The GNOME Foundation board election

If you are a rock star hacker (or a busy non-rock star hacker at work), you will not be a good Board member. Don't think that you can squeeze in a couple hours each week; you won't be able to. In the Board you have to do little tasks like answer mails, take minutes, send minutes to the public, be in contact with the companies in the Advisory Board, make plans, etc. If you wouldn't normally have time to participate in a volunteer organization where you do paperwork, the Board is not fit for you.

I would like to see us hire a bugmaster to ensure that downstream distros benefit from their collective work. I would like to hire a full-time editorial resource for our user and developer websites. I would like to see the foundation invest heavily in documentation, and ensure that high-quality, up-to-date, printed documentation exists for the platform and for users. I would like to see the foundation invest also in marketing, listening to ISDs, distributors and users and ensuring that that feedback gets fed back into the development cycle.

More specifically, as a Board member I would like to focus on the GNOME Brand - the verbal and visual manifestation of what GNOME is all about - GNOME's personality. I will continue to drive our brand's definition via the brand book (regardless) and once finished, make it easy for others to use and spread GNOME by driving the development and organization of consistent collateral. I would also love to help in any way I can to fully address our trademark concerns so we can confidentially make use of our brand.

As a board member I like to see we get the revamped website online, and the online store become a reality. I also want to see the Foundation have better writers, possibly funded by the foundation. I want to help better documenting board's events and procedures, and make sure incoming board email is processed as fast as possible.

Here's what I want to do if I'm elected. It's no big things, but important stuff: make sure that people who mail the board have an answer in less than 2 days, send as much informations as possible to the membership about what's happening (I do not feel the minutes we send are enough), push to delegate stuff.

Hire a business development manager for the GNOME Foundation, to raise funds and manage our organisational relationships. I am particularly keen on this, because a bizdev manager for the GNOME Foundation will be able to better manage the operational side of my crazy ideas.

I think it's important to keep a steady flow of funds from the advisory board members. I don't really have much of an idea of the current situation regarding finances in what areas we're spending or raising money.

Someone inside the European Union is pushing white papers, recommendations and similar documents since years. We need to be part of this effort and position ourselves in order to be in the right place when the reports lead to planning processes, design and implementation of real policies and migrations in the public sector.

Certainly getting involved with the board shouldn't require technical knowledge. But there is a need to plan the development of Gnome, and I'm not sure who is doing this. The last few releases have lacked direction, features are added without consideration of their integration into the desktop and future development, and hard decisions are not being taken. If not the board, then who?

Right now, some GNOME hackers are targeting OLPC for a port of their application, but we are not actively developing for that. I think OLPC is doing a lot of innovation, and GNOME can be a bigger part of it.

I think embedded and targeted devices is en exciting new area where GNOME has been going to in the last year. From the 770 to the OLPC and gps devices GNOME tech is being spread well past the desktop. The cool thing about these areas is that they allow for more focused development than a general desktop does. What this does is make the general desktop better because tech developed in the embedded market is in many cases huge wins for the desktop. We need to make sure we don't fork GNOME but instead create an environment where embedded developers contribute back to upstream and where upstream is open to the stuff the embedded developers and offering.

The board should deal with, and point out important issues in time. Which means that we as community together should prepare ourselves well ahead of time.

Licenses, open standards, software patents, free competition, privacy, and freedom of choice are issues I care deeply for. Along with access to, and sharing of freedom, knowledge, and information.

Much like our focus on usability and the release process, issues related to Software Freedom figure prominently in GNOME's trial-by-fire introduction to development (something we need to improve). We face a tougher time with our users because we don't usually have a direct relationship with them - we must work with and through our distributors to make sure users understand and hopefully value Software Freedom.

What freedoms exactly? The computer users I know can't code. What are they going to with the source code they have the freedom to modify? And free as in beer makes no difference to them: they either got their Windows XP with their Dell, or from a bloke they know with a CD burner.

Freedoms that you can't exercise are meaningless.

I've been focusing on another market for a while now (more seriously in the last year) which is not entirely standard fare for us: mobile and embedded.

This is a massive, growing market, more open to newcomers than the desktop market (thanks to our favourite monopolist incumbents), and we have a bunch of fascinating advantages in this space. It's a huge opportunity to take Free Software to *vastly* more people, faster than we've done so far, and to spur further investment in our developer platform (there are already more developers contributing to our platform for embedded use than desktop use).