> How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let > the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org > movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should > GNOME "do" with fd.org? Standards are useful for allowing big and distant projects collaborate and complement each other. Standards are useful for industries that move slower but any step they do is a solid step. Following the standards and contributing to building and improving them may be in te short term a pain in the ass and a very expensive investment of time. But in the long term I imagine myself explaining to my grandchildren: <piano & cello> "and the best thing I have possibly done to make this a better world is to follow, promote and improve open and public standards" </piano & cello> ;) freedesktop.org is one of our best opportunities, because still nowadays perhaps half od the problems new GNU/Linux users encounter are related to desktop unsolved issues. > What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers? > Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel > expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their > conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their > conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is > superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)? >From a board perspective I think we should have good relations with the KDE people as well as the Xfce and any other project trying to come up with great ideas about free desktops. The place to meet is freedesktop.org, we have a lot to share and learn from each other. Full stop. >From a GUADEC perspective, I'm not going to talk as a board candidate but as a GUADEC coordinator. There is a plan to have three tracks being one of them dedicated to the Toughest Bones Collection - http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/node/163 . A good bunch of tough bones in GNOME just happen to be tough bones for the rest of free desktops, and they are also putting efforts on to solving them. Anybody can present any paper for the GUADEC and, yes, since knowing their works and their thoughts would be interesing we could make more explicit this openness in the call for papers. Good idea! Also I was thinking of introducing more formats for sessions apart from the speaker-speaks-to-audience. For instance, round tables and debates. This would be an even more obvious gateway from the outside to GUADEC. Going to their conferences, if they invite us why not. > In my opinion, GNOME lacks strong leadership that steers development (...) > Yet there's no real leadership telling the GNOME app developers what > direction to go. (...) > Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME > Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board > member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to > discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board? If the GNOME project needs leaders they should not be on the board. Leaders tend to be really busy with exciting things and there is a lot of unexciting but necessary work to do in the board. If the GNOME project needs technical discussion and consensus about all the topics you mention, the board is not the body to lead this discussion. Maybe the board should put in on the table if nobody does and this is important for the project. Maybe the board should push for consensus if the debate is dividing dangerously the community or is beating about the bush wasting energies and not getting any result. But definitely it is not the board who decides technical issues, and even a board formed by the most prominent GNOME leaders should shut up on this, and this very prominent leaders should go to the appropriate lists (out of the GNOME Foundation) to discuss and decide. One more thing. Personally I dont think we need a leader here. When a movement has a leader, it is too easy for a strong oppositor to chop of this head and convert the leader into a (passed away) hero, or into a (sold out) traitor, getting as a result a headless community. Call me paranoid or conspirationist, but I expect serious attempts to chop off heads in the free software community, so we'd better don't have any, or have many. > 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? >From a board perspective we should make sure they obtain the best results from using GNOME and they have a good communication with the parts of the GNOME project indirectly involved. As we should do with any big deployment involving GNOME. OT: I have a personal interest in the development of this project, but my main questions about it fall in fact out of the GNOME desktop. If you are interested: http://desdeamericaconamor.org/blog/node/166 -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org
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