Board of Directors Candidacy - Robert McQueen

[Robert McQueen <ramcq gnome org>]

Name: Robert McQueen

E-Mail: ramcq gnome org

Corporate affiliation: Endless

IRC, Twitter, Telegram, Signal, etc: ramcq

Dear Foundation members,

I would like to announce my intention to stand for re-election for a second term as a director of the GNOME Foundation, not least because I believe the Foundation will benefit from the stability of longer-serving Board members and longer Board terms, and that my participation over the past year has been a net positive. :)

I am currently the Chief of Engineering at Endless, and we are building new channels and markets to bring our GNOME-based desktop OS in front of more users, and provide accesss to technology to empower people. I have been using and contributing to GNOME in a personal and professional capacity for almost 15 years, most recently contributing to Flatpak and helping to found and build the Flathub app store and address technical barriers to attracting app developers to the free desktop.

Professionally, I have served as a founder, company director or executive for that entire period, building products based around GNOME and the free desktop technology stack, and I am pleased have the opportunity to bring this commercial experience, and familiarity with the industry, legal and financial issues, into helping the GNOME Foundation grow as a more effective and impactful organisation. In the process of deciding to stand again I sought informal feedback from fellow board members, and the general opinion was that my advice and experience in the board meetings has been appreciated, although I encourage you to ask them for their thoughts yourselves.

In my previous term on the Board I have served as the line manager for the Executive Director, including setting the priorities for Neil and his team to drive for the strategy that the Board outlined at the start of the year. As with other board members I am trying to craft the Board into a more regular advisory (and, barring optional additional participation, less time-consuming!) role and have the Foundation use its current resources and staff effectively to raise more funds and launch more ambitious programs.

I also drafted and implemented the charter for the Compensation Committee to independently vet the ED's salary, to improve the tax/legal compliance of the Foundation as increased donations may subject us to increased scrutiny. I participated in that compensation committee (although most credit is due to Carlos and Nuritzi) and partnered with Allan and Carlos to refine thinking around defining what is GNOME software and how that interacts with use of trademarks and other resources.

Given the opportunity to serve the Foundation again on the Board of Directors, I will continue striving for GNOME to become a more impactful, widely-used and widely-deployed desktop in order to preserve end-user freedom, and seek to remove roadblocks to the successful commercial adoption of the desktop and our technologies at scale.

Many Thanks,

Rob