Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Sriram Ramkrishna

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

Sorry for my late reply.  GMail is horrible with finding old threads sometimes.

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:08 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
<kittykat3756 gmail com> wrote:
> Hi Sri,
>
> On 14 May 2014 01:16, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
> > Affiliation: Intel Corporation
> >
> > I'm running for a second term as Director of the GNOME Foundation.  I
> > plan on continuing my efforts in outreach both inside of GNOME
> > Foundation and to external.  There is still many things to do in order
> > to make our platform and desktop attractive to everyone and I wish to
> > continue talking about our story.  I can continue to be effective in
> > leveraging what I've learned as Director as well as the extensive set
> > of contacts I have as part of my day job and the open source project I
> > am involved there as well.
>
> Could you give us a few example of what you would like do to make the
> GNOME desktop more attractive?

Let me modify my statement a bit - I want to make GNOME attractive to
everyone both as a place to volunteer for non-technical projects, to
hack on cool technology, and of course a pleasant experience to use.
That being said:

For volunteer capture, we should continue to make sure that we have a
great path to being able to get to someone human, or mailing list to
get simple tasks to work on.  We  should have volunteers that make
sure that the documentation for getting JHbuild up and running is
smooth.  Examples should always work with the latest code from git.
To some extent, the  QA team is looking at some of this.  Basically,
we continue to increase the quality of GNOME by integrating with GNOME
Continuous with good unit tests, and also making sure that JHBuild
works for the most part and is predictable.  Nothing stops frustrates
people more when they can't even get to the part they want to do but
have to spend long hours just trying to get set up and failing at it.

> > During my tenure as Director, I have organized a hackfest, help start
> > a QA team, and worked to get many people involved in GNOME as
> > contributors. Long hours and days were spend engaging the Free and
> > Open Source community.  I find myself continuing to be energized in
> > being part of this organization of which I am proud of.  I ask for
> > your vote and confidence to continue working on the board.
>
> Hackfest organisation, team management/contribution/organisation and
> outreach are some of the core tasks that many of our community members
> do as part of their contributions to GNOME. In what ways did your
> board membership affect your ability to do these and what can be done
> to make it easier for other community members to do these without
> joining the board?

Being part of the board help me get exposed to situations that I would
not normally be exposed to.  Whether it is issues with reimbursements
or confusion with process that kind of thing.  You see the big picture
when you're trying to put on an event and what not.    Because you see
the big picture, you're able to see where something is broken.  So
doing the work on the core tasks makes you a better director.  It
doesn't necessarily mean the other way around.  My activities doing
hackfests and team management is what helps gives context to when you
see something that is not working right.  The counter is that your own
ideas are challenged of maybe what is fair and what isn't.  Others can
give you a different side of a story.  I've always enjoyed our
discussions on the board precisely because of this.  You learn
something.  That's cool. :)

sri