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Re: Questions to answer


Hi,

baris teamforce name tr wrote:

1) Why are you running for Board of Directors? What will you do more or
better than previous years Boards have done?
I believe I've been a good board member this year, and I believe I have a lot to offer the coming board. One thing I have to offer that I didn't have last year is experience and continuity. I don't think the board should do more, I believe we should enable, and communicate. 

Among the things I've done, or helped do, as a board member this year are:
I brought new members on the advisory board (OpenedHand, Fluendo and Imendio so far), which has brought in some revenue, and will hopefully give the advisory board a new drive over the coming year.
I worked towards establishing an online GNOME store. Unfortunately, we recently had a setback in getting this up & running, I'd like to complete that task early next year.
I co-operated with members of other non-profits and together we have now got a mailing list, a wiki and have had 2 face to face meetings intended to facilitate co-operation at an administrative level between foundations. One concrete example of this co-operation is that the foundation got a very good German lawyer on 2 days notice through a referral from someone on the mailing list in August.
I also helped organise GUADEC, but that was as an individual, not as a board member. 


2) 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'm on foundation, guadec and board mailing lists, and on bugmaster, but not on lists like ddl. I do browse the archives every now & again. I am on planet.gnome.org, read it regularly, and also read planet.freedesktop.org and planetkde.org, as well as the GIMP developer lists and gnomedesktop. 


3) What sources of funds do you as a candiate try do establish?
An online store, I think, is a requirement. I would like us to start producing accessible books for people who want simple introductions to GNOME, and want to help the foundation at the same time. And I would like them to be sold in the GNOME store. 


And what will you spend it on?
There's definitely room for the foundation to have 2 employees. And I believe that we should aim for more.
We are already funding conferences like the GNOME developer meetings in South America, I would like to see that spread to Asia and Africa, as well as paying for advocates to go to conferences to speak about GNOME.
In principle, we could also be paying for hardware that people need as developers. In practice, no-one has ever asked, and we have no real idea how to find out what people need without that. 


Not counting revenue from the shop and Friends of GNOME.
Why not? These are important and underdevelopped sources of revenue. Why go after other plans, while the low-hanging fruit's just waiting to be picked? 


4) Gnome is mostly a european and US based project, but seems to have
some following in Latin America and India. How will you as a candidate
grow the contribution base, especially in Asia, Africa and South America?
We have more than the appearance of some following... Chile and Brazil are hotbeds of free software and GNOME activity. GNOME Bangalore and GNOME India are two growing and active communities.
I don't think the foundation needs to go looking for people who love GNOME. Those people exist. What we need is to provide a forum where people can communicate, find each other and get funding. Icreated the UserGroups page in the wiki to help with one part of that, and the MarketingMaterial page to bring together material from diverse sources and make sure that that pool of knowledge wasn't lost. 


Or in general what would you do to increase community participation in the
GNOME community and GNOME elections?
Those are two very different things- the GNOME community isn't the group of people who decides the elections. Community participation in the community is a given. Increasing community participation in the elections will come from increasing community participation in the foundation. And that will stem from delegating authority, and making sure that people know that they *are* the GNOME foundation. 


5) Are you good at working with others, who sometimes have very
differing opinions than you do, to reach consensus and agree on actions?


Yes.


How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and
less the next?
I manage. This year, I gave up coding. In general, I tend to ask for help a lot. 


6) Do you consider yourself diplomatic?


Yes. Others may disagree :)


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 think so.


7) 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'm hesitant about answering this, since it goes to the technical direction of the project, and the board doesn't do that. I certainly think that GNOME and KDE are mutually the biggest threats to each other at the moment - we seem to want to try to score points off each other, rather than going after the big fish in a co-ordinated fashion. 


8) What one problem could you hope to solve this year?
How about "what one objective have you set yourself for the year"? That sounds better.
I would like to see the foundation commission a GNOME user manual for new GNOME users, and then have it printed and sold in the GNOME store. 


9) Please rank your interests:
	a. GNOME evangelizing to government, enterprise, small
	   business, and individuals
	b. GNOME marketing and merchandising of branded items
	   nationally and internationally
	c. GNOME legal issues like copyright and patents
	d. GNOME finances and fund raising
	e. Alliance with other organizations.


Doesn't "writing great software" get a place on the priorities?

e, d, part of a, b, c, the rest of a


10) 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 ]
(this question is taken from questions of year 2002. I wanted to include
this because our member count is around 350 today)
The foundation needs to be relevant to the GNOME community to increase its membership. That relevance comes from the fact that community members realise that what they're doing helps the foundation, and that what the foundation is doing helps them.
That may be the case already, which means that increasing the foundation membership might be as simple as improving the message, the visibility of the foundation and its board. 


11) (only to those who are running for reelection) Name one of your
accomplishments. And we were told that the board in the last years had
huge problems being pro-active. Any issue which was slightly contentious
had an opposition in the board. As a consequence there was no resolution.
How do you intend to behave differnetly this year to avoid a repetition of
that problem.
I named 3 above - you could add pushing the referendum to reduce board size, but since it's unclear whether that's an achievement or a mistake, I'll abstain on that one. This year, I would like to board to adopt some kind of procedure for resolution. Like, say, voting. And I would like all board members to try harder to use the mailing list to resolve requests to the board in a timely manner. We need some way to ensure that decisions can get made on the mailing list. 

Cheers,
Dave.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org
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