Candidacy statement for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors - Didier Roche

[Didier Roche <didrocks gnome org>]

Name: Didier Roche
Email: didrocks gnome org
Corporate affiliation: Canonical

Hello everyone,

I've served on the Foundation Board of Directors for half a year now, 
filling a vacant position, and would like to continue for 2018-19.

I am a GNOME user since 2004 and starting packaging GNOME in Ubuntu 
starting 2008. I've submitted and contributed some patches over the 
years, while staying close to the french GNOME conspiracy, participating 
at local events and attending GUADEC.

More recently, I've helped on the migration from Unity to GNOME Shell in 
Ubuntu and blogged about it in a series of posts to inform both our 
users and the GNOME folks about our decisions: why we did some tweaking, 
which kind of experience we deliver ensuring that we still provide a 
vanilla GNOME session experience as well…

I feel that I can continue on the Board of Directors adding a positive 
impact, especially in the following sectors:

* Travel policy and sponsorship
I'm acting as a liaison to the Travel Committee for some months now. 
There is a lot to do to make our process more flexible and easier for 
everyone (requesters for sponsorship and Travel Committee members). We 
started working on it, but it needs refinements, and we have some plan 
of actions going this way (see the recent board meeting minutes about it).

* Development CI and infrastructure
This is something which I didn't participate yet on the GNOME side, but 
which is dear to my heart. I have extensive experience in this area for 
other projects, like ubuntu Touch, where I built the CI process to 
deliver hundreds of projects to the distribution archive. I think a 
solid CI, backed by systematic unit and integration testing is a must 
have and a gap we have to fill, building on the step of continous. 
Gitlab provided us a serious first step in the right direction 
throughout that process, helping on peer reviews, code contributions. I 
think ensuring that breaking the general build is something that is 
immediately seen by the whole community as a read flag, and help 
transitions, is the next major step in that direction.

The expansion of the foundation will surely trigger some great 
challenges, but it's exciting to be part of it when those kinds of 
fundamental shift is happening.

Cheers,
Didier Roche