Answers to the 11 questions



1) Why are you running for Board of Directors?

I want to make GNOME to be the best it can be.  I want to contribute
my ideas and my personal vision on where GNOME should go.   I'm
not a big hacker and I've always felt that I wanted to contribute to
GNOME in way that fits my talents.

2) Do you have leadership and committee experience? If so, please explain.

Yes, I've had a lot of experience as an engineer working for
a multi-national corporation.  I've managed a team for a short
time locally.  I've lead a team of people who live in different
physical sites.

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 have a fairly good idea of what's going on within GNOME.  I'm not
certain that I know it on a day to day basis.  I don't think it's
required.  There is a lot going on and not everyone can track all
that happens.  However, the areas that I am interested in I like
to keep track of.

If I feel I can contribute positively I'll try to participate.  A
lot of times I like to help out people by making them aware of
things that are going on that they could take advantage of.

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 work primarily in a support role and it's my job to try to figure out
requirements on a technical project.  Fitting GNOME into that is
not a problem.

We are doing a great job of collaborating through various cross-project
mailing lists.  I want to see good collaborations with
other companies and organizations.  Especially, I'd like to see
greater collaboration with other GNU/open-source projects.

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?

GNOME has plenty of weak points.  I've watched the project grow and you
can really tell the character of a project by how well it manages it's
growth.  It hasn't fallen apart from in-fighting so that says
something. :-)

The biggest things in my mind are:

Documentation:  Tip of the hat to the documentation team on the job they've
been doing! :-)  I've  been in the #docs channel and watched these guys
put a lot of thought and effort in the docs infrastructure.  I's great!
while the infrastructure for documentation is fairly solid docs themselves
are lacking.  We are at 2.1.x and we still do not have decent
API docs.

Documentation lowers the bar of entry.  If we get good docs we get more
developers and we more participation.

Communications:  We've had some interesting flame wars
because of lack of communications and mis understandings.  This
creates a lot of unneeded friction within our group.
We've started to formalize our communications using the
GEP project.  We should keep doing that.

Standards:  We need more desktop standards.  Desktops need to agree
upon behavior.  User experience should be approximately be the same
between desktop projects.  If you want to sell to companies you have to be
able to show that it's easy to support.  By making a set of universal
standards it reduces support costs which makes desktops on free OS's
much more attractive.


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?

I'm a social bee. :-) I have excellent social skills that allows me to
work well with others.  This goes back to working with people at
different physical locations.  Leading a team like that requires
being able to get consensus and moving team forward and getting each
task done.



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.

I would definitely be interested in helping out trying to figure out
how to improve communications between different groups within GNOME.

(I'm stealing from Mike Newman here) I'd like to see GNOME used more in
government as well as encouraging it's use in poorer countries.

Our website needs some serious love.  It doesn't even compare to what
KDE and some other sites have.  We should really have something that
looks good.  Moreover it should really be used as a good communication
center for developers.  Offhand, I can tell you that the developer area
needs to be improved with better organization of where the developer
docs go.

I'm leery of forming committees.  Committees tend to slow things down
and we never make a decision because of various opinions.  If you do make
a committee you need to make sure that you pick the right people.

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'm very diplomatic when I need to be.  If you manage a team you have to
gauge people who work for you and understand what you can and can't
say to them because what you say affects the dynamic of a group and
introduces friction in a group.

I believe I can handle most things I think.  I'm not one for spotlights
so I might pass on media liaisons. :-)

9) Will you represent the interests of GNOME and the GNOME Foundation over
all other personal or corporate interests you may represent?

Whenever possible, yes.   Obviously, I have pre-existing contracts
with my employer that obligates me to not compromise them.

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

I believe I have the time to spend the time to do what is needed to
the best of my knowledge.

11) One of the ingredient for success in an Open Source 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 ]

Well, I'm guessing that most of the foundation members are core developers,
bug posters, documentation buffs, dabblers and so forth.

If you're asking to increase the number of members I think we need to make
sure that we have our documentation out there.  We have to make GNOME
easy to program, where GNOME have a variety of resources for developers
to draw on.  "Read the source" should never be the answer to a newbie
developer. (unless it makes sense)





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