Re: Question to GNOME Foundation Board candidates

["Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)" <zeeshanak gnome org>]

Hi Max,

On 26 May 2017 at 18:13, 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 know there will be more people ask questions about all domain with
> GNOME, so I ask 1 question with Asia first.
> I have 3 questions to all candidates ( sorry for my poor English )
>
> 1)  How many hours per week do you expect you will be able to dedicate
> to working on the board on a regular basis?

It's my first time so I don't know how much would suffice but I'm
hopeful I'll be able to give at least 2-3 hours every week, sometimes
more.

> 2)  What's your plan and view with GNOME in Asia? How do you think
> about grow GNOME in Asia?

Although I have never been fortunate enough to attend GNOME Asia[1],
I've been informed by participants that GNOME is pretty big in Asia so
I think we should definitely continue to have a presence in that part
of the world. While I do not have any suggestion as to how we can grow
in Asia, I'll be very glad to listen to any suggestion/ideas on that
and try my best to execute them if they are worth pursuing.

> 3)  How do you make GNOME great again? ( Sorry for my poor English again )
> ---- Any idea about let everyone say " Wow!! it's GNOME " " I know GNOME :) "

I think GNOME is pretty great already but of course there is a long
way to perfection and we should strive for perfection but I believe
most of the work towards that is accomplished by awesome contributors
like yourself and a lot of it is through coding.

What foundation can do IMO is to (try to) ensure that conferences and
hackfests are sponsored and advertised. AFAIK foundation has already
been doing a great job at that so we just need to continue that. We
have GUADEC as our biggest event, then we have GNOME Asia and then
Boston summit too. We have plenty of hackfests too. We also try to
sponsor all our GSoC student to attend GUADEC. So again, I think we
just need to keep doing what we are already doing.

Of course if we realize that we have the budget to do more, we should
consider the possibility of arranging more events. Personally, I would
be more inclined to arrange more hackfests than conferences as you can
get a lot done in a few days than you'd get done in months with
hackfests.

Many folks have dayjobs that doesn't pay them to work on GNOME so
while they have a desire to contribute, they never managed to
contribute enough because it's difficult for them to focus on GNOME
work. Hackfests give these contributors the escape they need from
daily routine/work to contribute.

What I can do personally is to arrange hackfests where we feel there
is a need for focused hacking/work together in one room. As you might
know, I've arranged a hackfest in the past[2] and participated in a
few so I've some experience there that should help me.

> Thanks again for all candidates volunteering to the Foundation Board.

You're most welcome and thanks a lot for your contributions as well.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali

[1] Although I was born and raised in Pakistan, which is logically a
part of Asia, the software industry in there seems more connected with
Europe and US than rest of Asia.

[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Location2014