Get to Know Some Governance Board Candidates

I'm pleased to see so many qualified candidates nominated for the
NetBeans Governance Board.

As someone who has voted in these elections for several years, I've
always found it difficult to choose the one who'd do the best job
representing the community.  There are so many mailing lists, projects
and other ways to participate in NetBeans I don't always have the
opportunity to get to know the candidates and learn how they view the
NetBeans project and its governance.

I imagine others feel the same way, so I decided to host a debate for
the candidates.  It turns out that this wasn't practical for a number
of reasons; for example, the NetBeans community is global and finding
a convenient time when everyone could meet is always a challenge.  I
decided instead to do this by e-mail -- to ensure a level playing
field, I e-mailed each candidate the same list of questions at exactly
the same time and asked them to respond by the same deadline.  I
explained that I would collate these responses and post them to the
nbdiscuss list.

Although only three of the nominees provided responses to these
questions, I want to add that I probably asked for the unreasonable.
There's very little time between when nominations end and voting
begins, and it's made far shorter when this coincides with the JavaOne
conference currently underway.  Many of the nominees are at the
conference, having traveled halfway around the world.  Therefore, I
recommend that you keep this in mind and view it as a positive sign if
a candidate responded rather than a negative sign if they did not.

I have added an item to the agenda of the next Governance Board
meeting to make a similar debate (with questions submitted by the
community) a regular part of the election process; I'd appreciate
knowing whether you support this.

I'd again like to thank those who participated and wish the very best
to all our Governance Board candidates.

Tom Wheeler
NetBeans Community Member / Outgoing Governance Board


And now, here are the responses, included in the order in which they
were received.  The content is unedited, with one exception.  For the
sake of clarity, I added last names (in square brackets) for people
Tushar Joshi referenced only by first name in his response.



Zoran Severac
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1)  What do you think is the most important issue the Governance Board
    can solve during your term and what will you do to solve it?

  Probably not the most important, but the one I see at the
  moment is the wider adoption of the NetBeans IDE and NetBeans
  Platform among the academic community. In a long term that
  would also support wider adoption in industry, and community
  growth. To accomplish that I would help to:

   1. Establish training programme for university teachers

   2. Create training materials that can be included as the
      part of university courses.

2)  As NetBeans is an open source project, its users have an
    obligation to help make it better.  What is your plan to get
    the community more involved in contributing to NetBeans?`

  Establish collaboration programme with other open source
  projects, and stimulate them to use NetBeans Platform/IDE
  for their development.

  By contributing to NetBeans, they will be contributing to
  their own projects.


3)  The NetBeans project does not have a mission statement.
    Do you think it should, and if so, what should it be?

  Yes I think it should have a mission statement, something
  like: to provide a better user experience for Java development.



Tushar Joshi
------------------------------------------------------
1)  What do you think is the most important issue the Governance Board
    can solve during your term and what will you do to solve it?

  I would like to keep following the infrastructural issues
  faced by NetBeans project.  Especially the mirror servers
  issue which was raised by Tom [Wheeler].  Establishing a
  mission statement and spreading it to the community will
  also be one of my goals in this term.

  I am more focused on the NetBeans Platform and will try to
  include one agenda item to make PlatformX happen in the
  community.  This may need to gather like minded people
  for PlatformX make more noise in the mailing list about
  what PlatformX is and how we can take it further.


2)  As NetBeans is an open source project, its users have an
    obligation to help make it better.  What is your plan to
    get the community more involved in contributing to NetBeans?

  I liked the First_Patch program and I believe we should
  continue this program to induct more and more developers
  into the patch creation process.  I would like to keep
  that program continuing, with the help of Tom [Wheeler].
  This is a good way to involve the community in contributing
  to NetBeans.  I would like to propose some programs which
  will motivate more bloggers to write about the NetBeans IDE
  and platform to spread the awareness of this fantastic tool.


3)  The NetBeans project does not have a mission statement.
    Do you think it should, and if so, what should it be?

  I feel NetBeans project shall have a mission statement. I
  agree with Tom [Wheeler] and Fabrizio [Giudici] to have
  Open Source mentioned in the mission statement.  If that
  word sounds like strategy as Ashwin [Rao] said, I will
  say we can write some statement which will look like
  goals but still have open source concept in it.

  I value the openness of the project and believe that
  the community should be stronger to maintain a paraller
  versions, say PlatformX of NetBeans just to become more
  involved into the project.  This will also provide a
  fall back plan if some deviation or re-prioritisation
  happen in the major goals of the project.

  I will like to see more community groups managing the
  dropped parts of the IDE, like Ruby, Python.





Sven Reimers
------------------------------------------------------
1)  What do you think is the most important issue the Governance Board
    can solve during your term and what will you do to solve it?

  Further enhance community participtation


2)  As NetBeans is an open source project, its users have an
    obligation to help make it better.  What is your plan to
    get the community more involved in contributing to NetBeans?

  Make it more visible that being part of the community and
  helping NetBeans is simple and does not to be a time consuming
  task. I will try to enhance on building the NetBeans Community
  on java.net as a community hub for all people being active in
  making NetBeans a better IDE.


3)  The NetBeans project does not have a mission statement.
    Do you think it should, and if so, what should it be?

  Well, first I think we have to (re)define what a mission
  statement is.  Probably we can just enhance on what
  already exists...



-- 
Tom Wheeler
http://www.tomwheeler.com/