Re: 11 Questions to answer

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

 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?\
As a project like GNOME gets larger, handling the administrative side of 
things becomes necessary.  I am interested in seeing GNOME succeed, and 
serving on the board is one way to do that.

> 2) Do you have leadership and committee experience? If so, please explain.
I am on the current GNOME Foundation board of directors.  I am also on 
the organising committee for the 2003 linux.conf.au conference (a really 
good conference you should all register for: 
http://linux.conf.au/register/).

> 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 participate on a number of the GNOME development mailing lists.  I 
admin the pygtk and language-bindings mailing lists.

> 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?
Yes. I have been working on GNOME since 1998, so I think I have a fairly 
good idea of the GNOME culture, and how to present it to such companies.

> 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 a number of groups such as the release team, sys admin team, 
etc.  These teams do a great job, and I see part of the foundation 
board's job to ensure that they can continue to do so.  In the past 
year, there have been a number of times where various groups have been 
waiting for a response from the board.

Making sure the board doesn't hold up other parts of GNOME would be a 
good thing to aim at for the next year.

> 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.

> 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.
At the moment we are working on a copyright policy for GNOME.  If it 
doesn't get finalised before the next board takes over, it would be good 
to complete that.

It would also be good for the board to be a bit more responsive to 
requests.  In the past year there have been a number of times when we 
didn't give timely responses as we waited til a teleconference to 
discuss things.  So this would involve making use of the mailing lists a 
bit more regularly.

> 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?
Yes.  On the LCA organising committee, it has been pretty important to 
manage things diplomaticly, in order to make sure all the sponsors get 
what they are supposed to and don't get too pissed off.  It is fairly 
similar for GNOME :)

> 9) Will you represent the interests of GNOME and the GNOME Foundation over
> all other personal or corporate interests you may represent?
When acting as a foundation board member, yes.

> 10) Will you be willing and have the available time to take on and
> complete various tasks that the Board needs accomplished?
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 ]
>  
In the 2001 elections, we only got about 260 votes, so it is not clear 
that all 460 members were active in GNOME at that time.  As everyone has 
renewed closer to the elections, we will most likely get a higher 
turnout for this year's election.  We will probably also find that on 
average, foundation members are more involved in GNOME this year.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au              | Linux.conf.au   http://linux.conf.au/
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/ | Jan 22-25   Perth, Western Australia.