Candidates for the GNOME Foundation 2023 Elections

Below you find the list of candidates running for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors in 2023. We encourage everyone to check the candidates' full candidacy statements, and follow related discussions on Discourse.

When deciding who to vote for, please consider the various tasks under the responsibility of the Board of Directors. This overview might be helpful. The board makes a number of important decisions and performs many tasks which require time, effort and the ability to work and communicate with others. The Board of Directors will represent GNOME to companies and the world. It is a good idea to strive for a well-balanced Board consisting of people with various backgrounds, skills, and perspectives.

Additional elections details can be found on the GNOME Foundation Web Site.

Candidates for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors

Sonny Piers
Full statement
Affiliation: Getmomo Financial GmbH

My motivations for joining the board is to use my experience to 1. Decentralize GUADEC to be more resilient and accessible, 2. Explore opportunities for the GNOME foundation to help fund critical and strategic development on the GNOME project. I’ve been involved in FLOSS for more years that I can count on my hands. Mostly XMPP, Mozilla and now GNOME for the last 3 years. I’ve been a foundation member for 1 year. Among other things, my contributions have included: building apps Workbench 1, Tangram 2, Junction, organize events Berlin Mini GUADEC, GNOME Mobile hackfest, participate in the GNOME Circle committee, work on developer experience and making the platform more accessible, mentoring GSoC and Outreachy students. Professionally and after 15 years of experience, I describe myself as a software and organization engineer. I have been mostly focused on building products. A few years ago I got interested in organizations, and I’m now occupying a managerial position.

Erik Albers
Full statement
Affiliation: None

My motivation to run as a candidate is a) help to sustain fundings and development for Gnome with a software sustainability and a grant-seeking approach in mind and b) support the development of Gnome’s “Welcoming newcomers” strategy and the “diversity and inclusion initiative” which I feel are outstanding important initiatives for sustainable and healthy community growth of Gnome just as of any Free Software. A good indication of progress for me to aim for e.g. would be to have 50% of the candidates in the next foundation board elections being persons who identify as females. I am Erik Albers and I am a Gnome user since the release of GNOME 3, a release from wich I never went back : ) Although or because I am not a Gnome Foundation Member yet, I think I can do my best to help growing the impact and funding for the GNOME Foundation with a different angle and an external perspective. Robert McQueen invited me towards taking this step, and after looking at the current status of the Foundation and its desired developments, I am now convinced that I can bring something meaningful to the table and that I would like to do this by running as a candidate for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors 2023 election. During the last decade I spent my time mainly contributing to the Free Software Foundation Europe - as a member of the association and as an employee, where I was in charge of community development, outreach, public relations and in creating a sustainability sector. Within this role, I had the pleasure to learn, help and develop an international Free Software organisation that has its roots in the community and who supports its volunteers with staffers – very similar to what the Gnome Foundation nowaday is. Also in that position, among other things, I developed the FSFE’s code of conduct, a diversity strategy, countless smaller and larger community meetings, internal and external communications, and I always enjoyed serving the community and its needs, outcomes and energies. In recent years, however, I spent a lot of my working time on explaining various stakeholders, political actors, and decision takers, as well as the general public, how Free Software and its reusability offers a more sustainable approach for technological developments. More and more it also becomes apparent, that the public development and release processes, that are inherent in Free Software, not only lead to better software but also lead towards more efficient and therewith towards more environmentally sustainable technologies.

Michael Downey
Full statement
Affiliation: None

I’m excited at the chance to offer my candidacy for this year’s GNOME Foundation Board of Directors election. I wanted to share a bit more about myself, why I would be excited to take on this important work, and why I bring a unique background that I think could make a positive contribution. My past has taken me through roles in engineering and large corporate IT, into serving the world through international charitable organizations like my most recent work at the United Nations Foundation, where I designed and ran its open source programs office to help international projects similar to GNOME on their journeys of sustainability. Having spent many years gaining understanding of the challenges faced by maintainers of large-scale public goods like GNOME’s software and community, and through my experience building and growing the OpenMRS medical records platform, I have a unique first-hand understanding where struggles lie for organizations like the GNOME Foundation, what approaches can work well, and what hasn’t worked so well in the past in building sustainable open technology communities. During my daily & personal life, I’m happy to say that I use free software everywhere I can voluntarily do so and have been for a long time now. In fact, I first started using GNOME with version 2.0.2 back in 2002 with Linux Mandrake (now Mandriva Linux!), and our home fully runs Linux and non-corporate Android devices today. In 2013, I accepted the Free Software Foundation’s annual Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of our work on OpenMRS. Helping new people get involved in free software projects is also very important to me. For over a decade, I’ve been a mentor and organization admin in the Google Summer of Code program each year, and have also been a mentor and sponsor of Outreachy (formerly GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women) for many of those years too. I’ve spoken about free software projects and activities at small and large community event such as OSCON, CopyleftConf, Open Source Bridge, and FOSDEM’s main stage. Currently, I sit on the project leadership team for LibreHealth, a small health-focused free software project community I co-founded. I was also chosen to serve on the inaugural Board of Directors cohort for F-Droid, the free software app store for Android, where I currently serve as the organization’s treasurer. I’ve also served on advisory boards for the Open Source Initiative and the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL). I’m also the founder of and help run FLOSS.social, a small, focused Fediverse community for free software people and organizations. Financially, I’m proud to have spent the past many years as a Software Freedom Conservancy Supporter, Matrix·org Foundation Elliptic Supporter, and for several years a “Friend of GNOME” donor.

Manuel Haro
Full statement
Affiliation: Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Fundación DEDICA

My name is Manuel Haro from Mexico and I’m Active Gnome Foundation Member, I am Computer Science Engineer with Specialty on Networks and Telecommunications, working for more of 30 years with Unix Systems and almost 28 working with Linux Systems. Working to strenghten the Open Source Philosophy at my country and Latam, from 12 years ago leading an amazing FOSS Community shaped for 60+ uiversities with 25 Open Source Innovation Labs as colaboration and technological innovation instance. Powered by our great FOSS community, an extraordinary model of collaborative innovation and talent catalyst has been consolidated where we works over FOSS technologies to develop strong technical projects to solve problems in multisectoral way and create amazing innovative ideas; this succesfull model we are heading towards the consolidation of a non-profit organization that will lead, strengthen and promote the community as the basis for an effective digital transformation: Digital Development and Open Knowledge Foundation ( DEDICA Foundation). I have had the enormous privilege of participating as a Judge at Gnome Engagement Gnome Challenge, as speaker a GUADEC for 4 years, as speaker at Gnome Asia 2 years, at Linux App Summit 2 years as Member of Gnome Foundation. At 2019 I was lead the Local Team present the proposal to organize GUADEC in Mexico that was approved for 2020 but the COVID pandemic force Us to organize GUADEC virtually for 2 years, of which I was be part of the organizing team; and finally we reach the edition GUADEC 2022 at Guadalajara, Mexico with really amazing results and opening an enormous possibility of linking the FOSS community and all our talent in Latam to all the efforts of Gnome Foundation. Recently working with an extraordinary group of leaders who are part of the Gnome Foundation to organize the Gnome Latam 2023 edition in a hybrid way, having the City of Zacatecas in Mexico as its face-to-face venue with an important participation and with assistants working remotely through our transmissions online almost from all the countries at Latam.

Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman
Full statement
Affiliation: Informology Sdn Bhd

I would like to announce my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors 2023 election. As a GNOME Foundation member for almost two years now, my goal has been to support diversity within the GNOME project. I’ve been with GNOME desktop users for more than a decade and just recently involved with GNOME Community in 2019 where I first joined GNOME Asia Summit 2019 in Indonesia. Since then, I’m actively contributing to GNOME by organizing GNOME Asia Summit 2020 ~ GNOME Asia Summit 2022 with the GNOME Malaysia Community. These efforts would not have been feasible without the members and contributors of GNOME, who have always volunteered to support us on this journey. I firmly believe in the value collaboration brings to open source. I aim to continue this endeavor by collaborating with more individuals and organizations within and outside the GNOME community to strengthen and broaden the GNOME project’s influence across Asia. Open Source is not new to me, As a former System Engineer at Open Source Competency Center (OSCC) under Malaysia Administrative Modernisation And Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) back in 2008, I got involved with various open source projects and used Ubuntu as my preferred operating system. Since 2012, I’m being elected to as Ubuntu Membership Board (1) and still serving to date. Just not that, I helped the Malaysian Government, especially the Ministry of Education (MOE) by promoting Ubuntu and Endless OS to local primary and secondary schools.

Additional Elections-related Information

Note, that according to the Bylaws Article VIII Section 2d the Board cannot have more than two members affiliated with one same company. If more than 2 people from one company are elected, only the top 2 candidates will join the Board. You will be able to vote for up to 4 candidates of your choice, with no restrictions in terms of affiliation. You cannot vote more than once for the same candidate.

If you have any futher question, please consult the Rules for this election or write to GitLab.