xorg/ BoardOfDirectors/ Elections/ 2017

The X.Org Foundation is holding elections for

  • The Board of Directors
  • Adoption of changes to the Membership agreement.

Election Schedule

Note: this schedule was updated 07 Mar for the extended nomination period. Original dates are listed.

  • Nomination period Start: Feb 19 00:00 UTC
  • Nomination period End: Mar 12 23:59 UTC (was: Mar 05 23:59 UTC)
  • Deadline of X.Org membership application or renewal: Mar 12 23:59 UTC (was: Mar 05 23:59 UTC)
  • Publication of Candidates & start of Candidate QA: Mar 15 (was Mar 12)
  • Election Planned Start: Mar 28 00:00 UTC (was Mar 19)
  • Election Planned End: Apr 11 23:59 UTC (was Apr 02)

PLEASE NOTE: The memberships of all X.Org Members have been expired, to participate in this election you MUST renew your membership by the deadline mentioned above! Please go to the Members page for your membership application or renewal.

Board Election

The terms of the following Board Members will end this year:

  • Rob Clark,
  • Martin Peres,
  • Peter Hutterer,
  • Daniel Vetter

There are 4 seats on the X.Org Board of Directors up for reelection.

The Elections overview page describes the voting methods and process.

The election process starts with a 2 week nomination period. If you would like to nominate yourself please send email to the election committee elections@x.org, giving your

  • name
  • current professional affiliation
  • a statement of contribution to X.Org or related technologies
  • a personal statement.

To vote or to be elected to the Board you needed to be a Member of the X.Org Foundation. To be a Member of the X.Org Foundation you need to apply or renew your membership until the end of the nomination period.

Changes to X.Org Foundation Membership agreement

The updated membership agreement to be voted on can be found here. The individual changes can be seen here.

Nominees

Matt Turner

Current Affiliation: Intel

Statement of Contribution: Mesa GLSL compiler and i965 driver developer, build system monkey. Gentoo X11 maintainer. One time pixman developer. GSoC student and mentor.

Personal Statement: I began using Linux in high school. I remember being awed by a wobbly windows demo, and my interest in the graphics stack began to grow. I switched to Gentoo, and after more bad decisions began contributing to X.Org in 2008. A few years later I began maintaining Gentoo's X11 packages and did a GSoC project writing an example kernel modesetting driver. In 2011 I skipped a midterm exam in a graduate level algorithms class to attend XDC, where I met a large portion of the X.Org community and my future coworkers at Intel, who hired me the next year. I've been working on building an outstanding open source OpenGL driver for i965 Intel graphics ever since.

Google Summer of Code and X.Org Developer's Conference were transformational experiences for me. The X.Org BoD does a lot of behind the scenes work to make awesome conferences like XDC possible and to sponsor travel for new contributors like they did for me. As a member of the board, I want to help provide those same great experiences for new contributors and to do what I can to give back to the people and organization that have contributed so much to my success.

Martin Peres

Current Affiliation: Intel Finland

Statement of Contribution: Power management on Nouveau, organiser of the XDC2014 and XDC2016, EVoC/GSoC mentor (2012-2016) and organiser (2014-2017), Google+ X.Org page maintainer, partial Freedesktop.org admin and working on a new CI/QA system for full-stack testing (Kernel, Mesa, XServer) with unit tests, rendering and performance.

Personal statement: I have been a contributor to the Nouveau project for almost 7 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 7 years, I have tried to bring in more people to the graphics stack. For instance, I mentored 6 projects in the Google Summer of Code and X.Org's Endless Vacation of Code. From 2013 to 2017, 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 729 in 3.5 years. In 2014, I organised the X.Org Developer Conference in Bordeaux (instead of focusing on writing my PhD thesis). Two years later, I also organized XDC in Helsinki where we saw the biggest attendance in the history of the conference. 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 and bugzilla requests. Most of my X.Org-related presentations are available here (will try to add the missing ones soon): http://phd.mupuf.org/publication/categories/x-org/. At Intel, I mostly work on windowing system integration and on a new testing system that automatically bisect changes in unit tests, rendering or performance in Mesa or Linux.

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 2017) and help with the organisation of the next XDCs.

Daniel Vetter

Current Affiliation: Intel

I've been hacking on graphics drivers for a few years now, mostly stuck on the kernel side of things. More recently I've also started to work on community issues, trying to make it easier to contribute to upstream, improve processes all around and reduces barriers to get drivers merged and new people integrated into our community.

On the board I've my main work thus far as secretary, (taking over from Peter) and if elected I'll offer to do this for another term. I've also helped improve XDC by documenting expectations and selection criteria for the conference at https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/RFP/ and how the paper committee selection works at https://www.x.org/wiki/Events/PapersCommittee/. I'd like to continue this work and making sure we have a great conference to meet and exchange ideas.

Rob Clark

Current Affiliation: Red Hat

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

Taylor Campbell

Current Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I'm a relative newcomer to development of the X graphics stack, starting when I began to port the Linux DRM/KMS graphics device drivers to NetBSD in 2013, though of course I had used it for many years prior.

My employer has no direct interest in the X graphics stack. My interest in X.org is selfish and pragmatic: I want a working graphics stack that is tractable, maintainable, auditable, and usable by ordinary developers without total reliance on a commercial sponsor.

I believe this goal is broadly furthered by having a diverse set of users, developers, and sponsors -- not just across hardware platforms and operating systems, but also across socioeconomic, national, gender, race, &c., boundaries. I have no particular agenda for X.org at the moment, but I support travel grants to get people involved from around the world, and mentorship of new developers.

I am a currently member of The NetBSD Foundation's board of directors, where I have been helping to work through a long administrative backlog, establish more sustainable processes for the board, and better organize the finances. I have been a student and mentor for the Google Summer of Code, and am org admin for TNF this year.