Re: 10 Questions for All Candidates

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Dan Mueth wrote:

> Having been on the Board for the last year, I feel I have a good idea what
> the Board has to do and some of the skills needed by board members. Using
> this experience, I have come up with a list of questions which I feel will
> help us learn more about each candidate and what sort of a board member
> they would be.
>
> I ask that each candidate please answer the following questions and reply
> to foundation-list gnome org to help the Membership know the candidate
> better and make well-informed decisions at the ballot.
I am sorry I didn't reply to this sooner.  My internet access was a bit 
patchy last week.

> Dan
>
> ----
>
> 10 Questions for all candidates:
>
> 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors?
I have worked on gnome for a while, and think it would be a good way to 
help out with the project.  Someone needs to do the work to keep gnome 
running, and we can't expect the current board to continue forever.

> 2) Do you have leadership and committee experience? If so, please explain.
I was on the steering committee the until the formation of the gnome 
foundation.

> 3) How familiar are you with the day-to-day happenings of GNOME?  How much
> do you follow and participate in the main GNOME mailing lists?
I am the list admin of the language-bindings gnome org mailing list (a 
low volume mailing list for discussion among gtk/gnome language binding 
authors).  I contribute on gtk-devel-list and various other lists.

> 4) One of the primary tasks of the Board of Directors is to act as a
> liason between the GNOME Foundation and other organizations and companies
> to find out how the two groups can work together to their mutual benefit.
> Do you feel you would be good at understanding other people and companies
> and finding ways that GNOME can collaborate with other companies and
> organizations to benefit both groups and their users?
Hopefully I can.  Currently the board is composed of North Americans and 
Europeans.  Having some representatives on the board from other areas 
(eg. asia/pacific) may make communication with organisations based in 
those areas easier.

> 5) One of the responsibilities and powers of the Board of Directors is to
> identify organizational weaknesses and needs of GNOME and to create
> committees, appoint coordinators of these committess, and act as liasons
> with them.  What do you believe are the current weak points of GNOME as an
> organization, and if you were able to, how would you change the GNOME
> organization?
With the gnome 2.0 platform, technologies like bonobo are becoming more 
central.  With good language binding support (perl, python or guile 
bindings come to mind), we should have a system where it is trivial to 
tie existing components together.

This will hopefully make gnome an ideal choice for prototype apps and 
other inhouse gui apps.  Hopefully in the future, people will see Gnome 
as the obvious choice for these sort of problems, rather than tcl/tk or 
python/Tkinter, etc.

This will require more complete language bindings (we can't really focus 
on a single language for this -- often you want to write the gui in the 
language the rest of your code is in), and more promotion of gnome as a 
platform for these sort of applications.

> 6) The board meets for one hour every two weeks to discuss a handful of
> issues.  Thus, it is very important that the board can very quickly and
> concisely discuss each topic and come to concensus on each item for
> discussion. Are you good at working with others, who sometimes have very
> differing opinions than you do, to reach concensus and agree on actions?
I would like to think I am :)

> 7) Often Directors have to draft policies, form committees, find
> weaknesses or approaching problems of GNOME and work on solutions, and act
> as liason with various groups (both within and outside GNOME) and
> companies.  Please name three or more areas which you feel are important
> for the Board to address over the next year and which you would enjoy
> contributing some of your time to help get things started and possibly act
> as a liason between the Board and any other committees, groups, or
> companies if relevant.
- more complete developer documentation, including docs for languages 
other than C
- better communication with local free software/linux groups
- maybe help organise more face to face meetings of developers (these 
don't need to be big ones -- for instance, as part of an existing 
conference like the ALS one).

> 8) Do you consider yourself diplomatic?  Would you make a good
> representative for the GNOME Foundation to the Membership, media, public,
> and organizations and corporations the GNOME Foundation works with?
I am usually non offensive, if that is what you mean :)

> 9) Will you represent the interests of GNOME and the GNOME Foundation over
> all other personal or corporate interests you may represent?
Well, at the moment I have no other computing related corporate 
interests but if I did, I would still be representing myself rather than 
a company.

> 10) Will you be willing and have the available time to take on and
> complete various tasks that the Board needs accomplished?
Yes.

James.