Re: Question for candidates

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:16 AM, Emily Chen <emilychen522 gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to ask below questions to future board:
>
> 1. For GNOME big event, call for sponsor is really important, what is your
> plan to call for more sponsors for conference like GUADEC and GNOME.Asia ?

I've read some of the responses of the other candidates, and I would
say that I largely agree that having diversified group both local and
corporate is a good starting point.  But for that we need to create
relationships with these companies.  Our advisory board mainly
consists of tech giants like Google who support Free Software.  But it
would be interesting to use our existing set of regional mailing lists
to brainstorm ways to talk with local companies.  For instance, we
have very few companies that are purely European, Latin American or
Indian.  Why is that?  Those are good questions to ask.  Who are using
our stack?  Did you know?  If you use DBus, you're using our stack?
GLib is a dependency.  Start with that conversation to the companies
you talk with at a local conference.

Max alluded to this question a bit but he focused purely on activity
in Asia.  But that answer needs to be answered globally.   The plan
really rests on having a competent Executive Director who can make
cogent arguments to propspective donors.  Let me give you an example,
go through all the projects on http://01.org/, how many of those
projects depend on DBus? Gstreamer?  How many blu-ray players depend
on libxml2?  Have you ever looked at the packaging of various common
consumer devices like your SmartTV?  Read the licenses?  Identify any
of the libraries?  Free Software is ubquitous.  Every large company
has some kind of plan for Free Software/Open Source, some of them have
a community manager.


> 2. What is the top 3 goals for GNOME Foundation in the next year, in your
> opinion ?

I think getting our finances in order is a good start.  Secondly, I
really like to continue working on volunteer capture.  Volunteers are
the lifeblood of an open source project, and we want to be able to get
diversified set of talents.  Not necessarily talking about coders, but
people who have background in marketing, technical writing, video
editing, and so forth.  If you didn't have people like Bastian
Hougaard, you wouldn't have that awesome release video for GNOME 3.12.
 Those people don't come easily.  Finally, we really do need to find a
good Executive Director, one is saavy and can build the financial net
to fund these important initiatives.


> 3. How to raise and increase the fund for GNOME Foundation ?

I think I answered this above.  Increasing our value to our current
adboard members, by showing improvement on the stack, show how we are
improving the Linux (the kernel) eco-system are examples that I think
will resonate with our adboard member.  Obviously, we will need to
find new sources of income, and that could be micro-payment system.
For instance, if a bug is fixed on bugzilla, then a donation button
could be presented so that money can go back into the foundation.
Continue working on getting specific fundraising like we've done for
privacy.  These are all good ways to get revenue.  Finally, build the
best damn desktop out there.  Money will come if we are successful in
our endeavor.

> 4. How many hours you work in GNOME Board related work each week?

I generally work about 5-7 hours a week on GNOME Foundation.  It's
been fluctuating lately because I"ve been putting efforts in
engagement and the qa team.

sri

> Thanks!
>
> Emily Chen
>
>
>
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