2018 X.Org Foundation Election Candidates

[Rob Clark]

To all X.Org Foundation Members:

The election for the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors will begin on
22 March 2018. We have 6 candidates who are running for 4 seats. They
are (in alphabetical order):

Eric Anholt
Robert Foss
Bryce Harrington
Keith Packard
Laurent Pinchart
Harry Wentland


Attached below are the Personal Statements each candidate submitted
for your consideration along with their Statements of Contribution
that they submitted with the membership application. Please review
each of the candidates' statements to help you decide whom to vote for
during the upcoming election.

If you have questions of the candidates, you should feel free to ask
them here on the mailing list.

The election committee will provide detailed instructions on how the
voting system will work when the voting period begins.

Rob Clark,
on behalf of the X.Org elections committee

========

Eric Anholt
Current Affiliation: Broadcom

Personal Statement:
Being on the X.Org Foundation board is primarily a non-technical
position, managing the funds, conferences, and mentoring activities of
the project. Our board has been doing an excellent job on improving
those systems over time, and I'm ready to help out with them again. My
interest is in continuing to reduce the barrier to entry to our
projects and encouraging a welcoming environment for all contributors.

========

Robert Foss
Current Affiliation: Collabora

Statement of Contribution:
I've contributed to various X.Org projects, spoken publicly about
using the X.Org stack instead of prorietary ones and worked towards
migrating features for new usecases to the X.Org stack. Additionally
I've worked towards migrating graphics stack projects, like
drm_hwcomposer into X.Org.

Personal Statement:
Before having contributed any lines of code to any X.Org project, I
went to XDC which demonstrated not only what a nice community the
X.Org is but also what technically is around the corner, and what
needs more attention.

As a professional working inside the X.Org sphere I'm going to
continue to work towards harmonizing various projects and increasing
compatability, with the goal of growing the community, making the
individual projects easier to adopt and reducing the need for forks.

If elected I would like to work towards lowering the bar of entry for
new developers by providing support for mordern workflows. I would
also like to provide support for having low hanging fruit for new
developers to pick, in order to attract more developers, but also in
order to provide a less steep learning curve.

But maybe more importantly I would like to contribute something back
to the X.Org community, which has been a tremendous resource to me.

========

Bryce Harrington
Current Affiliation: Samsung Research America

Statement of Contribution:
Inkscape, Cairo (release management, maintenance, etc.)

Personal Statement:
I am currently serving on the X.org Board as Treasurer. In this role I
helped in getting X.org registered with SPI, re-established our
donation systems and policies for individual donors and corporate
sponsors, and worked to get X.org's financial data better organized.

Professionally, I work on Cairo (maintenance, releases, general
development) and various other graphics-related FOSS technologies; In
my spare time, I run the Inkscape project and dabble in game
development.

========

Keith Packard
Current Affiliation: HP

Personal Statement:
The X.org board continues to perform an important role in the X
community. Over the last couple of years, the primary activities of
the board have involved organizing technical conferences and providing
funding for developers to attend both those conferences and other
important free software conferences around the world. I've been
involved in the board since the reformation of the X.org foundation.
If elected, I will continue to support free software developers
working on the X window system and related technologies.

========

Laurent Pinchart
Current Affiliation: Ideas on Board Oy

Statement of Contribution:
I've contributed to the Linux kernel DRM subsystem for nearly 6 years
by developing drivers, writing the initial KMS documentation,
reviewing core and driver changes and participating in design
discussions.

Personal Statement:
Since my first contributions to the Linux kernel DRM subsystem I have
approached X.org from a different perspective than many, making my way
through the stack from the bottom up, and reaching it from an embedded
ARM perspective. If elected I would like to help those once
second-class citizens in the graphics world continue to collaborate
hand-and-hand with with the rest of the ecosystem by ensuring that
they are correctly represented in the community.

========

Harry Wentland
Current Affiliation: AMD

Statement of Contribution:
I maintain the amdgpu DC display driver, and contributed and reviewed
patches to DRM.

Personal Statement:
Having had a fondness for open-source and Linux for more than 15 years
I jumped at the chance to help bring AMD's display driver into the DRM
community. Since doing this my appreciation for X.Org's mission to
create and maintain a free and open accelerated graphics stack has
grown. I've noticed how even companies that would like to participate
in open source are often unsure how to go about it and align such
participation with business goals. As member of the board, in addition
to supporting existing board initiatives, I will focus on increasing
new user participation and finding ways (e.g. documentation, process)
to help lower the barrier of entry to participation.