Re: Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Carlos Soriano

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

Hello Carlos,

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:13:10AM +0200, Carlos Soriano Sánchez wrote:
> - 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.

Good initiative.

But why do you need to be on the Foundation board to achieve that goal?

> - 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.

Ditto.

> - 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.

Seems like a good job for the Engagement team.

> - 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.

You can write a blog post or start a thread on the desktop-devel list to
try to convince other maintainers.

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

For the Foundation, I think everything is well explained in the bylaws:
https://www.gnome.org/foundation/governance/attachment/bylaws-2/

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

To have a voice for the Foundation, discussions can happen on the
foundation-list, every member can run for the elections to have a much
stronger voice during one year. Or discuss things at conferences and
other places (blog, IRC, …). Does it need more explanation? Or does it
need to be changed? for example the Foundation members currently only
vote for candidates, why not also vote for some of the decisions? Is it
that kind of things that you would like to improve?

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

Do you have an example of a free software project using such a
guideline? Why do we need a guideline specific to GNOME for that?

About taking decisions, I think the book Producing Open Source Software
[1] can be recommended (and is already recommended in the GNOME
Programming Guidelines [2]).

[1] http://producingoss.com/
[2] https://developer.gnome.org/programming-guidelines/stable/additional-materials.html.en

> Hope you like my ideas.

I like most of your ideas, but it looks like you can achieve most of
them without being on the board.

Cheers,
Sébastien