Re: Questions to answer

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

Candidacy Questions

[My apologies for answering these so late; I've been on vacation and
away from email since they were posted.]

> 1) Why are you running for Board of Directors?

Because I care very deeply about the future of GNOME and the future of
Free Software (which I feel are fairly intimately tied together.) I
have devoted the last four years of my life to GNOME and I believe
that the board can and should be one of the primary ways for me to
continue that dedication.

> What will you do more or
> better than previous years Boards have done?

I will strive this year to do vastly less, actually. I think the board
has tried to take on too much, and forgotten the lesson learned during
the 2.0 cycle with the success of the release team- the role of the
board should be to set goals, delegate aggressively, and answer
questions and give guidance- not to do things 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?

Less so than I did when GNOME was my full-time job, obviously. This is
particularly evident in my participation in the lists- I'm much less
active than I used to be. However, I still spend major chunks of every
day paying attention to what is going on in GNOME- reading all the
major lists, reading planet, talking with people in IRC, following and
testing new software releases, etc. If the board truly is to
transition into an advisory and delegatory role, then this is (I
believe) sufficient.

> 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.

First off, I don't think shop and FOG revenue should be discounted.
Each of those should be major sources of revenue bringing in many tens
of thousands of dollars a year, at least. This year's board (mostly
Dave, though we all helped give advice on the process) pushed hard for
this to happen, and though we've had a setback recently, I still think
that this should be something the Foundation should do. [Though I'd
again point out that this is not something the board should be
necessarily doing itself- it should be finding volunteers, giving them
goals and advice, letting them drive the process, and overseeing it.]
FOG should be massively bigger than it is- currently it is a very
amateur program as far as non-profit fundraising goes, and as we
consider life post-Tim, we should lay some groundwork for how to
improve it. [I've been pushing for some time to get CiviCRM installed
so that we can move forward on this front, but we've not yet found a
volunteer to push this project forward. If you're reading this and
think you're the right person, let us know :)]

Secondly, the biggest change we need to make in our revenue generation
is to more aggressively work with partners to target specific
problems. The board needs to be able to go to Sun, IBM, Novell, RH,
etc., and say 'we need money to hire someone to fix problem X.' We
have experimented with this in a very limited way this year, by hiring
Shaun to write better developer docs (which I pushed for aggressively
this year, and which thankfully Federico has now taken the lead on.)
That is still very much a work in progress, but I think that will
inform how we raise and spend such money in the future, and in
general, it is the right way to proceed- identify a very specific
problem, find the money, find the right person, and pursue it. It may
be that in certain cases the specific problem might be 'community
development', and we hire someone on a more permanent basis for that,
but in general we should not be following mozilla's route and hiring
technical staff to set technical direction.

Besides hiring people to resolve specific, limited issues, we need to
work more aggressively to improve our global event presence. We
started that this year (in a very small way) with the event box, and
we need to move forward to work with folks like FOSS.in and other
large global conferences to ensure that GNOME is well represented
there. This is again the kind of thing that the board shouldn't be
doing itself- the board should be finding interested people,
recruiting them, and saying 'we feel this route would be best for
GNOME- do you think you can do it?' (and then obviously giving them
fairly wide leeway to pursure that goal, within reason.) There are a
number of ways we can spend money on this- the event box was one,
flying people to conferences as speakers is another, and obviously
funding small non-GUADEC events where appropriate is another.

> 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?

Perhaps a different and more provocative way to ask this question is
'is there anything the board can do to increase the contribution base
that any motivated community member can't do?' I think the answer to
that is generally 'no'- every community member can get out and grow
the contribution base by recruiting friends, helping newbies, and
looking for and developing new ways for non-programmers and new
programmers to contribute. The board is no different than any other
gnomie in that respect.

There is one exception to this- spending money, which the board can do
and regular gnome members cannot. I think I covered that one already
when I discussed improving our global event presence.

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

I would do what I've always done- work with the bugsquad and the
marketing team. That's not a board problem. If we're relying on 7 (or
11) people to increase community participation, we're already hosed.

> and GNOME elections?

As I've said previously on foundation-list, I believe that the way to
get more people to vote is to make the board meaningful and make the
elections have actual policy disputes. Past that, I don't think the
board should actively seek to increase participation in 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?

I am still young and learning on this score, as some of my fellow
board members will attest to ;) However, I think I've proven over the
past four years in GNOME and three years on the board that I can do
this.

> How flexible is your time; can you dedicate extra time one week and
> less the next?

I am less flexible than I was, but in general I'm fairly flexible,
especially as I'll soon have finished my school applications and am
now settling into my new job. As my girlfriend will say fairly
vehemently, I'm willing to bend over backwards and put aside basically
anything else (including her all too often) for GNOME.

It is worth noting that I will (with luck) be going back to school
next fall. If I am accepted to the programs I want to attend, the last
two months of my term I'll necessarily be much less involved. That is
unfortunate, and it means that this will likely be my last term (if
I'm re-elected) but I believe that I can do a lot of good in terms of
refocusing the board during those first 10 months.

> 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 am generally diplomatic, though I've been known on occasion to blow
my top, usually in incredibly spectacular ways :) That said, I have
repeatedly represented GNOME to representatives from many media
outlets and from all of our major partners, and I think they'd all
report general satisfaction with working with me. I suppose that is
really the bottom line.

> 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 threats are the same as they have been for years- mostly patents
and related issues of interoperability. Many of these things are not
problems that the Foundation can solve, obviously, though I hope to
establish communications with other groups with related problems both
to push our political agenda and to help us assess our own state,
instead of relying on the lawyers of sometimes compromised companies
(like RH and Novell) to tell us what is or isn't possible.

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

The board's tendency to solve problems itself instead of delegating.

> 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.

Personally:
c (I'm trying to go to law school, so, yeah, these are of interest.
You should also add trademark here.)
d (I worked hard this year to make GNOME more transparent, and
succeeded, I believe, though there is still lots of work to be done)
e (I have tried to build some bridges between GNOME and Creative
Commons this year, have contacted SFLC though so far no fruit there,
and have given Dave lots of advice on his attempt to reach out to a
major prospective board member which Dave is optimistic we'll land
soon.)
b (this is odd to put so low, given that I've been so active on the
marketing team, but I have been active because I think it is a
critical need instead of something that I personally am passionate
about, if that makes sense. I really hope someone else (besides the
usual suspects) steps up and leads that team soon.)
a (I've done this (see the liveCD and my participation at shows like
LWE), but again, I hope it is the kind of thing others can take over.)

At the board level, I suppose my interests are similarly ordered,
though I would note that in every single one of these cases I think it
would be best for the board to create teams that lead on these issues
and report regularly to the board, instead of the board doing it
itself. It might be that board members might lead these teams (for
example, I'd probably like to lead the team investigating our legal
issues) but that would be independent of their board membership- I'd
expect the board to appoint the most qualified people to such teams
whether or not they are board members.

> 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)

This question is sort of redundant to what I've said earlier, I guess-
I basically don't feel this is something the community can rely on the
board to solve. Every GNOME community member must take an active part
in solving this problem; the board's role should be to empower others
to solve it and provide guidance and financial resources to those
people when they need it.

> 11) (only to those who are running for reelection) Name one of your
> accomplishments.

I think I've done a lot of things, some of them with a board hat on,
but in retrospect, there are really only a handful that (1) I can talk
about (some are confidential, unfortunately) and (2) I could do only
because I was on the board. All those have to do with finances. I've
pushed hard to get greater transparency in place, and will continue to
do that. Once the board had greater understanding of our finances, I
was able to push to fund Murray's event's box and to hire Shaun to
work on docs. Past that, I've done a ton of things, but frankly, all
of them (except these) I could have done just as effectively off the
board, and I think that is true of lots of things people seem to
expect of the board.


> 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.

Well, one thing I think we need to do is to stop doing things
democratically and to start doing them the same we do everything else-
rough consensus and running code. We don't wait on the board to do
code releases- that would be mostly insane. So why should we wait on
the board to do press releases, or to figure out how to increase our
membership? Deciding to delegate, setting big picture goals, and
getting out of the way of those we delegate to would go a long way
towards clearing up these kinds of issues.

Past that, there are some questions that must be settled by the board,
and must be settled by discussion. I don't think it is inappropriate
for the board to have those discussions, and sometimes to draw them
out over many months. We had several such discussions this year, and
while they were frustrating to me (as I initiated at least two of the
discussions, and had to wait and fight it out) I think in the end the
board did what it was supposed to do- it came to a conclusion, came to
what I feel were good conclusions, and acted. Yes, it didn't act as
decisively as a benevolent dictator can, but our community has not
chosen that route, and so unless someone wants to nominate themselves
benevolent dictator and convince the foundation to dissolve the board,
sometimes discussion and drawn out processes are what we get.


On 11/21/05, baris teamforce name tr <baris teamforce name tr> wrote:
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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)
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 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?
>
> 8) What one problem could you hope to solve this year?
>
> 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.
>
> 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)
>
> 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.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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