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GNOME Foundation Elections Results Are In

PaaChhaa writes "The GNOME Foundation membership and elections committee has announced the preliminary results of this year's elections for the board of directors. There are a few new faces this year, and Miguel de Icaza, whose candidacy was rejected last year due to late submission, is back. The run up to this year's election saw a threat of boycott, which ultimately resulted in the online publication of the foundation's financial records. Also, a heated discussion followed the posting of the list of ten questions, and the opinions of the candidates and other foundation members on these issues can be found in the foundation-list archives for the months of November and December. A notable exclusion from this year's board is GNOME's release manager Jeff Waugh. who didn't run at all."

23 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Mena by febuiles · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why the new faces point to Federico Mena? He's been working in GNOME for more time that most of the known developers.

  2. Unexpected results by AbbyNormal · · Score: 4, Funny

    The new president of the association: "George Walker Bush".

    We told them not to use those Diebold Machines. You'd think Gnome would read Slashdot or something.

    --
    Sig it.
    1. Re:Unexpected results by mforbes · · Score: 4, Funny

      What's really amazing is that of the 324 registered voters, GWB won the votes of all two hundred thousand!

      --

      Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
      Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge

  3. Executive Summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    In China, gnome is banned.
    In Netcraft, KDE is dying. (Confirmed).
    In Korea, only old people elect gnomes.
    In Japan, talking robot gnomes are elected.
    In Soviet Russia, gnome elects YOU!

    Any questions?

  4. chuckle by viva_fourier · · Score: 4, Funny

    > 5. What unique aspect will you bring to the job?

    I think it is safe to say I am closer to legally blind than anyone on
    the board, or running for it. That's unique, right? :)
    -- Luis Villa

    My question for Slashdot customer service: Can I find this mildly funny, or does that make me some sort of Gnome Foundation fanboy...

    --
    and now back to the fallout shelter...
  5. Voting irregularities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hear there were some GNOME precincts that had more KDE votes than the total number of registered voters. Something smells fishy.

    1. Re:Voting irregularities by learn+fast · · Score: 2, Funny

      It wouldn't surprise me at all if KDE and GNOME were to one day have evolved into warring political parties.

      Look at the eerie similarities:

      # inexplicable, irrational, vitriolic loathing of each other
      # the end user can't really tell any difference between them

      Yup, sounds like two dominant political parties to me. All we need now is a winner-takes-all voting system and game theory ensures they'll be entrenched forever.

    2. Re:Voting irregularities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      the end user can't really tell any difference between them

      Are you kidding?

      It's possible to distinguish Gnome and KDE quite easily by looking at the tips that appear when you first start them up.

      KDE: "Did you know? Right-click on any file and select CERVISIA to frobnicate the CVS flibdijibble flooble blargh foo."

      Gnome: "Did you know? Eating solid food is almost as easy as sucking Mommy's milk!"

  6. Elections? by HexaByte · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They're having elections? Why not _selections_?

    The person who contributes the most stable code get to be CTO, the one who got the most companies to pony up $$$ is CFO, and the one who can listen to the most complaints without going crazy becomes CEO!

    Just my vote!

    --
    HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
    1. Re:Elections? by WombatControl · · Score: 2, Funny

      And the one who doesn't contribute anything, whines the most, and is generally the most clueless can be selected as chief legal council!

      Yes, I have a thing against lawyers...

  7. Approval voting with multiple winners by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It appears that the election system used is approval voting, but with multiple winners. This does not result in proportional representation, but instead elects almost only "centrist" candidates. This may or may not have been the intent.

  8. Re:No More Spatial Browsing Please by Curtman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well said. Spacial Nautilus the kind of thing that looks good to developers because someone put forth a proposal and mentioned the HIG enough times. Look below the surface, and you'll see HIG as the reasoning for everything, often both sides of an argument simultaneously.

    I really believe its time for HIG v2, so we can see if things are improving from the user perspective, or getting worse. Nautilus on the whole is VERY confusing to the users that I have introduced to it. Just try explaining why removing the toolbar is a good thing to any reasonably minded person. All you'll get is a blank stare.

  9. The best part is we still win . . . by grahamkracker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With each year's election, it just keeps getting better & better . . .

    All of the traffic simply brings more review, attention and organization to the GNOME Foundation & GNOME Development.

    It's not a negative, it's a positive, either way they both push us forward towards our goals //kracker

    sage francis - sick of waging war - 01 - radio commercial intro

  10. In related news... by jd · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ukraine offered to send observers to the GNOME elections, to ensure fairness. Meanwhile, the Eric Conspiracy has already declared victory. Bin Laden has issued a statement saying that it doesn't matter who wins, he will continue to use Emacs until American troops are withdrawn from Microsoft Windows.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  11. Re:slashdot is... by Dragon218 · · Score: 3, Funny

    management team

    --

    "It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
  12. Re:Sun Exclusion -- Java vs .Net? by KeyserDK · · Score: 2, Informative

    NO, SUN employes is not excluded.
    NO, the board does NOT set the technical direction for GNOME.

    Troll...?

    --
    still reading?
  13. Re:Sun Exclusion -- Java vs .Net? by Eccles · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yes, but Gnomes usually avoid the Sun.

    Troll...?

    Oh heck yes. trolls definitely avoid the Sun. In Tolkien's stories, the sun would turn trolls (except Olog-hai) into stone.

    --
    Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
  14. Spatial browsing and the Mac Finder by devnevyn · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I haven't used spatial browsing in an other environment than the original Macintosh Finder, pre-OS X. However, the Mac OS 9 Finder is an example of spatial browsing at its best. For a /very/ thourough read on the subject of spatiality, see John Siracusas excellent and by now well-known article over at Ars Technica. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has a very good take on the subject, as well. Gruber:
    In the classic Finder, there is no abstraction between the actual file system and the view of the file system presented on screen. A folder is either open or closed. If it is open, it is represented on screen in its own window. The size, position, and viewing options for an open folder's window are always remembered, and are unrelated to the size, position, and viewing options of parent, sibling, or child folders. There is a clear, cohesive paradigm at work. An open folder is a window; a window is an open folder.
  15. Re:No More Spatial Browsing Please by Pxtl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Idunno, I like the toolbarless look, but that's just because I think its nice looking and I'm one of those people who never ever touches the toolbar. I find that the Gnome people in general don't like toolbars and tend to prefer right-click-menus. This is good for simple apps (like the file browser) but a poor decision for more complicated apps.

    Still, I agree that the "new window for each folder" thing is a bad idea. Why not follow FireFox's success and go with a rocker/radial approach? Middle-click = open in new window, rclick + scrollup = up one level, stuff like that? Just have the context-menu list the rocker gestures and hotkeys alongside the command names.

  16. Re:No More [Preconceptions] Please by DougWebb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It does apply to everyone, because everyone sees it whenever they use a computer and try to access the filesystem.

    Spatial Browsing, if implemented everywhere (including MS Windows and OSX), could become the new "preconception baggage", but it wouldn't be any better, because it's not really 'spatial'.

    As currently implemented, Spatial Browsing replaces representing your filesystem as a hierarchical tree with representing your filesystem as a flood of windows which appear to be disconnected, but which actually have a vague and very poorly represented hierarchical relationship.

    True spatial browsing, ala Raskin's Humane Interface, would be a real improvement. Instead of the hierarchy, documents are scattered around in groups, and you can zoom in on a group to discover that there are smaller groups within the larger group. This would make perfect sense to most people, who have stuff piled all over their physical desks using pretty much the same organizational structure.

  17. Re:No More Spatial Browsing Please by grumbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Complain a lot, write bugreports, cross your fingers and wait a release or two and they might add back a useable textinput/typeahead support. In the past Gnome developers have frustrated me quite a lot, especially in the switch from Gnome1.4 to Gnome2.0 where a lot of usefull features have gone missing, however most of the needed features have found there way back again sooner or later. So I have good hopes that they will fix the filedialog too in the future, just give it a bit time. Gnome developers tend to overshoot their goal of simplicity, it just takes some time to find the right balance between 'crowded', 'simply good' and 'too simple'.

    ### I can't understand why they won't even offer the old one as an option, except that it would mean admitting that they might be wrong.

    They follow more or less the principal of doing it right, instead of flooding the screen with options. And as basically everybody will agree the old dialog was just plain awfull (beside the tab-completion, which was really good), so I think they prefered to dump it completly to have it finally dead, instead of dragging it around for another few releases. Until they get proper typeahead implemented, it will be of course a bit painfull, since 'Ctrl-L' is really a rather ugly hack, however it gets the job done and the dialog is already much more pleasent to use with the mouse, so the damage isn't that big and time will most likly fix the rest.

  18. Re:No More Spatial Browsing Please by grumbel · · Score: 2, Informative

    ### I'll take this oppertunity to complain about GNOME's current love affair with spatial browsing, in the hope that it will get noticed.

    In Gnome2.8.1 there is a easy to reach option to switch back to the normal non-spatial browsing behaviour, so no more gconf searching for the right option. About making it default, its of course questionable, however spatial has its benefits when your directory structures are flat, which it most likly will be for most new users, rest of the users shouldn't have much throuble to switch back to the old behaviour now.

  19. Re:No More Spatial Browsing Please by wowbagger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And where, in the dialog, does it tell me about that?

    For all the Gnome guys seem to love these human interface guidelines, they seem to forget the single biggest item when making a GUI:

    Any item the user is to be able to manipulate should be represented on the UI

    Every time they fail to follow that, and every time they get called on it, they come up with some "Well, just press CTRL-ALT-META-LSHIFT-Q to enable that".

    So a user is to pour over the documentation, reading every bit of it to find all these key combinations that are NOT indicated on the UI itself.

    And this, somehow, is going to make it easier for the non-31337 user to use...