_______________________________________________Hello GNOME Foundation,I am announcing my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors. You will find below the key points of who am I in the GNOME Community and what I would like to help with. For the full length wall of text, please have a look at the blog post announcing my candidacy.Like many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user. I eventually started helping with translations. For this activity I have regularily been chasing maintainers for string freezes, or to ask for explanations when strings didn’t make sense for me.This helped me to blend in, meet the more general community, and finally take interest in higher level issues such as our infamous chat platforms split, or co-organising the GSoC 2021. I have a very strong interest in people, groups of them, ethics, how software impacts them all and how proper governance can help to achieve goals.
As a member of the board, I would focus on our internal and external communication, where we have a lot of room for improvement. Attracting new contributors is essential: our public face and the messages we send must resonate with their values. Once they are here, the bottleneck for their contributions must be removed: what they can do and where to do it must be clear, how to do it as well. While getting new recruits is extremely important for a project to stay in good shape, sustainability cannot be achieved without taking care of long time contributors.
I am strongly biased towards think for a bit but start doing quickly, ask around how it impacted others, and adapt rather than overthinking. I believe KPIs are necessarily biased and get circumvented all the time. Human interactions is how you measure success.
As the head of digital identity of a large organisation, I am experienced in projects aiming to lower the friction for customer onboarding. Quite counter-intuitively, many parallels can be drawn between corporate customers and non-profit contributors.
Open-source software communities used to despise designers and thought they knew better. Now we welcome them and see the positive impact they have. A second mentality change needs happen: we must allow the persons who are good at hyping others to help.
Regards,
Thib
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