Board nominations

[Jon Stanley]

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Absolutely agreed.  You could always campaign as the political
>  outsider! ;-)

Well, with what Paul said, I may as well announce my candidacy as
well.  I'm a relatively new contributor to Fedora, however, I am a
long time user of Fedora (at least from FC2 onwards).  I think that I
can bring a lot to the table, in terms of past experience, both in
Fedora and in th Real World(TM).  Part of what I do for my job is to
develop an IT transformation strategy for a wide variety of clients.
This involves taking a detailed look at where you are today, and where
you want to be.  Then my job is to develop a strategy to get you from
point A to point B, both at a tactical (how do I confront the
challenges that I'm faced with today), as well as a strategic (what do
I need to do in the long term to avoid being where I'm at today
again?) level.  This sounds an awful lot like what the mission of the
Fedora Board is, and it's what I do daily and what I enjoy to do.

Along the way, I face many thorny issues, sometimes due to people that
are opposed to change, and sometimes, there are really deep technical
issues that require a thorough understanding in order to resolve.  Is
it always a pleasure to do these things?  Absolutely not.  However,
someone has to do them.=, and I think I do a fairly good job of
balancing the needs of all parties involved in such a decision.

Now onto my Fedora contributions.  I successfully (I think, you be the
judge) relaunched the bug triage process, and we have a number of
community contributors in that space today, including myself.  I'm
very active in QA, and I now maintain a few packages as well (nothing
major).  I'm also a Fedora Ambassador, though I have not really done
any formal events to date, though I give impromptu talks occasionally.
 I'm also going to lend an encouraging hand (though not play an
"active" role, because I don't have a creative bone in my body for
websites) in the relaunch of the websites group, drawing on my
experience in reviving another fledgling group :).

One of the most important issues that I would champion should I be
elected is building community around "non-traditional" contributors to
Fedora.  This includes having subject-matter experts in the area of
marketing (I really like how this is going), artwork, websites,
documentation, bug triage, etc.  There are a number of opportunities
and needs within Fedora that cannot be served by the typical
developer/sysadmin that we generally attract that are needing people
to get involved.  I think that the one of the reasons that we've been
somewhat less than successful in this area is that the potential
contributors would love to get involved, they simply don't that Fedora
exists and needs these people, or they do, and are not sure where to
start.  This is a critical growth area for Fedora, in my opinion.

Now that all the heavy "who am i and what are my qualifications" stuff
is out of the way, the lighter side:

Seth, you need to add "yum make-me-some-stlouis-bbq".  I miss that
here in NYC.   The permissions on that shouldn't be relaxed, as
significant damage can come from non-root users operating the grill.

I will ride the New York City Subway in a suit tomorrow, but I'll just
blend in with everyone else.  I will not have Fedora handwork in easy
camera framing range, however, my work laptop (which, in the interest
of full disclosure, runs Windows due to corporate standards) has a
Shadowman sticker covering the Dell logo.  Does that count?

Dennis, make Fedora work on my toaster as a secondary arch!  I want a
koji.toaster.fedoraproject.org up ASAP! :)

Thanks for taking the time to lead this long mail :)
-Jon