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? Why am I running? Because I need the exercise. (-: More seriously, I am running because I am passionately involved in GNOME and Free Software, and want to help it succeed. I aim to help create a great Desktop, and I can contribute positively to the board. > 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. I follow mailing lists, planets, and irc. I also have good relationships with a lot of people in the various GNOME sub-communities, and follow what they are working on. > 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 think that looking for general revenue for GNOME is the wrong approach. While we have had a lot of luck raising general purpose funds with the Friends of GNOME program, we have had even more luck raising money for specific purposes. One of the initiatives I would drive the on the board this year is a fund raising drive around our ISV platform. There is a heck of a lot of external interest in seeing this move forward, and I believe we can do a good job. > 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) These are two different questions, so I will answer them separately. I actually have a feeling that GNOME has a healthy presence in those regions. We should definitely encourage the work done locally there, and the board has previously sponsored flying people to Latin America. > Or in general what would you do to increase community participation in the > GNOME community and GNOME elections? Make sure that people know that the GNOME foundation is relevant to them. One of the strengths (I feel) of the GNOME community is that we are diffuse, and thus you do not have to be part of the 'core' group to do something interesting. There are a lot of other projects that have a lot of life and momentum on their own. If we can prove to them that we're relevant to their efforts, they'll join. Also, we should hold an annual membership drive. > 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 have the time to work on the board, and have done so in the past. It would be part of my job at work to make sure that the board functions well. > 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 try hard to be diplomatic, and I hope others think of me that way. > 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? Lack of execution and focus. We have put ourselves in a great position to become the premiere desktop -- we now need to follow through! I am really quite optimistic about our chances, though. The other major threat to a Free Software Desktop is Software patents. That is a big issue that all free software projects need to work on together. > 8) What one problem could you hope to solve this year? The very first problem that the board is going to have is that of staffing. Since Tim has moved on, we are going to need to hire someone immediately to take care of the administrative details. Having been involved with a large number of hires at Red Hat, I am qualified to do this. Additionally, we need to push our ISV platform. This is one of the biggest issues facing us, and as big an effort as getting GNOME 2.0 out was. We should start another group to work on this (similar to the release team) and for this to be a big project-wide initiative. > 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. These are all important things, and the GNOME will need to do all of them. Rather than ranking them (which is genuinely hard to do -- given that they have different priorities and urgencies), I will address them individually. (a) Evangelizing is something best done locally. There's a lot that can be done to encourage things (such as Murray's conference box), but the board has to delegate here. (b) The merchandising should be a one time thing -- important, but not something that takes a lot of ongoing board time. Dave Neary has done a great job here. (c) This is one of the ongoing tasks of the board. I have a lot of experience in what is involved with these issues (though some of the problems, like the GNOME Foot Trademark, have no good answers). (d) This is an area that is near and dear to me, and is the reason I originally got involved in the board. My thinking here has evolved a bit -- rather than make sure we spend money wisely -- I think we should be finding things to wisely spend money on, and then raise the appropriate funds for it. (e) I feel like I have a lot to bring to the board in this area. I have a lot of contact with other projects, as does my employer (Red Hat). It is an area the board can do more of in the future. > 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) If we are relevant, we will get the members. Also, see the answer to 4(b). > 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 did a lot of small tasks for the board, but the big ones I have undertaken are: - Helped with hiring Shaun to do the documentation - Worked on helping the Boston summit turn out well - Worked on preparing the board to handle the post-Tim time - I helped get the Summer of Code team started - Not a board task, but I started Project Ridley to finish GTK+ earlier this year. Thanks for your consideration, -Jonathan
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