Re: Question to GNOME Foundation Board candidates

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

Hi Max,

Thanks for your questions. Responses inline:

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 1:41 AM, Max <sakanamax gmail com> wrote:

Hello all,

First, thanks to all candidates for volunteering to the Foundation Board.
Max come from GNOME.Asia team and thanks GNOME and board support Asia.

I have 2 questions to all candidates

The excitement mounts!

1)  How many hours per week do you expect you will be able to dedicate to
working on the board on a regular basis?

My weeks look set to be fairly flexible throughout the year and my aim would be to make best use of my "free time" to dedicate to board matters so that I have some slack during periods where I may have less time to spare. I anticipate spending an average of around 8-15 hours  of my time on board matters per week and I would, of course, communicate with the board about my outside commitments on an ongoing basis.

I am under no illusion that this is not going be a particularly tough year for whoever gets elected onto the board. It is no secret that being without an ED has put a tremendous strain on and we have all been very grateful for the commitment the current board have shown in dealing with the challenges that have arisen. I think that it is important for anyone who is elected this year to be aware of the difficulties ahead and to come prepared with strategy for making best use of time, from the outset. From my end, I firmly believe that leaders are most effective when they stick within the remit of their role and communicate well; tasks (e.g. treasurer) can and should be delegated out to those with the right skills, so that the board can best focus on those vital tasks which are not possible to delegate, in a timely way. The added advantage of adopting that open and cooperative approach to management, is that this can provide a necessary contingency for dealing with unexpected surprises. I want to want to do my bit to ensure that everyone who contributes to this organisation has the support they need in carrying out their roles.

2)  What's your plan and view with GNOME in Asia? How do you think
about grow GNOME in Asia?( ecosystem / contribute / sponsor /
volunteer ...  )

Firstly, my plan would be to do my best to make sure I am able to attend the next GNOME Asia Summit, since I have not yet had the opportunity ;-); so it probably won't come as a surprise that I would have to defer to members of the community for feedback about this matter, in the first instance. Whilst I do not want to insult your intelligence by pretending that I know an awful lot about a continent I have not yet even been to, I will say that I have been very keen to see GNOME grow as a global organisation and I think a very important aspect of that lies in having a concrete shared vision for the future. Ideally, I would like to one day see GNOME in a situation where we have an HQ in each continent and although this certainly would not be possible for us to achieve that in the foreseeable future, I absolutely believe that is what we should be aiming for long term and what we are capable of achieving if we do aim for it.

In the short term, if Asian members (or any other group) felt that nobody on the board had the right knowledge and skills to best represent them, then I would have no issue with advocating we establish a dedicated role (or committee) to address this. More generally, I would have a look at where our members are located, with a view to identifying whether there is more we need to do to engage and support contributors who come from specific regions. 

 

* Maybe you already notice -- there start to have sponsors from Asia
with GUADEC.( There are 2 in 2015 and 1 in 2014 )
* There are some open source events related and co-work with GNOME
Users Group or Members in Asia.
For example
** Hong Kong Open Source Conference  ( http://opensource.hk/event )
---- After GNOME.Asia Summit 2012, there are more GNOME and  open
source related activities in Hong Kong. They start Hong Kong Open
Source Conference at 2013.

** openSUSE.Asia Summit ( https://events.opensuse.org/conference/summitasia14 )

** FUDCon ( https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon?rd=Fudcon )
---- We held GNOME.Asia Summit 2014 together with FUDCon.





I know there will be more people ask questions about all domain with
GNOME, so I ask question with Asia first.


Thanks again for all candidates volunteering to the Foundation Board.
<(_  _)>

Thank you again for engaging with these elections! Please feel free to fire away with any further questions you may have.

Magdalen