X.Org Foundation Election Candidates

[Luc Verhaegen]

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?

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.