X.Org Foundation Election Candidates

[Alan Coopersmith]

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

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.  You can read more about the candidates
here and the election schedule here:
	http://wiki.x.org/wiki/BoardOfDirectors/Elections/2012

If you have questions of the candidates, you should feel free to ask
them here on the members at x.org mailing list.  The Q&A period starts
today, 27 February 2012, and will end 5 March 2012.

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

The Election Committee
X.Org Foundation


=================================
Candidates
=================================

Marc Balmer

Current Affiliation
     Micro Systems

Statement of Contribution
     Entrepreneur, Consultant, Software Developer, Teacher;
     xf86-input-elographics maintainer

Personal Statement
     First of all, I want to express that I am surprised that I was nominated, 
it was not myself who nominated me, but the fact alone that someone nominated me 
means that someone wants me to serve on X.Org's board and I am willing and 
capable to take the challenge, provided, of course, that enough X.Org members 
see me as a valuable member of the X.Org board of directors.
     I am a Swiss citizen, 44 years old, living in the canton Aargau. I am an 
entrepreneur, running the software development and consulting firm micro 
systems, www.msys.ch, successfully for more than twenty years.
     I am a former lecturor and member of the board of the HyperWerk Institute 
of the Basel University of Applied Science, where I tought general informatics 
and man/machine interaction.
     Since many years I give a lecture about "Open Source Software as a Reality 
in Commercial Software Development" at the University of Basel, which invites me 
as a long-standing open source defender/user/developer.
     In my commercial life I do point of sale systems, for which use X11 on 
touchscreen systems to interact with the cashier. I am an IBM business partner 
and my work with X.Org and touchscreens yielded me an IBM 2010 "Newcomer Award". 
IBM is seeing the potential in X.Org and Open Source, obviously.
     I am an active BSD Unix developer, focusing on NetBSD, but with having lots 
of code in OpenBSD and some in FreeBSD, and with very tight connections to the 
*BSD development teams in general.
     I helped with with making X.Org drivers available and working on various 
BSD platforms, most notable the AMD Geode on OpenBSD, but also support for 
various touchscreen drivers.
     If I am to be elected to the X.Org board of directors, I will first and of 
all help my colleagues to get the tasks at hand to be handled. But I will also 
see my role as a janitor reminding the X.Org community that the world is not 
only i386 and Linux, but that systems like the *BSD Unixes use and need X11 as 
well. And that some coordination between X.Org and the BSD's is needed.
     As a personal reference I would like to mention Matthieu Herrb, who is 
currently serving on board, and who knows my past in BSD and X.Org quite well.

=================================

Alex Deucher

Current Affiliation
     AMD

Statement of Contribution
     I've been working on Xorg video drivers for many years. I now work at AMD 
supporting the open source driver stack and helping provide chipset 
documentation for AMD hardware.

Personal Statement
     The X Window System has interested me since I first saw screen shots of X 
window managers back in 1997. I got actively involved in X around 2000 and my 
interest and participation has grown from there. I now work for AMD supporting 
open source software on AMD graphics hardware. Prior to starting at AMD, I 
worked in telecom engineering and intellectual property risk management. My 
current focus has been on 2D and 3D driver support and documentation for AMD 
hardware. I have previously contributed to a number of other X drivers including 
drivers for hardware from S3 and Siliconmotion and mentored several Google and 
Xorg summer of code projects.
     I joined the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors in 2009. During my time on 
the board, I spearheaded the 501(c)3 non-profit application, handled our 
Delaware tax filings, and was the election chair for the 2010 Board election. I 
would like to continue my work on the board: see the 501(c)3 process finished, 
encourage more projects like the Xorg Endless Vacation of Code, and perhaps even 
organize an Xorg Developers conference.

=================================

Matt Dew

Current Affiliation
     Micron

Statement of Contribution
     I do the work that noone else wants to do, like cleaning up documentation. 
I care about the project and want to see it become better, not just go into a 
holding pattern until Wayland takes over.
     I also am involved with GSoC and EVoC trying to bring in new, young blood 
into X.org.

Personal Statement
     Although I have followed X.org activity for almost 10 yrs now, I have only 
been contributing to X.org for 2 years. However I really want to help the 
project overall. As my coding skills are rudimentary compared to fulltime coders 
and I'm not lucky enough to be employed to work on X, I contribute the best way 
I feel I can; by working on the not-so-sexy aspects of X.org, like 
documentation, whenever I can. For the past 2 years I've been working on 
cleaning up the in-tree documentation, starting with converting 40 documents 
(>2000 pgs) from various formats like Framemaker and groff into one common 
format, docbook. Last summer I started getting involved with GSoc and EVoC 
trying to get students involved in X.org.
     I've recently taken over the EVoC duties from Bart Massey. In doing so, 
I've started pinging the local Unis to drum up interest among the bright 
students. I would very much like to see more public noise around the project and 
to generate interest amongst the bright recent college grads. If I were elected 
to the board, I would try to help move the project in that direction.
     Humble thanks for your consideration.

=================================

Matthias Hopf

Current Affiliation
     Georg-Simon-Ohm-University

Statement of Contribution
     Working on radeonhd (one of the principal authors), R[67]xx bringup, RandR 
(1.3, specifically), general Xserver fixes.

Personal Statement
     I'm active in X development since 2005. Being one of the principal authors 
of radeonhd, I helped jump-starting development for modern ATI (now AMD) 
graphics chips, and did major work for the 3D bringup of this chipset family. 
For SUSE I was mainly working on stabilizing the Xserver and drivers to get 
enterprise quality in our products, upstream I'm trying hard to foster new and 
fancy developments that do not conflict with backwards compatibility too much. I 
strongly believe that the notion of Open Source software does not only have to 
be reflected by licenses, but also by communication structures. The board irc 
logs, published on the freedesktop wiki, are one fine example for open 
communication. I'm also a strong advocate of Google SoC and X.org's 
participation therein.
     In September 2011 I changed my profession and I'm now lecturing and 
researching at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University of Applied Science in Nuremberg, 
Germany. My lectures will have a strong focus on Open Source technologies, and 
of course I'm promoting the use of Linux or Un*x-alike operating systems 
including the X11 technologies amongst our students.

=================================

Jeremy Huddleston

Current Affiliation
     Apple Inc

Statement of Contribution
     My role within X.org has primarily been that of developer and release 
manager. I am the principle maintainer of the XQuartz Project, and by extension 
the XQuartz DDX within xorg-server, the AppleWM protocol, and quartz-wm. In 
recent cycles, I have been the release manager for the stable branches of 
xorg-server.

Personal Statement
     I am honored to be nominated for a position on the X.org Board of 
Directors. I have enjoyed working with the community as a developer and 
maintainer of the stable branch of the X.org server and would be delighted to 
serve on the board. As a board member, I would love to be more involved with 
Summer of Code. SoC offers us a great opportunity to bring in new talent and 
support students in their own personal development. Our involvement with SoC has 
been quite beneficial, but we have room to improve. We can do a better job at 
matching students with mentors/support, and we need to improve the publication 
of results for the SoC projects. As a board member, I would like to address 
these concerns and work with the community to make our SoC involvement even 
better than it currently is. Thank you for your consideration.

=================================

Keith Packard

Current Affiliation
     Intel

Statement of Contribution
     Have written a bit of X server code over the years, designed and wrote a 
few extensions that add nice features to the window system.

Personal Statement
     The X.org board continues to perform an important role in the X community. 
Over the last couple of years, the primary activities of the board have involved 
organizing technical conferences and providing funding for developers to attend 
both those conferences and other important free software conferences around the 
world. I've been involved in the board since the reformation of the X.org 
foundation as treasurer or as a board member. If elected, I will work to 
continue offering opportunities for X developers to meet around the world.