Board of Directors Election 2018 - Candidacy - Federico Mena Quintero

Federico Mena Quintero <[email protected]> Wed, 30 May 2018 19:50:03 -0500
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.announce
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Candidacy statement for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors

Name: Federico Mena Quintero
Email: [email protected]
Corporate affiliation: Suse

Hello, everyone,

My candidacy is around two things: the Code of Conduct for GNOME, and
our development infrastructure.

* Code of Conduct

Over the past year or so, I have been a support member of the Code of
Conduct Working Group.  While the group's task of drafting and
proposing the Events Code of Conduct are done, the CoC is not in place
yet.  If I am elected as a member of the Board, I would like to help
put the Events Code of Conduct in place, along with its enforcement
guidelines.  Along with the other members of the CoC Working Group, I
attended one training session about CoC enforcement by Sage Sharp from
Otter Tech.  As part of the Board, I would like to make it possible
for GNOME conference organizers to attend such training sessions and
set up the infrastructure for having Code of Conduct enforcement in
all of GNOME's events.

As an extension of that, I would like to help with updating GNOME's
Code of Conduct at large, not just for events.  Think of our online
interactions within the project - gitlab, mailing lists, etc.  Our
current CoC has obsolete form and practices, and with all the
knowledge there is now about how to have a good Code of Conduct - and
all the organizations that can assist us in making one and validating
it - I think we can have a modern CoC that will make GNOME friendlier
to a diverse set of people.

* Development infrastructure

Several things are converging in GNOME to make it a much more
attractive to new contributors: we now have Gitlab, which makes it
easy for people to submit changes, and Flatpak, which makes it easy to
ship applications and SDKs.

However, there are some parts of our development infrastructure which
have gotten stale.  My pet peeve is developer's documentation.  We
have a mixture of DocBook, gtk-doc, Markdown, and a disparate set of
tools.  Our devel docs get rendered to HTML versions of DocBook
documents, which is... very last decade.  It shows up in
developer.gnome.org and in tools like Devhelp, and it is outdated in
both.

I think we can make use of the new GNOME Internships program to tackle
some problems.

- Improving our documentation tools so they use more modern
  documentation formats, or that render and aggregate docs to more
  useful versions.

- Do an editing pass over all of GNOME's developer documentation.  I
  want to take inspiration from the Rust docs project, which has found
  a good way to parallelize huge editing/writing tasks like these by humans.

- Finish the necessary work to integrate something like Bors/Homu into
  our Gitlab instance, so that we have repositories that never break,
  and so that it is possible to automate many menial tasks around
  rebasing, integration testing, and reviewing merge requests.

* Reaching out to underrepresented language communities

Last year, as an Outreachy project I tried and failed to recruit
people to translate GNOME to indigenous languages from Mexico -
Náhuatl, Mayan, Mixe, etc.  I think GNOME could set the example by
funding people to translate our desktop to these languages.  This
cannot be done by unpaid volunteers, as they generally live within
several layers of marginalization.  We need translations (and new
vocabularies for concepts that we cannot borrow from other software,
since they are untranslated to these languages), keyboard maps, and
outreach in general to these communities.

  Federico

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