Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Carlos Soriano

[Carlos Soriano Sánchez <carlos soriano89 gmail com>]

Name: Carlos Soriano Sanchez
Email: csoriano gnome org
Affiliation: Red Hat

Hello everyone,

I would like to announce my candidacy for the Foundation Board of Directors.

I have been working on Gnome since 3 years ago, starting as a volunteer on October of 2012 for gnome-shell and accomplishing successfully Gsoc on gnome-shell the years 2013 and 2014, joining Red Hat as maintainer of Nautilus after the end of the 2014 Gsoc.

I have been interested in lower the barrier for newcomers to contribute to Gnome. In that matter I have reworked part of the GnomeLove wiki. Also I have been always trying to help newcomers on IRC and make the Gnome community feel a welcomed place for those people.

As myself, I'm a enthusiastic person, I do what I do because I love it. I like teaching and helping people, and learn from them at the same time. I try to be patient, listen and understand what every person has to say.

What can I add to Gnome from the Board?

I want Gnome to be reached by more people. And I will try from different ways, as I tried until now:

- Community: They want to be listen. They want communication. They want to know how we take decisions. We need to improve that communication while being focused and loyal to Gnome goals and vision. Example of specific solutions I have in mind are:

   *Encouraging maintainers to create short blog posts communicating important changes.

   *Reach an agreement and explain the way we take decisions both in the projects and in the foundation.

   *Reach an agreement and explain how to have a voice on Gnome decisions in the projects and foundation as well.

   *Ensure we have a guideline for good behavior about taking decisions and how to communicate them to users.

- New developers (aka newcomers): How many people do you think are searching for nice projects to be involved with, live new experiences and learn at the same time?

We need to reach those people (I was one of them), and the first step is lowing the barrier to contribution and understanding of the platform. Some of the most important projects I want to push here are GnomeLove initiative and gnome-builder as a developer tool for Gnome.

- Platform "reaproachment": I think the current platform around Gnome is a little hidden and difficult to contributors. Initiatives like a Github mirror have been taken, but they are only partly good or not enough. We need to think about how to be more approachable by the people who are already used to other workflows from other open source projects that are using famous tools like Github for code, issues, and contribution or Wikimedia for the wiki, toolkits like Node.js, etc. without giving up on Gnome vision and goals.

- Focus: We need to focus more and more on the important issues that can make Gnome have a bigger impact. Luckily, what I saw on the last years, is that Gnome is focused and we are doing well here. But I think there is room for improvement, taking some decisions to encourage people to do certain things or for example using more projects from outside Gnome with well established maintenance and community around it.

Hope you like my ideas.

Cheers,

Carlos Soriano