encourage everyone to vote for Miguel, Havoc, Jim and
> Daniel.  Each of them have played a very important role in the board
> this last year.  Miguel's energy and vision are crucial to the success
> of GNOME.  Havoc's leadership skills is key and his approach to the
> future of GNOME plays off Miguel's approach really well.  Jim has
> provided great perspective at all times and has been a terrific advocate
> for interoperability and looking beyond the desktop PC space.  As for
> Daniel .... well, he's French.  Just kidding, he's doing an incredible
> job as our secretary and also "keeps us honest" in everything we do.
>
> Also, I think it's very important that there be continuity between the
> two boards, so we should keep these 4 people on for next year.

A number of people have expressed a concern that we need continuity in the
Board over time, including the Advisory Board.  I agree with this point of
view and hope people will elect a few of our previous board members.

It it tough for me to endorse candidates since I know a fair number of
them and because we have more than 11 excellent candidates.  I can't help
but provide a bit of information about two of our key board members over
the last year:  Havoc was an excellent chair of the board over the last
year, organizing and running the meetings, building concensus, speaking on
our behalf to the advisory board, and doing quite a few little tasks that
had to get done but which nobody else volunteered for.  In many ways,
Havoc signed up for a completely different job than the other 10 of us and
rose to the occassion in a way which I was very impressed by.  Daniel was
great at taking minutes, and had a very healthy mix of providing sound and
calm wisdom when appropriate, and providing excited and very direct
statements about anything which he felt was wrong or not heading in the
right direction.  I imagine most people who follow the mailing lists know
what I mean.

There is a really great collection of candidates who were not on the board
last year and I'm glad that we will have a lot of new people to the board.
(At least 6 since only 5 old board members are running.)  A lot of them
are very well-known and established in the GNOME community, so I can't say
much about them that people don't already know.

I would like to say a couple things about Glynn Foster since he is
somewhat newer to GNOME than many of the candidates and since I've worked
a bit more closely with him than many people have.  My first interaction
with Glynn was in regard to the developer.gnome.org web pages, where Glynn
put in a lot of time writing certain portions of the pages.  He also
struck me as probably the Sun employee who most quickly and fully
integrated into the GNOME community, who really enjoys following
everything that is going on and getting involved in lots of different
areas, and who seems to clock the most time on IRC and stays up latest
chatting with other GNOME contributors.  Glynn joined the elections and
membership committee a couple months ago after we put out a call for
volunteers.  As soon as he joined the committee, he (and Mike, our other
new member) quickly did a significant backlog of membership applications
and has generally put in a ton of work doing fairly boring work ever
since.  He was always very enthusiastic, quick to respond to emails,
motivated to do a thorough job, and willing to do any sort of work that
needed to be done.  It is nice to have at least a couple people with this
profile on the board.

Dan