Re: Questions to answer

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 20:26 -0500, 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 am running because I think I can be useful in figuring out the
technical direction in which GNOME needs to go in order to be accepted
by more deployments and ISVs.

You'll immediately ask, "isn't the Board supposed not to take technical
decisions?".  I think that question would be valid if you had a Board
where no GNOME hackers were involved.  That is not the case:  in
particular, the Board has had very visible hackers during its years.
Thus, I think that the Board, and the Advisory Board in particular, can
be a useful place to collect and sort out the technical needs of
organizations who have an interest in GNOME.

More or better than previous years -> I don't think there has been much
interest in the past toward figuring out the needs of our users, or of
the big deployments of GNOME.  Say we took the top 5 most important
problems in GNOME from the viewpoint of big deployments, and fixed them
this year.  I think that would let us capture users at an increased
rate.

I will keep close contact with the Advisory Board, and organizations
with GNOME deployments who are not yet in the A.B., and gather their
wish-lists for GNOME.

> 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?

Very familiar with the technical side of things, and I participate in
the development lists reasonably often.  I guess I am more active in
Bugzilla.

In particular, I have a good ability to identify long-standing problems
in the GNOME technologies; being here since 1997 does give you
hindsight.

I am not so familiar with the marketing efforts.

> 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.

I have not been involved in looking for funding.

This year I directed the effort to hire Shaun McCance to write a
document called "Overview of the GNOME Platform", which is in progress.
I think it is valuable to spend money into writing documentation that
will help people develop and deploy GNOME.

Our sysadmin guide is quite stagnant, and the integration guide for ISVs
is not finished.  Those are good candidates for being written by a paid
author.  We need to make it as easy as possible for people to deploy
GNOME, and we need to tell them how to integrate their current
applications with it.

I will dedicate Foundation funds to ensuring that our documentation is
useful to new hackers.

> 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?

Deployments in those locations have come mostly from government
initiatives.  Thus I'll repeat myself:  we need to make it as easy as
possible for this deployments to happen.  Are there technical
difficulties which they consistently experience, and which we could fix?
Are there missing pieces in GNOME that would make their job easier?

I will work toward figuring out these issues, and proposing technical
solutions to them.  Then it will be easy to find hackers to implement
them:  once you know *what* to write, it's easy to find someone who will
write it.

Also, we need to ensure that our documentation for developers is
complete, up to date, and in particular, that it is easy for newbies to
understand.  GNOME is a very big platform, and getting started in
developing for it is very hard:  documentation is outdated, scattered
all around, and not directed at newcomers.  Plain API references are not
useful to newcomers.

I will make a big effort to ensure that this documentation gets written.
I will dedicate Foundation funds to this, or look for volunteers who are
suitable for writing these documents.

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

I would try to make it easier for new hackers to jump into the
community.  We need technical overviews of the GNOME platform,
documentation on the internals of each subsystem, and useful tutorials
rather than disconnected API references.

I would encourage those hackers to become Foundation members, since they
would be building the software that our Foundation refers to.  Then,
they would naturally become participants in the elections.

> 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?

I think I am good at working with others, even if they speak of me as a
neurotic micromanager behind my back.  But no one has told me about that
in my face, so probably it is not that bad.

My time varies a lot in flexibility.  Most of the time I can dedicate
about 3 or 4 hours per week to the Board.  During short periods of time
when there are deadlines at Novell, my available time will be reduced to
almost nothing.  I hope that through delegation I won't have pending
Board duties at those times :)

> 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 think I can be diplomatic when it is appropriate.  On April this year
I had to resolve one particularly loud conflict between a few Board
members and another person (whose names I cannot reveal for obvious
reasons), and I think I was a good mediator -> the conflict was resolved
satisfactorily.

As for talking to the media, public, and organizations, I think I can do
it well.  I give frequent talks about GNOME to lay audiences, so I know
how to approach them.  My contact with various organizations has taught
me how they tend to view GNOME for their purposes, so I know how to
approach them, too.

> 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?

The biggest threat is not paying enough attention to our existing or
potential users.  GNOME has a history of long-standing problems that no
one sits down to resolve.  Sometimes they are particular bugs in the
software; sometimes they are big missing pieces of infrastructure.

I would like to the Foundation to take an active stance in identifying
these issues and dedicating resources to them.

Stale web pages -> hire someone already.
No tinderbox -> buy a machine, or get one donated.
No documentation -> hire someone already.
Missing code -> write specification of the problem and find someone to
write it.

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

Getting a clear roadmap for GNOME to support our developers better.
This includes volunteers, newcomers, and ISVs.

> 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.

E as the most important, A and C next.  I don't have experience with the
other two.

> 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)

Was the big reduction in 2001-2002 due to the decision to only let
contributors be members of the Foundation?

How to promote new membership:  by assuring members that they can get
something out of the Foundation.  By giving them responsibility.  Do you
want to be the official contact for GNOME in your region?  Excellent;
we'll give you this nice glossy card and give you something like a
"press pack" which you can use when promoting GNOME.  Are you a GNOME
hacker?  Excellent; we'll ship a set of printed manuals to you.

How to encourage commitment:  by not ignoring people outside the core
development/marketing/fundraising cliques.  We have gotten a lot better
about this due to the GNOME Love project and the Bounties.  We have had
real gems of people appear out of thin air through the Bounties.

> 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.

My accomplishments this past year:

- Start the ISV guide.  Probably not a real accomplishment since it is
not finished yet :)

- Compile the different suggestions that came in for the user group
license agreement.

- Contract with Shaun McCance to write documentation.

- As a personal accomplishment, resolve an important people conflict
during GUADEC planning.

  Federico