X.Org Foundation Board of Directors 2010 Election

[David Nicol]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, who are you, why do you want to run for the board, what have been
> your contributions to X and why should I take you seriously?
>
> Matt Turner

I am an outsider to X development -- sure, I've been using an X
display for twenty years; I've made a couple of unrealistic wish-list
suggestions concerning a potential protocol extension to allow moving
a client from one server to another, inspired by frustration at not
being able to somehow take a window with a log tail in it with me when
I left the over-air-conditioned "inner sanctum" and went out into the
main lab at the U (my then employer) one summer afternoon in 1998.

I recently went through a business school curriculum and I would like
to share the benefits of that experience in a productive way.

It seems that the X bylaws allow for outsider participation, perhaps
to provide oversight to mitigate developer-driven coolitis (not as bad
a malady as featuritis, but still suboptimal), and that has attracted
me. That and the fact that you do Borda counting.

Aside from the hopefully redundant role of focus maintainer, I have to
offer the fact that I am working on tools for distributed committees
(yeah, who isn't any more, you might say. But still, I am.) and may
offer this organization the use of them as they develop. Although on
reflection that hat might be better worn after the development,
offering the org the use of an in-place asynchronous meeting platform
rather than attempting to leverage an election win into requirements
gathering.

Aside from hoping that any Tools For Organzations I bring will be
useful, and hoping that my sense of focus will be helpful, I also
bring a desire to see a general world-wide bounty clearinghouse set up
for adding features to open-source projects. I think that X might be a
good place to start by establishing a general-purpose bounty system
for X development projects that do not carry either sufficient
intrinsic amusement value to attract volunteer developers or
sufficient business value to trigger deployment of professionals.
That's not general purpose, that's special purpose, but by creating a
bounty system with a more general vision, the system may spill over
into other realms, much as Orkut is now widely used in South America
and India, surprising those who launched it originally.