Re: Questions for the candidate

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 02:11:33PM +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Here are the list of questions for the candidates running for the board.

  Okay I'm late, but better late than never,

> ***************************************************************************
> 
> 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?

  Buy making sure 1/ the board meet on a regular basis 2/ outcome from
those meetings are available immediately for feedback and review.
The confusion IMHO comes from the lack of communication, the best we
can do to clear this up is to show the how the board is working.

> 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?

  Communication. The board is an entity whose primary task is to
enable communication:
   - with member companies
   - with other software projects
   - between members of the foundation
and we are not good at that. From a glance at the various board candidates
for this year it is clear that communication is a element that most candidate
put highly on the list of things they want to improve. There is some synergy,
and the board is the right place to make this happen.

> 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?

  Communication, very close to main point of 2/. Of course if elected
I would take back the edition of minutes and position as Secretary if 
the other members of the board accepts my candidacy.

> 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?

  Hard to speak in term of "market" when we are not "selling" but "offering"
a software solution. Clearly we need to communicate more worldwide, it's good
to see GNOME working better and better with Asian languages (and input methods).
Raising the voice of GNOME in Asia, India, Arabic speaking countries, would be
a very good way to spend our time. I think the best I can do myself is to
try to set-up guideline and international registry of volunteers ready to
take on the role of promoting GNOME. Try to get more national GNOME
representations even if they are not legally affiliated with the Foundation.

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

  The same "boring" but precise, concise minutes of meetings that I did
before, that at least is a claim I can make and be pretty sure to fullfill.

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

  I would first have to really understand what is the proposal. I decline to
comment until I have read it and made the basic math analysis on it.

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

  Good question. First regular meeting. If you know you meet every 2 weeks
at a precise time for a precise duration, then you have to set it up
in your agenda or decline to follow the board operation.

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

  Get the board back on a predictable process track !

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

  Better communication of the board, predictability and visibility should
help the community feel concerned about the foundation side of the GNOME
project.

> 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*)

  GNOME is a project. The project lives from the volunteers and from the
offering whether they are commercial or not. From an historical perspective
the fact that we made GNOME and the foot a Trademark proves that the intent
was to raise a brand and hence do marketing for it. It will be in collaboration
with the other actors in that process but it must be done. To be extremely
concrete Last year in Paris Linux Solution expo I made talks about GNOME
on the IBM, Novell and Red Hat booth. Independantly of my affiliation I
truely thing the best way for GNOME promotion is to piggy-back on existing
events run by our partners . It's way more effective and we can't afford the
setup of many events by ourselves.
  We can promote our project without being in isolation. It's far more 
effective, also benefits our partner, but it doesn't mean we have to
"dissolve" our branding in theirs, that's perfectly doable.

Daniel

-- 
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veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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