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

[Carlos Soriano Sanchez <csoriano redhat com>]

----- Original Message -----
| Hello Carlos,

Hello Sebastien

| 
| 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.

Thanks :)

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

Not necessarily need, I'm already doing it. But being in the board you have a stronger voice an you can make 
the board take some decisions to
improve this as well.
But of course, I could just send an email to the board saying "hey, can you take into account this?". But I 
think
that could apply for everything.

| 
| > - 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.

Same answer as before.

| 
| > - 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.

Not all of what I have in mind, but yeah, most part could be delegated to teams, and hope we can help from 
the board as well
taking some decisions on those points.

| 
| > - 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.

Yep, in my previous blog post on planet Gnome I tried to do that, but hope we can have an agreement
on the board for a "maintainer guideline recommendations" for a wider approach, that could help us to improve 
this issue.

It will be more to answer maintainers questions like "How should I communicate this? If I do this change, 
should I do something
to not make the community or users unhappy on the next release? It's okay answer an user like this?", 
questions that I had
myself and I failed to do them the first time, and I already received the backslash... so I hope that
developers take them into account to have a better experience with the community and avoid the bad after-feel.

| 
| >    *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/

I was thinking on something more approachable that could answer some specific questions like:
- How do you decide to spend the money?
- Why you don't spend money on developers?

How the board take those kind of decisions and why.

| 
| >    *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?

I discussed this in #engamement, and probably I didn't explain well here.

My intention is reach an agreement on how decisions are taken for our projects and what to expect
from them. A few examples: explain if the designers has a strong voice and maintainers are expected to take 
them into account, or
how we decide when there is a decision that clash between distros or with other DE's, explain to users how 
they can be part of those decisions, etc.

For example I had a case that an user told me: can you explain the democratic process you follow to remove 
the split view on Nautilus?
I think we are not explaining well enough... and some developer/maintainer can not know how to answer 
correctly without making everything worse (happened to me).
Having an agreement written and pointing to it can alleviate that weight on the maintainer shoulders.

This can be controversial and difficult, that's why I would like to talk about it on the board, and have a 
conservative consensus written down.

I really think the board should take care and take decisions of things that can hurt the Gnome relationship 
with community and also taking care of our developers and maintainers,
trying to remove from their shoulders all the things that can be controversial, wasting their time and their 
motivation, because dealing with this can be a full time
demotivating job :)

Sorry if it was not clear before.

| 
| >    *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

No, I don't have an example of a project doing this.

| guideline? Why do we need a guideline specific to GNOME for that?

I think GNOME received enough backslash due to taking decisions that were not explained or
not communicating good enough with the community.

| 
| 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

Thanks for the recommendation! Hope we can agree on just a few points of specific recommendations for our 
projects.

| 
| > 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.

Agree. What can't you do outside of the board of an open source project anyway? :)
I can send an email to the board to say my opinion on how we should deal with money, contract an ED, etc., 
but of course since
you are not part of the board, you don't have that power or strong voice to take those decisions, and the 
same for the points I said
previously.

| 
| Cheers,
| Sébastien
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| 

Thanks for taking the time to write your questions Sebastien, hope I made clear why I think
those points are important and why we need someone taking care of it on the board.

Cheers,
Carlos Soriano