2017 X.Org Foundation Election Candidates

[Alex Deucher]

To all X.Org Foundation Members:

Do to the fact that I was not able to get out the candidate list as
early as expected, I've adjusted the election schedule to allow for a
full candidate Q&A.

19 Feb 2017 Nomination period begins
12 Mar 2017 Nomination period ends
12 Mar 2017 Deadline for new membership applications and renewals
15 Mar 2017 Publish slate of candidates
15 Mar 2017 Nominee Q&A period begins
26 Mar 2017 Nominee Q&A period ends
26 Mar 2017 Election period begins
09 Apr 2017 Election period ends
10 Apr 2017 Election committee presents results to the current X.Org
board for certification
10 Apr 2017 Results published to the membership

The updated membership agreement to be voted on can be found here:
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/foundation/bylaws/plain/memberagreement.pdf?h=memberagreement-updates
The individual changes can be seen here:
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/foundation/bylaws/log/memberagreement.tex?h=memberagreement-updates

Information about the current board and which seats are up for
election are available here:
https://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/

The election for the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors will begin on
26 March 2017. We have 5 candidates who are running for 4 seats. They
are (in no particular order):

Matt Turner
Martin Peres
Daniel Vetter
Rob Clark
Taylor Campbell

Attached below are the Personal Statements each candidate submitted
for your consideration along with their Statements of Contribution
that they submitted with the membership application. Please review
each of the candidates' statements to help you decide whom to vote for
during the upcoming election.

If you have questions of the candidates, you should feel free to ask
them here on the mailing list.

The election committee will provide detailed instructions on how the
voting system will work when the voting period begins.

All of this information can also be found on this page:
https://www.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/Elections/2017/

Alex Deucher
on behalf of the X.Org elections committee

========

Matt Turner
Current Affiliation: Intel

Statement of Contribution:
Mesa GLSL compiler and i965 driver developer, build system monkey. Gentoo X11
maintainer. One time pixman developer. GSoC student and mentor.

Personal Statement:

I began using Linux in high school. I remember being awed by a wobbly windows
demo, and my interest in the graphics stack began to grow. I switched to
Gentoo, and after more bad decisions began contributing to X.Org in 2008. A few
years later I began maintaining Gentoo's X11 packages and did a GSoC project
writing an example kernel modesetting driver. In 2011 I skipped a midterm exam
in a graduate level algorithms class to attend XDC, where I met a large portion
of the X.Org community and my future coworkers at Intel, who hired me the next
year. I've been working on building an outstanding open source OpenGL driver
for i965 Intel graphics ever since.

Google Summer of Code and X.Org Developer's Conference were transformational
experiences for me. The X.Org BoD does a lot of behind the scenes work to make
awesome conferences like XDC possible and to sponsor travel for new
contributors like they did for me. As a member of the board, I want to help
provide those same great experiences for new contributors and to do what I can
to give back to the people and organization that have contributed so much to my
success.

========

Martin Peres
Current Affiliation: Intel Finland

Statement of Contribution:
Power management on Nouveau, organiser of the XDC2014 and XDC2016,
EVoC/GSoC mentor (2012-2016) and organiser (2014-2017), Google+ X.Org
page maintainer, partial Freedesktop.org admin and working on a new
CI/QA system for full-stack testing (Kernel, Mesa, XServer) with unit
tests, rendering and performance.

Personal statement:
I have been a contributor to the Nouveau project for almost 7 years
already. Most of these contributions have been on the reverse
engineering of the power management on NVIDIA GPUs and implementation
work in Nouveau. During those 7 years, I have tried to bring in more
people to the graphics stack. For instance, I mentored 6 projects in
the Google Summer of Code and X.Org's Endless Vacation of Code. From
2013 to 2017, I have been part of the board of directors of the X.Org
Foundation where I helped managing the Foundation's side of the GSoC
and EVoC. I also started improving the communication on what our
members are doing by posting articles on our Google+ page which went
from 0 subscribers to 729 in 3.5 years. In 2014, I organised the X.Org
Developer Conference in Bordeaux (instead of focusing on writing my
PhD thesis). Two years later, I also organized XDC in Helsinki where
we saw the biggest attendance in the history of the conference. In
2015, I started working at the Intel Open Source Technology Center in
Finland on the performance of their GPU. I also became an
administrator for freedesktop, handling account and bugzilla requests.
Most of my X.Org-related presentations are available here (will try to
add the missing ones soon):
http://phd.mupuf.org/publication/categories/x-org/. At Intel, I mostly
work on windowing system integration and on a new testing system that
automatically bisect changes in unit tests, rendering or performance
in Mesa or Linux.

If re-elected, I will continue to work on the communication around the
Open graphics stack, help organising the GSoC for the foundation (I
already signed up for 2017) and help with the organisation of the next
XDCs.

========

Daniel Vetter
Current Affiliation: Intel

I've been hacking on graphics drivers for a few years now, mostly
stuck on the kernel side of things. More recently I've also started to
work on community issues, trying to make it easier to contribute to
upstream, improve processes all around and reduces barriers to get
drivers merged and new people integrated into our community.

On the board I've my main work thus far as secretary, (taking over
from Peter) and if elected I'll offer to do this for another term.
I've also helped improve XDC by documenting expectations and selection
criteria for the conference at https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/RFP/ and
how the paper committee selection works at
https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/PapersCommittee/. I'd like to continue
this work and making sure we have a great conference to meet and
exchange ideas.

========

Rob Clark
Current Affiliation: Red Hat

freedreno: mesa, ddx, libdrm, kernel
various other (mostly arm related) stuff: omap ddx, various core and
helper bits in gallium and kernel
With open src grapics on arm starting to become a thing, perhaps it is
useful to have a board member with an arm perspective?  At any rate,
if I can help, I'd be more than happy to.

========

Taylor Campbell
Current Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I'm a relative newcomer to development of the X graphics stack,
starting when I began to port the Linux DRM/KMS graphics device drivers
to NetBSD in 2013, though of course I had used it for many years prior.

My employer has no direct interest in the X graphics stack.  My
interest in X.org is selfish and pragmatic: I want a working graphics
stack that is tractable, maintainable, auditable, and usable by
ordinary developers without total reliance on a commercial sponsor.

I believe this goal is broadly furthered by having a diverse set of
users, developers, and sponsors -- not just across hardware platforms
and operating systems, but also across socioeconomic, national, gender,
race, &c., boundaries.  I have no particular agenda for X.org at the
moment, but I support travel grants to get people involved from around
the world, and mentorship of new developers.

I am a currently member of The NetBSD Foundation's board of directors,
where I have been helping to work through a long administrative
backlog, establish more sustainable processes for the board, and better
organize the finances.  I have been a student and mentor for the Google
Summer of Code, and am org admin for TNF this year.