2019 X.Org Foundation Election Candidates

Tue Mar 12 00:24:00 UTC 2019

To all X.Org Foundation Members:

The election for the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors will begin on 14 March 2019. We have 6 candidates who are running for 4 seats. They are (in alphabetical order):

Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez
Arkadiusz Hiler
Manasi Navare
Lyude Paul
Daniel Vetter
Trevor Woerner

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.

If you have questions of the candidates, you should feel free to ask them here on the mailing list.

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

Harry, on behalf of the X.Org elections committee

# Nominees

## Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez
__Current Affiliation:__ Igalia

__Personal Statement:__

I have been contributing to Mesa for 5 years, specifically to the Intel
drivers for OpenGL and Vulkan. I was one of the organizers of XDC 2018
in A Coruña, Spain. If I am elected, I will use my experience on XDC
2018 to improve the organization of future XDC, help to spread X.Org
technologies and help X.org project as much as possible.

## Arkadiusz Hiler
__Current Affiliation:__ Intel

__Personal Statement:__

My main interest is in quality and automated testing throughout the
graphics stack. Especially helping the areas that are lagging behind: testing
the kernel and KMS plumbing.

I would like to focus on building open source testing toolbox so that anyone
can mix and match bits of it to build their testing infrastructure.

There are a lot of exotic setups and edge cases that are hard to exercise
locally by developers due to lack of hardware. Automating those cases by
software faking it or by granting access to the testing infrastructures
benefits the whole community. It also a good way of lowering the bar for
new contributors and enables refactoring with confidence.

## Manasi Navare
__Current Affiliation:__ Intel

__Statement of Contribution:__

I am a lead contributor to Intel's Open source graphics kernel driver i915 as well as to the Linux Kernel DRM subsystem. One of my most widely used contributions is the Display Port Compliance code in i915, DRM as well as in Xserver and IGT to make the entire graphics stack Display Port compliant and reward the end users with black screen free displays. Most recently I have been involved in upstreaming Display Stream Compression feature across DRM i915 to enable high resolutions like 5K at 120. I also have commit rights to several upstream projects like drm-intel, drm-misc and Intel GPU Tools.

__Personal Statement:__

I have been Linux Open Source contributor for last 4 years since I joined Intel's Open source technology center.  I have presented several talks at Linux Graphics conferences like Embedded Linux Conference, XDC and FOSDEM on several graphics display features like Display Port compliance and Display Stream Compression. I have been already actively involved in IRC discussions with DRM and i915 maintainers to constantly provide any solution on display port questions and work on improving the kernel documentation and code quality.
I have proactively started attending X.org board meetings on IRC to better understand working of X.org and at XDC 2018, I also volunteered in the Code of Conduct committee during the conference and I was the point of contact for this. I am also currently a mentor for the KMS project in Outreachy winter program and committed to mentor the Google summer of code program as well.

If I get elected, I would like to contribute by helping organize the X.org foundation conferences, screening the papers and any help needed in terms of public relations, working with the sponsors or code of conduct on the day of the conference to make the events a huge success. I would also like to leverage  my open source working knowledge on any technical help required for the X.org events.

## Lyude Paul
__Current Affiliation:__ Red Hat

__Personal Statement:__

One of the people who helped start Panfrost! Also a
contributor to nouveau, i915, amdgpu, radeon, weston, Xorg, multiple X DDXs,
libinput, the wayland protocol, various other non-graphics related bits in the
kernel, and probably more!

__Statement of Contribution:__

I originally found out about Linux through a rather
unexpected place: an Ubuntu booth at an Anime convention. I was in awe of the
beauty of the all-mighty Compiz workspace switching cube and ended up deciding
to give it a shot on my own computer. I ended up loving Linux, and quickly found
I couldn't go back to other operating systems. I also wanted to become involved,
but didn't really know how to at first. After years of being a user throughout
high school and the start of my college career, I ended up taking on the
challenge of trying to enable TrackPoint button emulation on my ThinkPad Helix
that I was running Gentoo on at the time, through xf86-input-synaptics. I ended
up making my first FOSS contribution through this. Using that experience I made
a GSoC proposal in 2014 for enabling Wayland support on drawing tablets and was
accepted and successful in my project! That ended up getting me an internship at
Red Hat, which got me involved with graphics related development and turned into
my current full-time job.

Deciding to follow my heart on pursuing a career in open source was one of the
best decisions I've ever made. And I hope that by being on the board of
directors I can help give back to the community that helped so much to get me
into the career that I'm in today.

## Daniel Vetter
__Current Affiliation:__ Intel

__Personal Statement:__

I've been hacking on graphics drivers for a few years now, mostly
stuck on the kernel side of things. More recently I've also started to
work on community issues, trying to make it easier to contribute to
upstream, improve processes all around and reduces barriers to get
drivers merged and new people integrated into our community.

On the board I've my main work thus far as secretary, and if elected
I'll offer to do this for a bit longer. I've served on the papers
committee and the CoC enforcement team for XDC last year, and I lead
the sponsor drive, securing 8 company's support. I'd like to continue
this work and making sure we have a great conference to meet and
exchange ideas, open and accessible to everyone.

## Trevor Woerner
__Current Affiliation:__ Togan Labs

__Personal Statement:__

I started programming sometime in the mid-1980s on the family's Apple //e.
I've been programming and working with Linux-based systems ever since I
was introduced to them at university in the early 1990s. Professionally I
mostly do embedded Linux systems development, but have also worked with
various RTOSes, and bare-metal systems. While in university a more senior
student introduced me to Xlib, and so I wrote a bunch of programs in Xlib
directly, including a couple class assignments (e.g. an ATM machine). For
my 4th year "thesis" I worked with one of the math professors to create a
data-set visualization program in OpenGL under X (GLX/GLUT). A while back I
took some pokes at the build.sh build system and have some commits there.

My currently employer encourages me to participate in open source projects, so
I've volunteered to help run X.Org's GSoC and EVoC programs. For the past year
I've been attending the board's IRC meetings to get a feel for the process and
the people. Being a member of the board would make it easier in my work with
GSoC/EVoC.