Candidates For The 2015 X.Org Board Elections

The candidates running for the open seats for the X.Org Foundation Board if Directors has been released.

Egbert Eich on the behalf of the X.Org Foundation Election Committee released the candidate names today: Rob Clark, Peter Hutterer, Stuart Kreitman, Martin Peres, Emil Velikov, and Daniel Vetter. There's four seats up for grabs this year, the current listing of directors can be found via this Wiki page.

Embedded below is the personal statements from each of the candidates, as mailed out a short time ago to the private X.Org members mailing list. There's now a three-week QA period before the voting begins -- along with voting on whether to become part of the SPI project.

Name:
Peter Hutterer

Current affiliation:
Red Hat

Statement of contribution:
XServer input maintainer, maintainer for most of the input drivers, libinput maintainer, etc.

Personal Statement:
I'm running for re-relection on the X.Org Foundation Board. IMO the main purpose of the board these days is to provide assistance to members and X.Org and its associated projects. To me this means XDC and travel sponsorship and developer programs such as EVoC, GSoC and OPW (now Outreachy). As the Secretary of the BoD I've been trying to increase transparency on all our dealings by posting regular meeting minutes with quick-to-read summaries. If re-elected I will continue to do so, providing members with a quick and easy window into our work.

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Name:
Stuart Kreitman

Current Affiliation:
Oracle Systems

Statement of Contribution:
Continuing incumbent board member, treasurer.

Personal Statement:
I hold some institutional memory which may be usefull during the anticipated transition to SPI administration.

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Name:
Rob Clark

Current professional affiliation:
Red Hat

Statement of contribution to X.Org or related technologies:
freedreno: mesa, ddx, libdrm, kernel

various other (mostly arm related) stuff: omap ddx, various core and helper bits in gallium and kernel

Personal Statement:
With open src grapics on arm starting to become a thing, perhaps it is useful to have a board member with an arm perspective? At any rate, if I can help, I'd be more than happy to.

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Name:
Martin Peres

Current Affiliation:
Intel Finland

Statement of Contribution:
Power management on Nouveau, Organiser of the XDC2014, EVoC/GSoC mentor (2012-2014) and organiser (2014-2015), Google+ X.Org page maintainer, Wayland Security

Personal Statement:
I have been a contributor to the Nouveau project for almost 5 years already. Most of these contributions have been on the reverse engineering of the power management on NVIDIA GPUs and implementation work in Nouveau. During those 5 years, I have tried to bring in more people to the graphics stack. For instance, I mentored 4 projects in the Google Summer of Code and X.Org's Endless Vacation of Code. From 2013 to 2015, I have been part of the board of directors of the X.Org Foundation where I helped managing the Foundation's side of the GSoC and EVoC. I also started improving the communication on what our members are doing by posting articles on our Google+ page which went from 0 subscribers to 569 in 1.5 years. In 2014, I organised the X.Org Developer Conference in Bordeaux (instead of focusing on writing my thesis). In 2015, I started working at the Intel Open Source Technology Center in Finland on the performance of their GPU. I also became an administrator for freedesktop, handling account requests. All my X.Org-related presentations are available here: http://phd.mupuf.org/publication/categories/x-org/

If re-elected, I will continue to work on the communication around the Open graphics stack, help organising the GSoC for the foundation (I already signed up for 2015) and help with the organisation of the next XDCs.

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Name:
Emil Velikov

Professional affiliation:
Collabora Ltd

Statement of contributions to X.org:
As of around 2011 I've made around 700+ contributions towards the graphics stack as a whole. I focus on beating distribution hacks into shape and upstreaming them, messing around with mesa and libdrm build systems fixing and breaking the builds, plus the occasional code de-duplication and cleanups. Recently I've been keeping mesa's release schedule in place, and digging through the mailing lists for patches worthy in the stable branch.

Personal statement:
I appreciate the evolution of the graphics stack through the years and I find it worrying that the number of contributors, albeit growing is low comparing to other aspects of (F)OSS development. As a member of the BoD I'm aiming to continue the social presence of the Xorg Foundation and work towards getting more developers interested and contributing to the stack.

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Name:
Daniel Vetter

Current Affilation:
Intel

Statement of Contribution:
drm/i915 kernel maintainer since about 3 years. I also occasionally manage to write a few patches for better testing, better documenation and fewer dragons hiding in the crufty dark corners of drm.

Personal Statement:
I first interacted the X.org community because kernel modesetting broke my laptop, and I tried to fix it. But what made me stick around wasn't so much the endless stream of bugs to tackle than collaborating with a bunch of awesome people all over the world. And eventually meeting them at conferences in great places. The Xorg Board does a lot of work to facilitate that by organizing conferences and sponsoring travel. And also to make sure new people can join the community easier by running programs like evoc or gsoc. Thus far I've mostly concentrated on technical topics and keeping the code in good shape, but if I elected I will work to support these important functions the board serves in our community.