Re: Questions for candidates

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 06:11, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
>  1 How do you manage your time and that of others? 

	I manage my time using a pre-emptive multi-tasking algorithem; with
some loosely constrained earliest-deadline-first scheduling. As for
others, I tend to assume they'll do something sensible with occasional
encouragement.

>  2 How are you going to treat your current Gnome work once you become 
>    a foundation board member? Will it suffer?

	Well; I usually hack through (phone) meetings anyway - so, I anticipate
little change.

>  3 Which parts of the Gnome project do you think work well and would 
>    like to encourage further?

	gtk+, D/Bus, ORBit2, gconf, gnome-vfs work nicely - but I'm more
interested in encouraging the adoption of these technologies outside of
what most people think of as 'the Gnome project'.

>  4 The GNOME team has been working on several features to promote use of 
>    GNOME in small and medium business environments, which will potentially 
>    deliver GNOME many users. What are you going to do to promote the use of 
>    GNOME within these environments?

	Talk at conferences, plug the domain, train people to help SMEs etc.

>  5 What do you see as current threats to the future of a complete Free 
>    Software desktop? And what would you like the GNOME Foundation to be 
>    doing to address these issues?

	I think Java is a growing threat to non-free software; and I'd
encourage people to use Mono instead :-) I also think that AGFA's
lock-in on metric-compatible fonts is a serious issue, that needs
fixing.

>  6 What ideas, if any, do you have regarding GNOME and the rest of the 
>    world (as in not USA and other "central" countries) ?

	"Gee your accent is quaint - where do you come from ? ... 
	 England ? - how do you drive there ?"

	Um; I'm from England, it's cold and wet, people hack a lot. Global
warming will destroy hacker productivity - ergo we need to cut CO2
emissions.

>  7 What is your commitment to transparency and open books? Given this 
>    commitment what steps will you take over the next year to realize 
>    your vision?

	I've no idea. Personally, I'm deadly happy with my salary, and I'd
prefer people not to know quite how far I've moved from the "earning"
into "getting" phase. So I've no idea. I'm happy that the people on the
board have the right motives anyhow, whether or not I know how much we
pay anyone.

>  8 What would you do to increase community participation in the GNOME 
>    community and GNOME elections?

	I'd encourage the nominations comittee to send more warnings /
targetted spam to people telling them to stand ...

>  9 Do you have any thoughts on how to expand the developer base?

	Expand the user base; working on this.

> 10 [Long introduction I hesitate to summarise, but I believe the gist
>    of the question to be] how do you propose to fix the lack of apparent 
>    structure or direction which causes a loss of momentum?

	Well - I've tried this several ways - and totally failed; My feeling is
that there is a sub-set of things that we all agree on (in fact) such as
'the move to cairo', 'gnome VFS daemon' that have been on the table for
many many months and we just need a nice MrProject chart that shows the
_known_ _agreed_ plans for each project / and allows people to see what
cool feature XYZ is blocking on - and how to help.

	If you read this far - you should realise by now that I can't spell; oh
- and Vote for Me !

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael ximian com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot