Re: Questions to answer

["Vincent Untz" <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

Answering these questions is a lot harder than what I had expected :-)
Please ask for clarifications if I'm not clear (which is quite possible),
or tell me I'm wrong if it's the case.

On Tue, November 22, 2005 02:26, baris teamforce name tr wrote:
> 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors?

I'm running because I care about GNOME and about the Foundation and I
believe I can be useful on the board. As a Foundation member, I'd like
to know more about the Foundation and what's happening in there. As a
member of a local group, I'd like to see the Foundation as a central
point of contact for GNOME that would help lots of local groups. As a
user, I'd like to see that GNOME users are not forgotten. As a
contributor, I would like to see more effort going into making GNOME
even more known than it is. Those are the points that are important to
me. A quick summary is:

  + making the Foundation more open
  + developing local groups
  + showing how important our users are
  + making our project more known

> What will you do more or better than previous years Boards have done?

I'm not sure I can say I'll do something more/better than what was done
before since I don't know exactly how hard the job is. But I can give
two concrete examples of what I think we can easily do:

  + having more discussion on foundation-list. This will make the
    Foundation more open, but also will make it possible for members to
    get more involved in the Foundation.

  + having someone who's responsible for making sure everything is fine
    for the events where there'll be a GNOME booth. This person could
    help find some materials (hardware, posters, stickers, etc.) for a
    booth, but also would provide some useful tips. This will help new
    local groups developing even more quickly. Maybe in the end a simple
    checklist would be useful, but when you do your first booth, you
    sometimes want more :-) I'd like to note that the GNOME Event Box
    that Murray launched is really a wonderful step in this direction.

> 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 many mailing lists (although I'm not always participating), I'm
reading the archives of some others lists, I'm hanging on IRC, etc.

I'm also following the development of the GNOME releases, so I know
what's happening from a technical point of view, but also as a "what's
new in this release" point of view.

So I think it's safe to say I'm fairly familiar with the day-to-day
happenings.

> 3) What sources of funds do you as a candiate try do establish? And what
> will you spend it on? Not counting revenue from the shop and Friends of
> GNOME. Think more like the recent move by Mozilla or a subscription based
> bounty system.
> (olafura from gnomedesktop.org)

I'm not that interested in raising funds (see question 9), but one thing
I think we can do is tell companies and people: "here's a list of
projects we want to do, you can see the money needed for each project.
If you're interested in helping for one of these projects, consider
joining the Friends of GNOME". That is, clearly state where the money
will go.

Where should this money be spent? Where the best ideas are :-) Some
ideas: global and local marketing materials (where global is for
everyone and local is for some local groups), hardware for developers
who might need it, travels to present GNOME at events, etc. I'm sure
there are better ideas out there. And if you have one, please share it
on this list. There's no need to be on the board to have ideas!

> 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?
> (olafura from gnomedesktop.org)

As a candidate, I'm afraid I won't directly grow the contribution base.

However, I'd like to help local groups doing so: it's important to
explain and show that GNOME welcomes all the contributions and that
starting to contribute is easy. For example, on the GNOME booth we had
at the RMLL (in France, four months ago), we made some mini-conferences:
"GNOME Love, how to contribute to GNOME?", "Coding a new feature, let's
do it", etc. Some users were interested in this because from outside, it
looks really difficult to start contributing. I'm glad to see that at
least two of the people who assisted at those mini-conf are making
some patches, have helped for translation and are probably
contributing in some other ways too. So, to attract new contributors,
we need to show them that it's really easy to contribute and to guide
them (by making some list of tasks, eg).

Another important point is to make people more aware of GNOME than they
are right now. This means making more noise about our project :-) This
is something we're trying to do in GNOME-FR, and I'd like to push all
the local groups who have some time to do so.

> Or in general what would you do to increase community participation in the
> GNOME community and GNOME elections?

I think the community does participate in the GNOME community :-) As for
the elections, this is something I've tried to understand in the past
year. I think making the Foundation more open will definitely help.

> 5) 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.

First, I think most of the discussion should happen on the lists, and
the meetings should be used to take decisions or to debate issues where
not everyone agrees.

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

While I can be obstinate, I always try to listen to other opinions.
I think I can quickly agree on actions, even if I disagree on the
problem if I don't see it as critical. However, if trying to reach
consensus for a specific issue takes months, then I believe we should
not always do so and simply vote: sometimes, it's really important to
move quickly.

> How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and
> less the next?

Sure I can. This will of course have an impact on my other
contributions, but this is already how I'm working.

> 6) Do you consider yourself diplomatic?

Yes. The real question is: do other people consider me 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?

I hope so. If I didn't think I would, then I'd probably not run since
this is an important role of the board.

> 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 don't see real threats, but some difficulties: formats that are not
open, hardware with closed specification, etc.

The Foundation could try to change this, but I don't think it's its main
role.

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

Give more materials to local groups.

> 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.

All of the items are important for the Foundation :-)
Here's how I rank them, as in "here's what I'm most interested in":
 b, a, e, d, c

> 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)

I think there's one problem in this question: being a GNOME contributor
is not the same as being a GNOME Foundation member.

I believe that the GNOME project has committed and dedicated
contributors. Sometimes, a contributor might stop contributing because
of a new job, or because he's been contributing for too long and he
wants to see some new things. I'm pretty sure we could attract some new
contributors (see my answer to the fourth question). But I do not see a
real problem here.

As for the Foundation membership, it's more difficult to answer this
question. The problem here is that it's not clear how someone can
contribute, as a Foundation member: there's no need to be a Foundation
member to help with GUADEC, marketing, etc. I think the number of
Foundation members is a way to know how many contributors think the
Foundation is important for GNOME. If we have more discussion on
foundation-list, I believe we can make members getting more involved.
Should we have more foundation members? Well, if this means the new
members are new contributors, of course :-) The question is, why a
contributor would want to join the Foundation. And my answer is: because
everyone can see that the Foundation is doing this, this and this and
that's important. Let's make the Foundation more open.

> 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'm not running for reelection.

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.