X.Org Foundation Election Candidates

[Carl Worth]

To all X.Org Foundation Members:

The election for the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors will begin on
February 15, 2009 and voting will remain open for two weeks.  We have
six candidates who are running for four seats.

They are (in alphabetical order):

  * Donnie Berkholz
  * Alan Coopersmith
  * Jim Gettys
  * Bart Massey
  * David Nicol
  * Daniel Stone

Presented below are the Position Statements each candidate submitted
for your consideration along with Statements of Contribution submitted
with their membership applications. 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 members at x.org mailing list.

The vote itself will take place via the interface at:

    http://members.x.org

More detailed instructions on using the voting interface will follow.

The Election Committee
X.Org Foundation

Donnie Berkholz
dberkholz at gentoo.org
====================

Position Statement
------------------
The development community is the core of a thriving X.Org, and helping 
it strengthen and grow is my primary interest in running for the board. 
The X dev conference and the summit are great, and I'd also like X.Org 
to begin sponsoring and promoting another type of developer gathering
-- 
code sprints. The idea is to get a small group of people focused on a 
single purpose and lock them in a room together for a few days. As we 
saw from the XKB work coming out of Linux.conf.au, this can create huge 
amounts of progress quickly. These types of gatherings also help
greatly 
in building and strengthening relationships and trust.

I served on the Gentoo Foundation's board of trustees for a term, so I 
already have experience in this type of service. This seems like an
area 
where I can contribute to X.Org in a meaningful way. I've been around 
for a long time and committed occasional patches. There's a big 
difference between being a good developer and a good board member, and
I 
think I can help X.Org with the latter even though my previous 
contributions haven't taken the form of thousands of lines of code.

Statement of Contribution
-------------------------
Lead X maintainer for Gentoo Linux since 2003. X.Org occasional
committer of patches generated by Gentoo. Active participant in the
community via lists and IRC. Administrator of Planet
Freedesktop. Moderator of x-packagers mailing list.

Alan Coopersmith
Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM
========================

Position Statement
------------------
I have been active in X.Org since its founding, and before that
contributed to both XFree86 and the previous X.Org industry group.
I am currently finishing my second year on the board of the 
OpenSolaris community, with my term expiring in March.

The role of the X.Org Board should be to manage the resources of the
foundation and use them to support the developers, both current and
new.  Travel sponsorships for developers to come to X.Org conferences
have worked well, but X.Org resources are not limited to conferences,
and the Board should encourage proposals for new ways to use them.

I believe the members should have greater visibility into the
workings of the X.Org Board, including more frequent reports from 
the board of the tasks it is working on and how it is progressing.
The license standardization started last year and the contribution 
policy started recently need to be finished.

Statement of Contribution
-------------------------
X11R6.9 Release Manager, Member of Modularization Task Force &
Security Coordination Team, Maintainer of xdm & Solaris port of Xorg

Jim Gettys
jg at freedesktop.org
==================

Position Statement
------------------
I've been too busy with OLPC the last few years to have had much time
for X, though started working on the Linux USB driver to support
multi-touch input devices that N-Trig (and I expect others) are now
introducing. I again have time I can spend on X.

I'm pleased to see the work that everyone has done that has made (or
will make shortly) X second to none.  To the extent that the board has
any influence I'd like to help ensure we now lead the industry (in areas
where we don't already, that is...). 

Statement of Contribution
-------------------------
Bob Scheifler and I started X.

I have served on the X.org BOD for the last several years.

Bart Massey
bart at cs.pdx.edu
===============

Position Statement
------------------
Over the last two years, I've had the privilege of serving
the X.Org Foundation Board as Secretary and as a Board
Member.  It has been a lot of work, but I'm confident I've
helped as we have made important progress.

One of our first priorities as I joined the Board was to
find productive ways to spend our fairly large cash reserves
instead of just sitting on them.  We initiated a successful
independent series of X developer conferences and sponsored
travel costs as necessary for attendees.  We started our own
student sponsored coding initiative in parallel with our
participation in Google Summer of Code.  We joined VESA and
gained Member access to their technical documentation.

Another priority was to put the Board on a solid legal and
organizational foundation.  With the help of the Software
Freedom Law Center, we have just completed the
reorganization of the X.Org Foundation as a US IRS 501(c)3
Educational Non-profit Foundation.  As such, we are in a
better position to accept donations, manage funds, and
represent the Membership.  We recently caught up our
somewhat shameful backlog of Membership applications and are
once again encouraging X.Org developers and participants to
become Members.

During the last couple of years, X.Org has regularized its
release process, received substantial contributions of open
chipset documentation and open source driver code from
chipset vendors, and advanced the development of X at an
impressive and ever-increasing pace.  As a University
professor, I am particularly pleased with the way we have
started to re-engage with the academic and professional
community; a key PhD dissertation and security contributions
by an NSA employees thrown into the recent mix have helped X
continue to be a technology leader on the desktop.

However, there is still a lot to do.  We need to bring more
new developers into the organization.  We need to establish
long-term revenues sufficient to fund current and future
initiatives.  We need to better support X developer
communication channels with each other, with the Board, and
with the broader community.  I'd like to continue with the
Board and help with these activities.  I humbly ask for your
support in doing so.

Statement of Contribution
-------------------------
I am a member and the Secretary of the X.Org Foundation Board, an
Associate Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University,
and an X geek with 20 years experience.  I'm the architect, advisor,
and sometimes implementor to the XCB project, which provides a modern
replacement to Xlib. I've also tried to help out with design and
algorithms for Xft, Render, Cairo, and various other projects.  PSU
hosts freedesktop.org's infrastructure, and PSU students have
contributed to X in substantial ways.  Let me know how I can help.

David Nicol
davidnicol at gmail.com
====================

Position Statement
------------------
Given a position on the board of the X.org foundation,  I will bring
not only thirty years of experience as both an amateur and
professional computer programmer, but an appreciation of the virtues
of change control and documented process from professional experience
and classroom theory from an MBA program.

My position on the question of interoperability with closed-source
vendors is, we should not do anything to withhold interoperability.

My position on introduction of new features to the underlying protocol
is, I'm for it and have a short wish list.  My position on potential
use of a position on the foundation's board to promote pet projects is
"against" however; I will not abuse my position to unduly promote
research into inter-server client migration protocol extensions.

My position on the foundation being cash-positive is subject to
modification as I do not know many details.  Off the cuff, I would
like to see a general open source bounty clearinghouse done correctly,
and I have some strong ideas about what "correctly" means in that
space. Since operating such a clearinghouse would be outside the scope
of X.org's mission, perhaps X.org could join with other similar
foundations to help create, or endorse an existing, bounty
clearinghouse in addition to offering bounties and/or development or
research grants.

I have been an active participant in electronic discussion forae since
the 1980s, and my position on the range of rhetorical positions I have
held on various issues is that I have tended to be less antagonistic
as I have matured.  How main-stream of me.

My contribuitions to perl porters and to the anti-spam research group
may be researched to see samples of my discussion style.

Please write to me at both davidnicol at gmail.com and
xorg at davidnicol.otherinbox.com with any specific questions or
concerns.  I will be glad to expand on anything mentioned in this
position statement, for example.

Statement of Contribution
-------------------------
coding since 1980, dot-com since 1996

Daniel Stone
daniel at fooishbar.org
====================

Position Statement
------------------
I'm running for re-election after being elected in 2006.  While I
haven't been able to do much recently due to moving back to Australia
(and not having sorted out a new meeting time that suits everyone
since), I organised XDS 2007 in Cambridge and most of XDS 2008 in
Edinburgh.

I haven't been able to make as much progress as I'd like on a number of
issues, but for quite a few of them, we're simply waiting on external
action (e.g. incorporation change), and can't do anything about it.  I'd
like to say that running the infrastructure ctte and participating in
the membership ctte was productive, but infrastructure haven't really
had much to do, and membership haven't done much (which would be my
fault as much as anyone's).

On the Board, I was a large advocate of travel funding, and I think
managed to increase the amount of sponsorships we handed out in terms
of travel (both XDC and XDS having very large travel/accommodation
sponsorship budgets) and equipment to various X.Org hackers.

I fully support the Board's current move towards making all Foundation
business as public as possible (and public by default), and will
continue to push for this.  I've also been attempting to draw a line
between X.Org as a technical project and the X.Org Foundation, with a
reasonable amount of success.  One of my goals for 2009-2010 would be to
increase the Foundation's online presence, as well as the amount of
useful information about the Foundation.  Once we've done these two, we
can reasonably start seeking corporate sponsorship again.

Statement of Contribution
-------------------------
Overall input and XKB maintainer, random server hacker, build system
ninja.  Board member for 2006-2008 term.


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