Re: Questions to answer

[Germán Poó Caamaño <gpoo ubiobio cl>]

El lun, 21-11-2005 a las 20:26 -0500, baris teamforce name tr escribió: 
> Hi,
> 
> With the recent announcement of candidates, questions for candidates to
> discuss during these week is here. Questions are gathered from previous
> years' questions, from foundation-list, and this and previous years'
> discussions on gnomedesktop.org.
> 
> Candidates are encouraged to answer questions to give ideas to Foundation
> Members why they should vote for them. And members can direct their
> questions to candidates different than these questions if they want.
> 
> Good luck to all candidates and let the discussion begin:
> 
> 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors? What will you do more or
> better than previous years Boards have done?

Because I'd like to contribute with another perspective.  I can't
say I will do better than previous boards, but obviously I'll do
my best effort to do a good job.

> 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 am subscribed to 41 lists from gnome.org, between major and minor
lists, that I usually read (some of them doesn't have any traffic, so
don't get surprised about the amount of lists).  Also I follow in
a regular base what is happening in GNOME Hispano and GNOME Chile.

I follow different sources such as footnotes, plantet's, and
some media that have information about what is happening with
GNOME, desktop and Free Software in general.

So, I feel that I'm familiar with the day-to-day happenings of
GNOME, even I hadn't been good writing a lot of emails in these 
lists.

> 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)

Probably I'm not good on that task.  I've been in the other side:
how to achieve goals with a very reduced budget.  I can help there.
Furthermore, I don't think the whole board must have skills for
everything, because people can be a complement each other.

> 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?

I'm from South America :-)  We have a big amount of users there, but
no so many contributors to the core.  There is a gap between local
programmers (probably they don't feel self confident about their
own skills) and the core hackers. I'll promote activities that 
promotes interchange of experiences and knowledge between them.

> 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'm flexible on this.  A longer answer could be found in 
the answer of this question in my previous message [1].

> 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'm diplomatic when is needed.  But, I must recognize that sometimes
I've been opinionated when there was not good argument against a real
fact. It's not common anyway.  I try to listen all opinions and 
viewpoints given and I consider myself open minded.

> 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 did answer this question in my previous message [1]

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

I won't speak as a problem, but as a opportunity to improve. I would
like to improve the transparency about the board works and improving 
the communication between different actors.

> 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.

I did answer this question in my previous message [1].  In short it
was a, d, e, b, 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)

Nowadays there is a feeling the work is get done by the board
and the fountation's members are just observers. One way to
start delegating a job is asking for easy and not demanding (not
so much time) taks, as the same fashion of gnome-love.  Let's 
make the membership useful, not only for vote. If it's useful,
people will want to join us (or makes formal their contribution).

> 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've never been part of the board.

[1]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2005-November/msg00105.html

-- 
Germán Poó Caamaño
http://www.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/
Concepción - Chile