candidacy: Luis Villa

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

Name: Luis Villa
email: louie novell com
corporate affiliation: Novell, Inc.
Why I'd like to serve:

If re-elected, this would be my third year on the board. My first year,
we made some decent progress in a lot of areas. However, in this, my
second year, the quality of my contribution to the board suffered
because of my commitments to my job, and I believe the whole board lost
focus as well. As of today, I've finished shipping the Novell Linux
Desktop, and I come away from it both with more time and a renewed
appreciation for the need for the GNOME community to be strong and
organized. In my mind this probably means less board and not more- my
focus in a third term would be to restructure the board to make it
smaller and more effective. The most important questions the board (and
the foundation) face right now are: why are we failing to accomplish
things? Why must we scramble to find candidates every year? Why is our
software better than ever, yet our foundation weaker? We must understand
and resolve these problems before the next elections- everything else,
in my mind, is secondary. If the solutions have to be radical (shrink
the board, restructure it, blow up the foundation) that's fine- it's
clear we don't currently understand our strengths or weaknesses, and we
must do that going forward.