Candidacy: Baris Cicek

[Baris Cicek <baris teamforce name tr>]

Name:        Baris Cicek
Email:       bcicek gnome org
Nick:        baris
Affiliation: Nerd Software

Bio

I'm 27 years old, and contributing GNOME since early 2000s. I've been
taking role of GNOME Turkish translation coordinator since 2004, and in
past served community at GNOME Membership and Elections committee for
three years. My last but not the least significant contribution was
organizing GUADEC 2008 which was held in Istanbul. 

Since from the day one I've also been trying to contribute with
occasional bug reports and patches for various GNOME applications as
well.



Why Board

As being a foundation member I believe a big project like GNOME should
need a more organized community and an NGO like the GNOME Foundation is
the most important entity for the users and the developers of the GNOME.
In past years I didn't have intention for being a board member, since I
didn't believe that my experience with the community (or lack there of)
is mature enough to handle such a role, moreover I could have used my
energy as a member as well. (I still believe that to make a difference
in GNOME, being on the board only gives you more responsibility than
being a member nothing more).

Being more integrated with community, and step back of some previous
board members for new faces on board, I wanted to put my money where my
mouth is.

There are the things that I would like to help if I'm elected for board
that I want to put more effort, being on board will give me motivation
to get some improvement over them.



Why Vote For Me

If I'm elected for the board, this is my promise to the community that
I'll do my best to get improvements on the following issues:

+ Make it easier to pay back

Distributions, and ISVs are using our products and they get profit from
this (which is fine). As a nature, what we want as a pay back is to make
our products stronger by the help of their back contributions. 

We eventually improved this co-operation, but we need to work harder
(and faster) to make paying back easier and efficient. We need to do our
work on our side and expect (and convince) other parties to do their
work.

That includes infrastructure improvements (like our recent bugzilla
upgrade), but also better policies and more open mindset. This way we
can improve our translations, documentation, art and code base faster
than ever before. 

So if I'm elected to the board, one of the things that I want to help is
to coordinate parties to discuss and foster integration of GNOME with
beneficiaries.

+ This is not limited to other parties

Getting back contribution, or even contribution is not limited to other
parties, but we need to do things inside our own community as well. 

Not very far ago, some might remember that we had some problems on our
major foundation related mailing list. Mailing lists, or any other media
that we can share our opinions are openly is very important. But for
some reason, current way of working of ML does not help this. Not only
we can't get valuable return on some of the mailing lists, but we also
prevent experienced members to contribute to discussions. 

It's inevitable that we need a channel for generic discussions, and a
media that handles these discussions better than the way we use some of
our mailing lists. So that's why I would like to help on a reinforcement
that will fulfill our needs. 

+ QA for our events

We have great events, and GUADEC is one of our biggest assets. Although
every year we're having a better GUADEC, and every year we have
better/more hackfests, we can't leave it to chance that these events be
better in quality every year and time. 

We've already had a great leap forward on this front, by the help of
hiring Executive Director, and it significantly improved the distributed
structure of organization of these events. 

But we still lack some standardization in organization of events. We
should have some default policies regarding events, and every time a new
team start to organize an event, they should have a road map, that way
they can use their energy much more better. 

This is the third issue that I thought to be useful on board and to be a
candidate. If I'm elected, I'll work on things that will make life of
organization team (ie. hosting guidelines, helpful instructions during
the event, infrastructure that could be useful for events like
conference etc.) of events. 


+ Of course these are not the every thing that I would do if I'd be on
board, I'll try to help for anything that I could be helpful, but if I'm
elected, and nothing on these issues were improved during my term, I
(and probably you too) should consider myself unsuccessful. 


We have lots of power, we just need to reveal it even more. 

Regards,
Baris Cicek