Vitals

Summary

The GNOME Project has allowed me to take my first steps into the world of collaborative projects and long nights of translation sprints. Due to my open minded attitude, I have been able to get involved in many different projects and work with a great number of interesting people.

My passion is in the community aspect of these projects and how to better integrate new comers and volunteers with the rest of the community. I am also extremely interested in how we, the open source community as a whole, can leverage this immense pool of ideas and projects, and use it to the benefit of all.

If elected to the board, I will bring in my experience of building communities and guiding/enabling users to become more active in the GNOME Project. After all, the GNOME Project IS about people! I will also push to make accessibility a high priority for the project.

Biography

For the last 48 months I have been deeply involved with the planning and organization of several open source collaborative projects, mostly related to the localization and translation for the Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR) language. During this process I eventually became a "full time" member of several organizations, most notably becoming the leader for the Ubuntu Brazilian Portuguese Translation Team, Foresight Linux, Xfce, LXDE and a member for the GNOME Foundation.

My ideals have always led me to maintain a very generic, non-distribution specific approach to my projects, which in my opinion allows for a "create once, use it anywhere" methodology. For instance, the Brazilian Portuguese translation process for GNOME was showing a 73% completion rate prior to the 2.18 release. I initiated and organized the collaborative effort between the Brazilian Ubuntu and GNOME teams that led to the successful completion and release of GNOME 2.18, completely translated in only a few months. This process was a delicate one, since the Ubuntu team had direct access to Launchpad's Rosetta translation system and were not used to having their work reviewed by non-Ubuntu staff. I believe I have played an important role in keeping everyone's egos out of the equation and making sure that everyone focused on what was most important: delivering a 100% translated product. When Ubuntu Feisty Fawn was delivered, it contained our translations from upstream, plus the minor tweaks needed to accommodate Ubuntu's own code changes. Moreover, all the distributions that released GNOME 2.18 were also able to take advantage of our collaborative effort, another major factor that attracted our volunteers.

The process described above also served as the jumping point for some other multi-collaborative projects I have initiated, such as the unification of a standard and common knowledge repository for Brazilian localization teams, currently in development and supported by the GNOME, LXDE, XFCE, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Documentation Project Brazilian branches teams!

I have also spearheaded and organized the creation of several communities and projects, such as the creation of the Ubuntu Brazilian Documentation Team and Planet Blog aggregator, vital source of information for the ever so expanding Brazilian presence in the open source world! I am also present in pretty much all of the active Linux distributions communities in Brazil, such as Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, Fedora, and Debian, to name a few.

As you can see I'm a strong believer in working with people from different projects, empowering users to become contributors, and collaboration and sharing of resources. If elected I will strive to apply the principles mentioned above to every single area that makes up GNOME and make sure that people are acknowledged for their contributions and hard work.

FoundationBoard/Elections2009/OgMaciel (last edited 2009-05-25 19:16:26 by SusanaPereira)