Re: A question to candidates

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Nov 22, 2007 12:11 PM, Dave Neary <dneary free fr> wrote:
>
> 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 a lot of the other candidates have had good answers here with
regards to non-hiring spending; in particular I've long thought travel
and micro-meetings (especially geographically distributed ones like
the newly proposed GNOME Asia Summit, and the various meetings in
Latin America), and I proposed such spending at my very first board
meeting (though it didn't happen, for understandable reasons.)

I'd love to have a pro-active system administrator on staff, but I
think a good ED would be a better first hire- they should be able to
increase revenue, allowing us to hire a sysadmin later, which wouldn't
be true in reverse. I've not been privy to the current ongoing job
search, so I'm not sure why we haven't hired a post-Tim exec yet (bad
job description? bad search policy? just lack of good candidates?
etc.?) but obviously understanding that would be one of the first
priorities of a new board, I'd think.

> 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?

It is hard for me to speak in specifics, given that I've been fairly
out of the loop with the current board. As I've discussed on this list
before, I do think that communication and delegation could be
improved, but those are ongoing issues that must constantly be worked
on, whether or not they are problems or strengths.

Luis