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

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 1:21 AM, Oliver Propst <oliver propst gmail com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 2:16 AM, 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
> What have you learned the past year as a Director ?

I learned that sometimes being open and transparent to the public is
the wrong thing to do.  It's okay to reveal our finances within the
foundation and to those who have graciously donated to us, but
sometimes not okay to reveal to the general public.  It is a surreal
experience  doing damage control and I'm being called into account by
an angry commentator who neither has a financial stake in GNOME nor
even uses GNOME but feels that they deserve answers.

How we reveal our information in the public is important and it is
important that we get our messaging correct when we deliver bad news
to the Internet.  In a talk I gave, I said something along the lines
of "bad news travel fast, ugly news travel even faster through social
media."  A point that sadly has proven true.

> > 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.
> Can you provide any exemple of how these contacts have benefited GNOME
> and/or how you plan to leverage them in the coming year?

In the future, you'll see a GNOME page on 01.org. :-)  This just
another angle of having greater name exposure and also demonstrates
how much GNOME technologies are being relied on for a number of
projects that are being worked on.

sri