Re: Questions to answer

[Dominic Lachowicz <domlachowicz gmail com>]

Hi,

Instead of replying to all of the threads, I'm just going to paste my
responses here. Please don't be too offended if I missed a question or
two - there were a lot in there. Please pester me if you think
anything I've said needs further clarification or if I missed a
question important to you. Thanks.

> 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors? What will you do more or
> better than previous years Boards have done?

I'm running for the board largely because I disagree with the
foundation's decision to reduce the number of board members from 11 to
7. The current board was clearly dissatisfied with its inner workings
and in need of reform. I hope to better understand these problems and
propose viable reforms to the board in order to ensure its continued
success, relevance, and longevity.

I have also been skeptical of the board's transparency in the past.
This has become especially important with the contracted board's size.
The board needs to advertize their future plans, successes, and
failures in a better way than meeting minutes.  The foundation-list
and website are greatly under-utilized for these purposes. Basically,
the board needs to do a better job marketing itself.

> 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?

Between the blogs, media outlets, IRC, skimming the ML archives, and
casual conversations with friends @ Novell and Red Hat, I'd like to
think that I'm pretty well-informed.

> 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 agree with Dave Neary. The revenues from the shop and Friends of
Gnome are important and underdeveloped resources.

I'd like to see Gnome better utilize the marketing folks to get out
the message that Free Software isn't free. It all starts with
successfully marketing ourselves. We'll need to become more
transparent here too - the Friends of Gnome page doesn't tell you what
the community's needs are, what your donations might go toward, and
what past donations were used for.

We might also use users' donations to shake off the notion that Gnome
is an "elitist" community, unresponsive to users' needs. We can do
that through holding more bug bounties, for example, and perhaps havie
the board administer these bounties or create a subgroup to do so.

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

Above all else, our software must speak for itself. It must be of
top-notch quality, and with recent Gnome releases, I think that we're
getting close. We must shake off any preconceptions that our community
is a cathedral and not a bazaar. We should encourage projects to post
more status reports on the Planet and Planet Gnome News. It fosters a
real sense of community and the sense of vibrancy.

Gnome needs to recruit new blood. The marketing and Gnome Love
projects should be encouraged and have the full weight of the board
behind them. We should be encouraging university students to
incorporate Gnome into their "independant studies" and "senior
projects". And we need to make sure that we get the most
marketing-wise from our immense goodwill gestures, such as the $100
laptop project. A small investement in these projects will pay off a
hundredfold.

> 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. Are you good at working with others, who sometimes have very
> differing opinions than you do, to reach consensus and agree on actions?
> How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and
> less the next?

> [ Also Curtis Hovey #1 && #2]

I have as much time, patience, and energy as is necessary in order to
get the job done. If this means spending an hour or more per day to
get the job done, so be it.

> 6) Do you consider yourself 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'd like to 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?

Developer burnout and stagnation. I see a lot of familiar faces here...

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

Increased board transparency and accountability.

> 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.

My interests as an individual differ from my interests as a member of
the board. As an aspiring law student, I'm most interested in legal
issues. But in order for the community to flourish, we will need to
market ourselves better.

> 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'll politely refer you to question #4.

[ Phillip Van Hoof #1: How important are desktop standards for you ...
What should GNOME "do" with fd.org?]

I think of FDO as nothing but a good thing. With the HIG, we all
strive for software that "just works" for our users. But unless we
have a well-defined and supported platform, Linux on the desktop
doesn't "just work" for would-be corporate contributors and adopters.
In order to better market Gnome, the board should endorse increased
cooperation with the other Linux desktops.

[ PVH: #2 What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE
developers? ... ]

I don't see why KDE should be singled out over XFCE, etc. We should of
course not only invite but promote discussions between the various
competing groups, be it on IRC, mailing lists, conferences, etc. I'll
kindly refer you to the previous question.

[ PVH: #3 Choice, benevolent dictators, and the like ]

I've never believed that choice is an inherently good thing. There is
such a thing as too much choice; where it's near-impossible to make a
choice because there are too many things to discriminate.

In many cases, one or two "best-of-breed" applications/libraries
emerge, and become defacto standards. As a community, we need to form
consensus on what these standards are, and move them from defacto ones
to FreeDesktop ones wherever appropriate. Once these standards emerge,
we must concentrate our developer manpower on supporting these new
standards and removing redundant, deprecated tools.

I'll also kindly refer you to my previous two answers.

[ PVH: #4 Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project
for the GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve
yourself in the One Laptop Per Child concept? ]

I'll kindly refer you to my answer to quesiton #4.

> [Curtis Hovey #4. Explain how you expect to meet you goals.]

By being a present and proactive member of the board, foundation, and
community at large.

> [CH: 7. Name the best album you purchased in the last year.]

PJ Harvey's "Rid of Me" and Nine Inch Nail's "With Teeth" are my two
favorite commercial CDs of the past year. "The Third Life"'s $5 album
purchased after seeing them perform in Boston's subway was my most
fulfilling purchase, and a pretty good CD to boot.

Best,
Dom