Election of X.Org Foundation Board Members is now open

[Barton C Massey]

I am happy to announce that the election for year 2008
positions on the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors is now
officially open, and will remain open through 11:59 UTC
Monday, December 31 2007.  Only current X.Org Foundation
Members in good standing are permitted to vote in this
election; all such Members are encouraged to do so.

You can vote by logging into https://members.x.org and
selecting the button marked "cast" in the middle of the
page.  (If you don't see the "cast" button, try the "Ballot"
button up top first.)  Once a ballot is presented to you,
you will be asked to rank the six candidates in the order 1
(most preferred) to 6 (least preferred).  You do not have to
place all six votes. You may select a given ranking only
once (e.g., only place one vote of '2').  When you then
press the vote button, your vote will then be permanently
recorded---no change to a recorded ballot will be permitted.

I would strongly urge you to complete your voting a few days
before the election deadline if at all possible.  It's the
holidays, so responses to problems may take a little longer.
If you have any problem voting, please send email to
elections at x.org with a copy to me, bart at cs.pdx.edu, as
soon as possible so that we can try to resolve the
difficulty.

There are six candidates for four positions this time
around.  I have attached information about each candidate,
listing them in alphabetical order since that is the order
in which they appear on the ballot.  For each candidate, I
have given their name, the "X.Org Member statement"
indicating their involvement in X.Org and the X Window
System, and the "Candidate statement" indicating their
platform as a Board Member of the X.Org Foundation.

If you have further questions for the candidates, please ask
them on the members at x.org email list so that others can
benefit from the responses.

Thank you for your support of the X.Org Foundation and its
work with the X Window System.

    Sincerely,

    Bart Massey
    Election Committee
    X.Org Foundation Board
    bart at cs.pdx.edu

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Stuart Anderson

Member Statement:  Multiple contributions to
X11R6/XFree86. Current Board member.

Candidate Statement:  It's official. I've become one of those
old guys. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the first
time I hacked on the X Window System.  Fortunately, though,
I'm still writing code on a daily basis.

When I haven't been hacking on code, I've had the
opportunity to be gaining experience in other areas, like
how to run a business (and sometimes how not to run one),
and how to build consesus among competitors, etc.  It's this
balance of skills that I have been bringing to the Board
during my past terms.

Philosophicaly, I believe that X.Org exists to support the
community, and not control it. X.Org should be looking for
ways to help facilitate progress on advancing the X Window
System, and staying out of the way when it doesn't have
anything to contribute.

We have made a lot of progress over the past few years since
the creation of the X.Org Foundation, but there are still a
few things that we need to continue to improve upon. If
elected for another term, I will continue to focus on making
the changes and implementing the processes that will ensure
the long term viability of the X.Org Foundation so that it
can continue to support the community that is advancing the
technology.

----

Eric Anholt

Member Statement:  My role in X.Org has largely been as a
developer, including contributions to the EXA acceleration
architecture, RandR 1.2 development, and developing native
Intel modesetting.

Candidate Statement:  I have been pleased with the relatively
minor, supportive role that the X.Org Board has taken since
X.Org's rebirth in 2004.  Continuing to allow X.Org
technical direction to be led by the active developers is
key to our success.

On the X.Org board, my goal would be to encourage the use of
X.Org board funds for appropriate activities.  Our latest
XDS and XDC conferences have been great successes at
improving communication between the developers and promoting
cooperation.  I want to see that continue, with increased
encouragement of student and other developers without
supporting corporations to apply for travel assistance, to
ensure that the relevant developers can all show up.

Within the scope of the board, the primary area for
improvement I see is in increased efficiency and
follow-through on commitments.  The board could also
increase its role in ensuring that desired improvements to
our hosting cluster occur.

----

Matthieu Herrb

Member Statement:  Long time X contributor. Started active
work with porting X11R6 to XFree86 on BSD.  Current focus:
Security, OpenBSD support.

Candidate Statement:  My goals, if I'm elected to the BoD,
will be to continue to help the X community by making sure
that the X.Org foundation make everything possible to:
- keep the X.Org code available under a BSD/MIT style license.
- keep the X.Org code portable on a vast range of architectures and
  systems.

Among others, I'm going to help the X.Org foundation to
continue to organise and facilitate developers
meetings. Some kind of X server's internals tutorials should
also be setup to help new developers to get started faster.

Together with participations to actions like Google's Summer of Code,
this has the opportunity of boosting X.Org developer's community.

----

Adam Jackson

Member Statement:  I work on X, for Red Hat and recreationally.

Candidate Statement:  The X Window System is one of the most
successful free software projects in history, and it has
been my privilege to work on it for the past three years. I
believe that we at X.org have accomplished many great things
in that time, revitalizing a stagnating community, and
bringing a compelling modern display system to users around
the world, on systems from large-scale visualisation to
desktops to servers to consumer electronics.

I also believe that there is a long, hard road ahead of us.
The technical work we need to do to continue to compete and
innovate is daunting.  The political work we need to do to
evangelize the importance of free software graphics is
intimidating.  The social work we need to do to continue to
grow the community of contributors, testers, documenters and
promoters is monumental, and absolutely essential to our
continued success.

My time working on X has been a challenge and a pleasure.  I
believe that my experience has given me insight into the
challenges we face, and I hope to have the privilege of
serving the community and the foundation as a board member
as well as a contributor.

----

Stuart Kreitman

Member Statement:  Xorg promoter to the Open Solaris
community, hacker, DevConf organizer, biodieseler, commuter
scientist.

Candidate Statement:  The board has plenty of unfinished
business in organization, bookkeeping, membership, and
outreach. I want to stay involved and help move this stuff
along.

My X hacking these days is not open; its inside of Sun, but
it will be opened in the near future.  For example, we are
porting the Sunray thin client to Xorg, and the mandate is
to open license it.  Most all of my work at Sun is conducive
to the the health and proliferation of X.Org, if you
consider the populations of Solaris x86 desksides and
laptops which are running the Xorg code base, as well as
large numbers of SunRays and cheap/free sparc workstations
which will soon be moved from Xsun to Xorg.  Also, I've been
able to use my X.Org identity to help request resources like
money and hardware and conferencing facilities for the
Foundation.


Thanks for the opportunity to serve in the past and the
potential to continue service to this organization.

----

Carl Worth

Member Statement:  I'm the maintainer of the cairo graphics
library, which is a significant user of the Render
extension. I've also contributed implementations to the
Render software fallbacks, and participated in XCB
development.

Candidate Statement:  The X Window System has an essential
role in an increasing number of mobile and desktop platforms
built with Free Software. Of course, the X.Org Foundation
has no technical role in the development of the system. But
the foundation does have a unique position to be able to
facilitate the workings of the community. Examples of
foundation activities include hosting developers' summits
and attracting new developers by funding students. I would
be happy to contribute of my time and effort to help with
these and other appropriate foundation activities.