X.Org Foundation Election Candidates

[Alex Deucher]

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Luc Verhaegen <libv at skynet.be> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 02:32:06PM -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> To all X.Org Foundation Members:
>>
>> The election for the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors will begin on
>> Monday, 5 March 2012 and will come to a close 12 March 2012.  We have
>> six candidates who are running for four seats. They are (in
>> alphabetical order by surname):
>>
>>     Marc Balmer
>>     Alex Deucher
>>     Matt Dew
>>     Matthias Hopf
>>     Jeremy Huddleston
>>     Keith Packard
>
> Oops, 5th is almost upon us soon, time flies. Let me get a few
> questions in quickly then.
>
> First of, many thanks for those who have served their 2 year term. The
> last two years were marked by a massive increase in openness, which
> might not always have been easy, but it is and was very important in
> order to maintain the relevance of the X.org Foundation.
>
> Q1) Election time is upon us again, and once again, we have to go into
> elections blindfold. We have the irclogs of the last 2 years, but we
> have no State of the union, we have no financial information, we have no
> summary of the works in progress. How do the candidates feel about this?
> How do the returning candidates feel that their work of the past two
> years cannot be properly evaluated? How do the new candidates feel with
> respect to being able to provide their mission statements, not fully
> knowing which areas to target for the next 2 years?

As someone on the board, I can say that there isn't really anything
else happening beyond what is discussed in the IRC meetings.  Some
highlights (all of which were discussed at length on IRC):

- We submitted the 501(c)3 application to the IRS
- We got some questions back from the IRS and discussed the in the IRC
meetings and even sent some emails to the membership lists soliciting
information to answer the questions.  Our responses were then sent
back the the IRS.
- We approved travel funding for several people that asked the board
for funding for several events.
- We discussed and approved funding for several XDC/XDS conferences
- We discussed and approved Francisco's EVoC project

What sort of additional information would you like to see?  Also,
please note that if you or anyone else has any questions about
anything board related or wants clarification about anything discussed
in the IRC meetings, please feel free to email the board
(board at foundation.x.org) directly.  The Xorg foundation does not set
the direction of the project, we just facilitate the direction set by
contributors.  The nature of the foundation is a reactive one based on
the direction set by the contributors.  As such we can put forth
things that we would be supportive of as board members, but the
projects and direction come from the community.

>
> Q2) As the organizer of (once again) the X.org DevRoom, and co-organizer
> (together with Egbert Eich and Matthias Hopf) of XDC 2012 in Nuremberg,
> i run into a spot of trouble. The reality is that the importance of the
> actual Xserver is shrinking, with respect to all the other things that
> are going on in what once was mostly the domain of the Xserver (drivers,
> mesa, wayland, ...). The schedule for our devroom at fosdem was like 50%
> drivers, 25% wayland, 25% other things, of which 1 talk really could be
> marked as purely X. My issue with the current constellation is that
> people tend to associate the X.org Foundation with just the Xserver,
> which makes it increasingly difficult for me to label the events i
> organize with just "X.org". I kind of, implicitely, see the X.org
> Foundation as the guardian of all the listed technologies, but this is
> not so clear outside of the members of the X.org foundation.
>
> How do the candidates see this? Should the X.org foundation only be the
> about the X server, and become less and less relevant, or should it
> expand its stewardship to also officially include related technologies?
> I am not sure whether a change to the bylaws for that would be
> necessary, or would just an official statement made by the new X.org
> foundation board, a statement that expands the reach of the X.org
> Foundation to include related technologies, be sufficient.
>
> This would not only make life easier for me as a devroom organizers, but
> it might make things clearer for everyone.
>
> One key example happened just a month ago, just before FOSDEM.
> Apparently there was some Wayland event before the actual FOSDEM
> conference. I doubt that many X.org foundation members, and X.org
> foundation board members are aware of this today, let alone were aware
> of it beforehand. I do not think that any announcement of this made it
> out onto the wayland mailinglists, or whether it was really meant to
> only have a small closed group of people who are key contributors to the
> wayland project. That is, if all of the wayland contributors were
> present, i have little visibility there.
>
> From a fosdem devroom prganizer pov, i found this rather bad, as I am
> sure that, if this event was known publically, there would have been
> more interest in people visiting FOSDEM and our FOSDEM devroom.
>
> My feeling is that if the X.org Foundation would've (semi-)officially
> stewarded (and thus provide infrastructure and sponsor events) not only
> the X server, but also drivers, Mesa, wayland and related technologies,
> then this event could've been sponsored by the X.org foundation, it
> would have been more public, and would've allowed more people to
> participate.
>
> How do the candidates feel about this? Should the X.org foundation
> expand its stewardship reach? What is your vision there?

I think the Xorg foundation should facilitate the development of the
entire GUI stack (and related technologies) whether or not it is
directly related to the xserver or another piece of the stack.  We
already facilitate projects that are not specific to the X server.
For example, the EVoC project we funded was for OpenCL.

Alex

>
> That's all that comes to mind right now. Thanks.
>
> Luc Verhaegen.
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