On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 19:02, Ghee Seng Teo wrote: > The GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee is enclosing here the > following 11 questions for the candidates running for the board this year. > This is almost becoming part of the GNOME Board election tradition now. > To give a bit of variation, Membership & Elections Committee has added Question > 11 at the 11th hour as we believe this is a worthy question to be added. > > Please spend a bit of times in answering these questions as you can treat this > as part of your election campaign. Your view in the particular matters will in > process help the foundation members in formulating their votes.. > > > 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors? Because I can, and I think I can make a difference if I'm elected. > 2) Do you have leadership and committee experience? If so, please explain. Leadership, yes, through Free Software. Being the nice dictator is nice. As I already said, I don't have experience on a board, but there's always a first time. > 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? Very. I've got code of mine spread around quite a lot of modules that make the GNOME Desktop. > 4) One of the primary tasks of the Board of Directors is to act as a > liaison 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? I've worked at big corp, and I've worked in startups. So I have the experience of different styles of management and power delegation. Makes it easier to know who to talk to, and engage a discussion. > 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 committees, and act as liaisons > 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? Most of the time, it's the lack of communication. We need to find reliable ways to put our word out. Mailing lists and websites are our way to communicate with the outside world. We would need to have a website for the organisational news of GNOME. For example, the membership renewal news was very badly communicated outside the core of the community (IMO). > 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 consensus on each item for > discussion. Are you good at working with others, who sometimes have very > differing opinions than you do, to reach consensus and agree on actions? Yes, I don't like conversations that keep on dragging. We have IRC and mailing lists for discussion. I expect most of the discussion to have been done outside the conference call. > 7) Often Directors have to draft policies, form committees, find > weaknesses or approaching problems of GNOME and work on solutions, and act > as liaison 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 liaison between the Board and any other committees, groups, or > companies if relevant. Finish Jim's work on the fonts side. It's very important for the whole Free Software community. Get the new CVS system up and running. New developers (or users that want to contribute) have problems with the lag of the current system. That's actually one of the reason some projects (like GStreamer) are not hosted by the GNOME CVS. Finally, the communication problem, see 5). > 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 bought a suit. Is that a good answer ? ;) > 9) Will you represent the interests of GNOME and the GNOME Foundation over > all other personal or corporate interests you may represent? I'm a GNOME developer first, and then a Red Hat employee, when on the board. As people might get confused, GNOME development isn't part of my job at Red Hat. > 10) Will you be willing and have the available time to take on and > complete various tasks that the Board needs accomplished? I feel that's a prerequisite to candidacy. So it's a yes. > 11) One of the ingredient for success in Free Software project such as GNOME > is committed and dedicated memberships. How would you propose to promote new > membership, and encourage commitment of existing membership to make the GNOME > desktop the desktop of choice? [ Hints: the number of Foundation members have > reduced from 460 in 2001 to approximately 300 in 2002 ] That's a problem related to 5) again. Cheers -- /Bastien Nocera http://hadess.net Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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