[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

Daniel Stone writes:
 > [Adding members at x.org to the CC.]
 > 
 > On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 09:43:58AM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
 > > 1) X.org has limited funds gotten from company sponsorships, I'd like
 > > to know what plans for those funds the nominees would have?
 > 
 > I think the major thing we can do is put this into two things.  Firstly,
 > XDC is valuable, and we should be doing everything we can to encourage
 > this to grow, be that with financial support or otherwise.  (I also
 > liked the EXDC that Egbert ran a couple of years ago; that would be a
 > good idea to revisit.)
 > 
 > Secondly, as I said on members@, I really like the idea of small,
 > targeted meets.  If we need to get you and Alex Deucher together for a
 > week to fix the Radeon driver, be that sending you to Canada, or sending
 > you both to GUADEC/OLS/LCA, I think that's something we should very
 > strongly consider.

Exactly! You are right on this!

Last November I arranged for a HotHouse on LinuxDay in Voralberg, 
Austria - a small LUG organized event with many interesting projects 
attending.
This was mainly to get Thomas Winischhofer and Luc Verhaegen together
(and for me to meet Thomas whom I've been working with for long time).
Everybody I talked to among the developers agreed that this was a 
worthwhile idea. 
I had budgeted for around USD 500 to support travel and 
accomodation for 3 nights for Thomas and Luc.
50 percent of this was funded by freedesktop.org (from the
funds they received from Google), the plan was to ask X.Org for
the other half.
However when I approached the board about this I was insulted so
badly: My motivations to ask freedesktop.org for parts of the
funding were questioned as, the event was called my 'pet project',
that I withdrew my request for funding.
I was asked why I didn't schedule the meeting at linuxworld in
Frankfurt where Leon had run a booth earlier the same week.
Some Board Members seem to forget that a lot of our contributors
have daytime jobs which don't allow them to take off a few days
during the week to attend trade show events. So it is much more
convenient for them if an event can be scheduled on the weekend.

In the end Thomas paid for the train ticket himself, and Luc and
I shared the expenses that were left over. 
I did not mind because it was a really great event.

Cheers,
	Egbert.