Throwing my hat into the ring...

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hi everybody:

This is an email to announce my "self-nomination" for the GNOME
Foundation.

I want to serve on the Board not because I am looking for something to
fill my idle time ;-), but because I believe that I have something to 
offer to the Board.

Why should you vote for me?  Well, besides being a very active full-time
contributor to GNOME, I believe that each core GNOME project area (such
as Usability, Documentation, Internationalization, etc.) should be
represented on the Board.  As the primary coordinator and a major code 
contributor to the Accessibility project, I think that I would be the
right person to represent this group.

At the same time I want to assure everyone that if elected to serve on
the Board, I won't wear only my Accessibility hat; I pledge to take a
big-picture view of GNOME's interests as a Board member.  This applies
doubly with respect to my role as a Sun employee; my membership on the
Board would clearly be as an individual contributor, and not as a "Sun
representative".  I do think however that it is desirable for the
Board's membership to include employees of the major 
"corporate" contributors to GNOME, so that the GNOME community 
as a whole and the various corporate GNOME groups can communicate 
openly and effectively about the interplay between commercial and 
non-commercial interests in GNOME, to help iron out concerns that may 
arise.  I also believe that such members can provide valuable feedback 
about the use of GNOME in the "enterprise" environment and other 
environments which differ from the single-user Linux environment.  
So far I believe that Sun is the only major GNOME "corporate" 
contributor that has no employees serving on the Board.

I am active not only in the accessibility project work, but also am very
actively working with groups involved in Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Java
integration with GNOME, and so would represent these important 
growth and enhancement areas for the desktop.  My goal for GNOME
is a fully networked, full-features desktop that provides not only 
a great developer platform but all the basic applications that
desktop users need and expect, that is not only free but fully
accessible
to everyone.

(Apologies for the hastiness of this email, I am at the moment working
with the Mozilla integration team in Beijing on these very issues).

Best regards,

Bill
bill haneman sun com
GNOME Accessibility Project 'ringleader'
Sun Microsystems Employee