stefano

Gnome Foundation elections are getting near, and the candidacies have already been submitted to the mailing list.

Here’s an overview of the candidates, along with the copy paste of their candidacy mail. I also tried to find the hackergotchi for everyone, and did minor edits to the formatting – for sanity.

Probably you don’t have the right to vote (vote is open to members only), but chances are you could find interesting the nominees anyway.

Or you could tell me more about the candidates, what you think about them and which would you vote for.

Behdad Esfahbod

Nick: behdad
Home: http://behdad.org/
Blog: http://mces.behdad.org/
More: http://live.gnome.org/BehdadEsfahbod
Affiliation: Red Hat

Summary:

I’ve been serving on board for 2.5 years now and have been holding the title of President of the Foundation and Chairman of the board for the current term. Fortunately the experience is not as painful as it used to be, thanks to Stormy. I think we are in a very good shape on the organization side, but there’s a storm coming (no pun), with all the GNOME 3 planning, messaging, marketing, etc. So I like to stay on board to help with it all.

Details:

I’ve been heavily involved in GNOME since about 2005. These days my hacking can be summarized as:

• Keeping an eye on everything Unicode
• Developing everything font and text related
• Trying to keep GNOME lean

In more programmer-friendly terms, that means I (co-)maintain and develop on: fribidi, harfbuzz, fontconfig, cairo, pango, vte, and hack here and there further up the stack every once in a while.

On the non-hacking side, previously I served on the Accounts Team. More recently, I’ve chaired GUADEC program committee for the past couple of years. While on board this year, I’ve done (and if elected, plan to continue doing):

• Hackfest / conference organization
• Worked on the a11y outreach program
• Making sure Stormy find the information / people she needs to get
  work done
• Make sure decisions are made / things move forward

Cheers,
behdad

Brian Cameron

Affilitation: Sun Microsystems
Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/yippi/

I would love to see more people running for the elections. Do it!

Summary (75 words)

I am running for re-election for the board because I love GNOME, the community, and free software. I also believe that I can help make the GNOME foundation and community successful. I have done work with GNOME accessibility and feel strongly that the community needs to further outreach to meet the free desktop needs for all people, regardless of income, location, gender, or level of ability.

I am affiliated with Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Who?

I have been a part of the GNOME community since January, 2001 and have experience as a UNIX programmer and technical documentation writer for over 17 years. I have been the maintainer of GDM and have had the honor of serving my first term on the board this past year. I have regularly attended GUADEC conferences since 2002. My nickname on IRC is yippi. I
live in Chicago in the United States.

Why?

I am highly motivated and have time to invest to make the Board successful. I have passion for working with the GNOME community, and would like to further expand the ways I am involved. I have a good working relationship with many people in the community.

Aside from the day-to-day work of being on the board, I have had a number of accomplishments in my past term:

• A significant amount of work to organize the first GNOME.Asia summit.
• I have been working closely with Stormy, the Foundation CEO, and have been acting as her manager.
• Have been responsible for getting the Foundation covered under D&O and General Liability insurance policies.
• Many tasks relating to the GNOME Marketing improvements over the past term. I frequently highlight the humanitarian and accessibility aspects in marketing discussions since I think it is important to not lose focus on these aspects.
• Worked with the accessibility community to establish the weekly IRC meetings to improve communication between the a11y community and the larger GNOME community.

That said, I think that it takes more than one term for a person to really become a productive member of the board. It takes a fair bit of time just to get one’s head around what needs to be done. Now that I have more experience, I would like to expand my involvement and serve as an officer in my next term, perhaps as secretary or treasurer. I believe that my experience serving the board in the past term will be helpful in the next term.

Also, GNOME rocks.

Thanks,

Brian Cameron

Diego Escalante Urrelo

Nick: diegoe (how creative!)
Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/diegoe/
- http://diegoe.blogspot.com/ (if you are learning Spanish)
Affiliation: SMB Training till end of May (not GNOME related), then,
none.
†Summary:

I’m Diego, 21, from Lima – Perú. Some of you know me as a pesky bug triager, others as an even peskier (is that even a word?) patch submitter and others as a pesky almost spam mail source.
I’ve been doing GNOME related stuff since 2006 although I really got more involved only in 2007, since then I’ve done code work for Epiphany and other modules, mostly fixes or small features (I did woohoo bar for Ephy! -firefox stole my idea, I swear). I’m deeply in love with GNOME as a project and community .
Since December 2008 I’ve been serving in the Board replacing Jeff.

Why Board?

I feel that my last months in the Board have let me understand how it works, I’m sure I have done a good job and that I can do it even better for the following period.

What did I do for this half period in the Board?

Of course, the following wasn’t made by me alone (those other six guys at the Board rock hard) but I feel this is were I was more involved:

• Helped gather the annual user group reports and hand pick from the flood of pictures all around the web to go with such reports
• Worked closely with Stormy to bootstrap the travel committee
• Worked with Bruno to get the membership committee refreshed
• Preparing a quickstart guide for new Board members (that you all new board members will receive)
• Received feedback from various members about their areas of interest in GNOME and problems they had (luckily most of those got solved quickly)

Why running again?

Because I feel that I can do a better job now that I understand how Board works and because I have big enthusiasm for the stuff that we will
see in the following months, I want to keep helping closely.
Some stuff I would like to try to focus on now would be marketing in the 3.0 context, fundraising, keep working with the committees and a second
edition of the GNOME LA Tour .

Thanks for reading,

Diego

Germán Póo-Caamaño

Nick: gpoo
Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/~gpoo/
http://www.calcifer.org/~gpoo/ (for Spanish speakers)
Affiliation: None

Summary

I am a contributor since 2000 and I am running for the Foundation Board because I want to help Gnome and its community
from a different perspective and bringing an independent voice.
I want to see the communication from Foundation Board’s to its community improved. I will work to empower contributors, work
groups and local communities.

My involvement in Gnome

• I have been involved in Gnome since the beginning of the current century, and I have been working with Unix since 1991 and Linux since 1995.
• I have attended GUADEC from 2002 to 2008, but also to other Gnome events, such as GUADEC-ES (Hispanic Guadec), Forum do Gnome (Brazil), Gnome Day (Chile), Involucrate (Peru).
• When I was young I was coordinator of Spanish translation team and I wrote gnome-nettool. Since then, I helped here and there.
• I usually give a hand whenever I am asked for.

Promotion of Gnome and Free Software

• I have spent a lot of my spare time promoting Gnome and FLOSS in conferences, I have given more than 60 talks on Gnome and related topics.
• I have been involved in local communities since its beginnings, such as Gnome Hispano and Gnome Chile. I founded and organized the biggest Linux[1] conference in Chile, but also I organized other events related with Free Software and Gnome.
• I have helped and encouraged several developers to get involved in Gnome.

Motivations:

I want to be on the Foundation’s board because I want to improve the communication from the board to its community. I think It
has improved trough the years, but I am confident it could be better.

I want to help to getting things done as quick as possible whenever its related to conferences, hackfest and events from local communities, in order to improve the use of foundation’s budget and communication.

[1] Yes, the kernel.

Regards,

Hubert Figuiere

Nick: hub
Blog: http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/
Affiliation: None

Summary:

I have been involved with Free Software for a decade or so, mostly working on the application side: AbiWord, gnote, etc. I have attended several Free Software conferences as resources permitted and given talk on several occasion. I have a true faith in GNOME and what it brings to users of Free Software, and I truly believe that’s where the future is.

Why?

With the past achievements of the Foundation, I believe that the board is a great asset to GNOME as a project, and as I have never been member of the board (nor even a candidate), that I could bring fresh hands and eyes. If elected to the board I would do my best to serve GNOME’s (and the Foundation’s) best interest and help pushing it GNOME on the non-coding aspects.

Misc.

I’m based in Canada.

Hub

Jorge O. Castro

Blog: http://castrojo.wordpress.com
Affiliation: Canonical LTD
Hi!

I would like to announce my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation Board.

My motivation

I would like to extend my contributions to GNOME. I work with community people on a daily basis and I know my organizational skills will benefit the project. To use an ice hockey term I prefer to just “put my head down and skate” to get things done. I know this will be hard work but I am committed to helping GNOME be successful.

Why you would vote for me

• I am dependable and I work hard.
• I respond quickly to queries, even if the answer is “I’ll have to get back to you.”
• I like to work as a member of a team; this is where I feel I am most effective. I am currently on the Ubuntu Community Team for Canonical Ltd. and I thrive on the dynamics of community work.
• I love GNOME.

Why you might not want to vote for me

• There are areas of GNOME that I am unfamiliar with, for example, a11y, i18n, and mobile. I look forward to growing in these areas.
• I love tacos.
• I am very familiar with the Desktop and Developer platform, however I do not have a development background.

In conclusion, I am motivated to do this and I believe I can make a difference.

Regards,

Jorge O. Castro

Lucas Rocha

Nick: lucasr
Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/lucasr
More: http://live.gnome.org/LucasRocha
Affiliation: litl

Summary

I’ve been part of the Foundation Board for almost 2 years now. My impression is that the Foundation is gradually improving every year as an organization. GNOME is in a very important moment now with a lot of important changes to come. I think I can be very helpful on making sure Board supports the community in the best way possible towards the GNOME 3 goals.

Details

I’ve been an active GNOME contributor since 2005. Since then I got involved in a bunch of different (technical and non-technical) activities inside the project by maintaining (gnome-session, gjs, eog and zenity) and contributing to some of our software modules, doing release management, co-coordinating projects (Google Summer of Code in GNOME, Planet GNOME, GNOME Journal, GNOME Roadmap, GNOME Brasil, …), side-contributing to some teams (Web, Marketing, …), organizing events, and other misc stuff. In the specific GNOME Foundation scope, I’ve been a member of the Membership Committee for more than 1 year, from which a resigned some time after I became part of the Board since July 2007. Currently, I work for litl, a startup developing some cool stuff based on GNOME and other FLOSS technologies. I’m from Brazil!

While on Foundation Board, I worked on:

– A11y outreach program
- New Friends of GNOME
- Annual report
- General communication with the community
- Daily board decisions / communication

Cheers!

–lucasr

Og Maciel

Nick: OgMaciel
Affiliation: rPath Inc
Blog: http://ogmaciel.com (en_US) / http://blog.ogmaciel.com (pt_BR)

Summary

The GNOME Project has allowed me to take my first steps into the world of collaborative projects and long nights of translation sprints. Due to my open minded attitude, I have been able to get involved in many different projects and work with a great number of interesting people.

My passion is in the community aspect of these projects and how to better integrate new comers and volunteers with the rest of the community. I am also extremely interested in how we, the open source community as a whole, can leverage this immense pool of ideas and projects, and use it to the benefit of all.

If elected to the board, I will bring in my experience of building communities and guiding/enabling users to become more active in the GNOME Project. After all, the GNOME Project IS about people! I will also push to make accessibility a high priority for the project.

Biography

For the last 48 months I have been deeply involved with the planning and organization of several open source collaborative projects, mostly related to the localization and translation for the Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR) language. During this process I eventually became a “full time” member of several organizations, most notably becoming the leader for the Ubuntu Brazilian Portuguese Translation Team, Foresight Linux, Xfce, LXDE and a member for the GNOME Foundation.

My ideals have always led me to maintain a very generic, non-distribution specific approach to my projects, which in my opinion allows for a “create once, use it anywhere” methodology. For instance, the Brazilian Portuguese translation process for GNOME was showing a 73% completion rate prior to the 2.18 release. I initiated and organized the collaborative effort between the Brazilian Ubuntu and GNOME teams that led to the successful completion and release of GNOME 2.18, completely translated in only a few months. This process was a delicate one, since the Ubuntu team had direct access to Launchpad’s Rosetta translation system and were not used to having their work reviewed by non-Ubuntu staff. I believe I have played an important role in keeping everyone’s egos out of the equation and making sure that everyone focused on what was most important: delivering a 100% translated product. When Ubuntu Feisty Fawn was delivered, it contained our translations from upstream, plus the minor tweaks needed to accommodate Ubuntu’s own code changes. Moreover, all the distributions that released GNOME 2.18 were also able to take advantage of our collaborative effort, another major factor that attracted our volunteers.

The process described above also served as the jumping point for some other multi-collaborative projects I have initiated, such as the unification of a standard and common knowledge repository for Brazilian localization teams, currently in development and supported by the GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Documentation Project Brazilian branches teams!

I have also spearheaded and organized the creation of several communities and projects, such as the creation of the Ubuntu Brazilian Documentation Team and Planet Blog aggregator, vital source of information for the ever so expanding Brazilian presence in the open source world! I am also present in pretty much all of the active Linux distributions communities in Brazil, such as Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, Fedora, and Debian, to name a few.

As you can see I’m a strong believer in working with people from different projects, empowering users to become contributors, and collaboration and sharing of resources. If elected I will strive to apply the principles mentioned above to every single area that makes up GNOME and make sure that people are acknowledged for their contributions and hard work.

Sincerely,
–
Og B. Maciel

Srinivasa Ragavan

Irc : srag (in GIMPNet/FreeNode)
Web : http://blogs.gnome.org/sragavan
Affiliation : Novell, Inc.

Short Summary:

I love GNOME, free software and the community. I care for it. I’m contributing to GNOME for the last 6 years, by means of code, bugs, patches and features. I want to contribute more in non-code terms being in the board. I’m confident I can do it. Every GNOME board I have seen is awesome, unique and ever-improving. I’m sure, I would add my best to it.

Me ?

I’m 28 years old, computer science engineering graduate from India. Out of college, I joined Novell, and 8 years on, still there. First 2 years, I was working on BIND and Apache projects. Since 2003, I’m with GNOME, contributing to various GNOME projects and OpenOffice.org. Notably, I’m the project maintainer for Evolution (and friends) for the last ~3 years. I’m the author of Anjal, the mailer for Netbooks.

What have I done till now in GNOME?

I have been writing code for ~6 years. Mostly patches, bugs enhancements. I’m maintain Evolution. I have contributed to create a self-sustaining Evolution community. I have brought new module maintainers in Evolution, who were active contributing. I have streamlined patch reviews in Evolution, and enabled more contributions to Evolution .Evolution adds to at least 50 new contributors every major release. I have been the top patch reviewer in GNOME for the last two years. I’m currently writing (Anjal) new mail client for low-power, low memory devices and mobile devices. I manage an Open Source Internship program in India (through Novell & GNOME Bangalore chapter), which enable students to contribute to Open source projects in GNOME, Open Office, LDTP and Mono. I still mentor few students in contributing to GNOME and other open source projects.

What will I do if I’m on the board?

• The release team has done an amazing road map and schedule for GNOME3. I would stand by and support release team when required and then GNOME to have a successful in GNOME 3.0 release.
• We have an amazing Desktop, great hackers, a wonderful community and users. We have good marketing as well. But I feel, there a lot of room for improvement. I would give more focus on GNOME marketing.
• I love GNOME, the community and the users. I’m would keep my ears wide open and listen to everyone and be a people representative on the board.
• I would do my best for arranging hack fests, meetings and conferences.
• I was successful with the open source internship program that I started in India. It helped in adding a few consistent contributors to GNOME. But India has a lot more potential contributors to GNOME and free software. Being part of the board, I would strive hard towards making more GNOME contributors from India.

When I first told my friends, some of them asked me, ‘Do I have time?’.
Time is something that everyone lacks. I swear, I’ll do better planning and dedicate necessary time for the board activities.

If I win, this will be my first term for the GNOME board. Vote for me.

Thanks,
Srini.

Vincent Untz

Nick: vuntz
Blog: http://www.vuntz.net/journal/
More: http://live.gnome.org/VincentUntz
Affiliation: Novell
75 words Summary

Hi, here I am, Vincent, 7 gnome-years old now. I’m running for the Foundation Board this year, after thinking hard about it. I believe the Foundation is doing great; it’s certainly not perfect, but my feeling is that things have improved in the past few years. Being on the Board is the way I choose to make sure this goes on. Of course, I could pretend I’m perfect and… wait, I’m not perfect?

More Details

I started contributing to GNOME in 2002, and I’ve been working in various areas of the project since then — bug triage, code, release management, local promotion, Foundation, etc. I have some irrational love for what we’re doing

I’ve been increasingly happy with what the Foundation has done in the past few years, and I believe this trend can go on if we keep working hard. And I’d like to help here. Of course, there’s no need to be on the
board to help (yes, everybody can contribute to the Foundation, don’t tell me you didn’t know that!).

I’m running for a few reasons:

• I will have time for this role. Yes, it’s worth mentioning
• I think I’ve done a relatively good job as a board member in the current term. Nothing huge (or at least, I don’t remember anything huge), but certainly enough to make me happy.
• I know the community well, and I’m comfortable with talking to anybody in our community (or not), about any topic. I also believe people can come to me and discuss anything without any problem. Of course, I might be mistaken But if I’m not, then it’s a good thing for helping coordinate stuff.
• I somehow like to do some of the boring parts that other people usually don’t enjoy. I said “some”

Also, I enjoy sending my candidacy mail just before the deadline. This probably means something about me…

Cheers,

Vincent

EOF