Re: Question to GNOME Foundation Board candidates

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Hi Max,

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Max <sakanamax gmail com> wrote:

1)  How many hours per week do you expect you will be able to dedicate to
working on the board on a regular basis?

If I get elected it would be my first time on the Board, so it's hard to estimate how much time exactly it will require.

Having said that, my expectation is to dedicate 5-10 hours per week to Board work. I can use some work hours for this purpose as well, so I expect to be able to scale up my commitment at times when needed.

2)  What's your plan and view with GNOME in Asia? How do you think
about grow GNOME in Asia?( ecosystem / contribute / sponsor /
volunteer ...  )

I am very excited by the great work the GNOME Asia team has been doing in recent years to grow local communities and attract new people to the project! I think GNOME as a project should keep supporting and empowering those initiatives in all the ways it can; conferences, hackfests and outreach are a few ways to do that. I'm looking forward to more and I would like to see the Board facilitating connections that make more of those possible.

I also feel the question of how to grow visibility and participation in geographical areas that are currently under-represented in our community cannot be entirely separate from how those users consume the software we produce.

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in how people experience computing; for many people in developing countries (and many countries in Asia among them) their first contact with a personal computer is very different than what it has traditionally been for people in our community.

I would like to see GNOME be at the forefront of that; more concretely that means ensuring our platform stays relevant on the new cheap hardware people will buy in the next few years, and that our software caters to the specific needs of the users in those communities.

These are not all tasks specifically or exclusively for the Board to accomplish, but I do wish to see our leadership take a more proactive approach towards areas with potential opportunities for growth, since it has worked for us in the past (with e.g. our Outreach programs).

Cosimo