Re: A question to candidates

["Lucas Rocha" <lucasr gnome org>]

Hi Dave,

> I did send these to the membership committee, but voting's nearly open,
> and I think they're important, so I guess I'll just ask...

Ok.

> The foundation's role is essentially to facilitate the enthusiasm of the
> GNOME project, as Andrew Cowie blogged earlier [1]. This consists of two
> major elements - managing/improving the finances that the foundation
> has, and identifying areas where those finances can help remove
> roadblocks or encourage productive contribution.
>
> After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances
> are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2].
>
> What do you see as the best way to spend this money? In terms of hiring,
> do you prefer hiring a sysadmin, or an executive director? What other
> priorities do you have for expenditure this year, outside of our usual
> cost centers (GUADEC + salaries + travel sponsorship)?

I think the best way to spend this money in 2008/2009 is:
- To support (presential) activities that will facilitate contributors
to move the desktop and platform forward.
- To support activities that will streghten the local user groups
around the world.

About the hiring, it really depends. At first sight, I would prefer to
hire an executive director because it would have more impact on GNOME
Foundation actions (marketing, business partnerships, conferences,
etc). However, if we can't find a really good person for the position,
I would prefer to hire a sysadmin. Of course, one thing doesn't
necessarely exclude the other.

> A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points
> of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points?

Weak points:
- Sometimes certain things get stalled because we (Board) don't get
enough feedback (+1's or -1's) among us. We should have more effective
ways of making those daily micro-decisions and getting things done
more quickly.
- We could delegate more often. When delegation is possible, the Board
should   have some sort of list of potential volunteers for certain
types of actions. For example: business partnerships (Dave, Quim,
Jonathan, ...), Artwork (Andreas, Jakub, Vinicius, ...), user group
contacts, etc. Actually, I think I'll start doing this straight away.
:-)
- We could be more pro-active on proposing actions to the community.
You solve this by proposing actions. :-P I'm planning to propose some
small developers summits to some maintainers.

Cheers!

--lucasr