Board nominations

This is the nomination page for Fedora Board elections. There is a separate page for the history of Board seats.

In May/June 2010 there are three seats up for election. The seats open are currently held by Dennis Gilmore, Mike McGrath, and Tom Callaway.

Name (IRC nickname)

Past work summary: I have happily served as a twice-elected member of the Fedora Board, and am I asking for your vote for my third term. I am currently employed by Red Hat (since 2001). I am the Fedora Engineering Manager inside Red Hat, leading a team of full-time Fedora contributors working at Red Hat, and acting as a liason between Red Hat and the community. I have been active in Fedora since its inception, serving on FESCo, chairing the Fedora Packaging Committee, and acting as the Fedora Legal point of contact. I've recently been involved with the CLA overhaul efforts, as well as working with the Fedora SPARC Architecture team to get a release out. I have more than 350 packages in Fedora, and I represent Fedora proudly at public events as part of the Fedora Ambassador team. I'm also involved with Fedora release engineering, and general troubleshooting that needs doing.

Future Plans: I think that Fedora is doing a lot of things right, but we still have areas for improvement. I believe strongly in usability, both in the software and in our community. I feel that the Board should be a place where we can set big goals for multiple releases, to inspire and direct our community forward. I plan to encourage Fedora to grow in new areas, while minimizing red-tape. It should be fun to participate in Fedora, and I want to work towards efforts to involve our userbase and give them the chance to become contributors.

Anything else: Turtles. Cute, little turtl... wait. WHO POURED RADIOACTIVE OOZE ALL OVER MY CUTE BABY TURTLES? Now I have to teach them the ways of Ninjitsu. :/

Goal statement: To make sure that open parts of the board meetings are recorded/reported, and closed things are reported when they can be. To ensure that we great failures with a smile and a laugh and learn what to do better next time.

Past work summary: I am what one calls a Red Hat Old-Timer. I worked for Red Hat from 1997 to 2001 in Technical Support, Systems Administration, and Coffee Making. I left in 2001 due to health reasons (too much Coffee Making) and went to work for .gov world in early 2002. I worked at Los Alamos National Laboratories in network services, Sandia National Laboratories as a general Unix administrator, and then the University of New Mexico in network services/general Unix administration. During this time I used my spare time on the Fedora Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), and also working with the CentOS team on Quality Assurance and other things. I went back to work at Red Hat in 2009, and have been working as Fedora Infrastructure's Pimply Faced Oldguy. In that time I have come to know many of the smaller projects and programs that Fedora has.

Future plans: Fedora is in many ways a classic startup and in other ways it is absolutely not. Having worked at multiple startups, Fedora is going through many of the same startup growing pains as people try to identify with what it really means to work with/for/on Fedora versus other things. And yet Fedora is not a startup but also a community that attracts certain people and ideas. What those are change over time which is actually a wonderful thing as only dynamic communities can grow to acquire new ideas and people. All of which boils down to using my experience to help show alternatives and where other groups found dead ends.

Anything else you want to add: I deeply believe in the statement: “The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance." by Randy Nelson of Pixar.