Re: Questions for the candidate

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi all,

Guess I'm first then...

Sayamindu Dasgupta said:

> 1. Judging from the comments posted here (gnomdesktop.org comments
> area), it seems as though most people are confused about the purpose of
> the GNOME Foundation and its board. How will you, as a member of the
> board, try to clear up confusion and outline a clear direction and
> purpose for the Foundation?

This year's and last year's boards have worked a lot on
transparency of their workings, and I think we need to continue
that. But I think that board member needs to be a more
identifiable hat that people wear. The more things that people
hear about where someone is talking as a member of the board
rather than an individual, the clearer things become. So a big
part of the board is to publically have people represent the
board in boardy type discussions.

> 2. What do you see as the most important thing that the board
> accomplishes, and what do you think is the area of the board's activity
> where you could improve things?

The area I would hope to improve things is in GNOME branding.
That means working with different people to get nice glossy
posters and banners which can be shipped out to local GNOME
groups so that they have nice stands during conferences, and
making sure that GNOME is present at conferences as much as
possible. Also, that means concluding a merchandising agreement
or two, and having footed stuff up for sale on gnome.org. This
year's board has done quite a bit of work on this already, so I
think it's reasonable to expect that we will have GNOME
merchandise available online this year.

The most important job the board does is (should be?)
informational. The board should be the place where you can get
definitive answers to questions on GNOME user groups and local
foundations and big GNOME deployments. The other important aspect
of the foundation is financial.

> 3. What is the number one priority for the GNOME project now, in your
> opinion? What do you think you can do as a board member to work towards
> that goal?

The number one priority for the GNOME project organisationally 
now is probably to grow the number of Linux desktops in general, 
and make sure that we are well positioned to take a good chunk 
of those new Linux desktops by increasing our visibility. 

Technically, I'm not really in a position to say, but
interoperability and integration come to mind. There are really
exciting things happening right now with standard definitions for
the Linux desktop space, and abstraction layers coming from
freedesktop.org that will hopefully put an end to KDE and GNOME
being completely distinct desktops like they were back in the 1.4
days.

> 4. What do you think is the most important market for GNOME over the
> next year or two, and what do you feel you can do to help get GNOME
> better penetrated into that market?

Governmental organisations. They like the things that we have to
offer, and are tending towards GNOME without us actually going
hunting for them. The board should work closely with the
marketing team to figure out who to talk to, and do as much as
possible to sell GNOME into those markets. I would expect lots of
help from Novell, Sun and RedHat for this too.

> 5. What unique aspect will you bring to the job?

Probably nothing unique. I tend to commit myself to no more than
I can handle (although at times that hasn't been true), which is
pretty rare. I'm good at getting through an agenda in phone
meetings and concentrating on core questions, which I have found
is unusually rare too.

> 6. How would you feel about moving to a system of Preferential Voting?

No preference. I'd be happy with it, but I don't think (in spite
of the recent discussions) that it's an important issue.

> 7. How do you think you could motivate the rest of the board, if and
> when the other directors have other time pressures? 

Time pressures are inevitable - the lack of motivation probably
comes from the desire or the pressure to do more than you can. 
There needs to be an atmosphere where people can feel OK saying
that they don't have time to do something. Phone meetings need to
be no longer than necessary. And action items need to be recycled
or shared if over a coouple of months someone can't find the time
to do something (and that needs to be OK).

> 8. What one problem could you hope to solve this year?

I would like to have the marketing team heavily involved in the
creation of a more visual GNOME brand this year. I've been very
jealous of spreadfirefox.org and I think that we can take a
number of lessons from the Mozilla crowd (even though we're
a different type of project).

> 9. What would you do to increase community participation in the GNOME
> community and GNOME elections?

I'm not sure about this one. I guess participation in elections
has gone up this year from last year. Involvement in the
community has traditionally been driven by project drivers or
maintainers, and membership of the GNOME Foundation is managed by
a separate committee.

I suppose it all depends on what you consider the GNOME
Community. As I consider it, involvement there has never been
board driven. If by that we mean board activities, then it means
being almost promiscuous with groups who can help towards board
goals (and we need to have some of those set for the year, I
think).

> 10. Should Gnome be marketed as a separate component ? Or should it be
> actively promoted as a part of the offerings in a commercial software
> stack ?
> (Separate component in the sense *a DE in its own way and with its own
> ecosystem*)

Separate component. The best thing about GNOME is that it is Free
Software, and as a project I think it's important we keep that in
mind.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
David Neary,
E-Mail: dneary free fr
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