[ZF] Martijn's candidacy for the board

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I'm Martijn Faassen and I'd like to explain my candidacy for the Zope
Foundation board for a third term.

I've been participating in the Zope community since near its birth in
late '98. Some projects I initiated or helped initiate that have some
influence in the Zope community are Formulator, Silva, Five and Grok.
I care about nurturing and expanding the Zope community and its
software. I think the best way to learn more about who I am is to look
at this work and my participation in the community.

I've served on the Zope Foundation board for the first two terms in
its existence. In the first term I was a regular board member, and in
the last term I had the privilege of being the board's chairman. In
the first term the Foundation Board was definitely still finding its
feet, preparing the way for the activities during the next term. This
term, we've successfully introduced the highly-needed new bylaws for
the Foundation. We've also completed the copyright transfer agreement
so that the Foundation source code now officially belongs to the Zope
Foundation (we need to get some technical bits over with now, but the
signatures are there). We've also made a lot of progress on the web
hosting infrastructure for the Foundation. I cannot claim these
successes for my own as everybody in the board participated in them,
but at least I can claim to be a part of it.

If elected to the board again, I'd make these my priorities for the future:

* complete the technical issues of copyright transfer so we can
properly start the role of stewardship for the copyright to the source
code.

* continue the process of getting more technical infrastructure to
foundation-managed hosting.

* hopefully finally get somewhere with the website effort through a
project-specific "microsite" approach.

* finding a way to increase relevance of the Foundation to our
membership and expanding the membership.

* I'd also like to explore the options for a Zope conference of some kind.

For the wider Zope community my priorities are:

* I'm a developer. I like creating cool new shared components that
will be useful for me and for other developers as well. This is often
done
  by integrating existing technology into Zope or Grok.

* I care about the community as I get a lot of value from it. One of
the most important ways to grow our community is
   making sure that new developers find out about Zope technologies
and have a way to learn about them and start using it.

* Zope needs to stay relevant with new technical developments, picking
up on good ideas and technologies from the wider Python and web
development community.

* In order to accomplish these goals, Zope needs a sound community
structure in which we encourage participation and contributions, and
thus make progress.

Lots of my energies as a developer and community participant are put
in the Grok project (http://grok.zope.org) in particular, but since
Grok uses Zope technology at its basis I care a great deal about
improving that as well.

I give these priorities for the wider Zope community because they wil
of course influence my activities as board member as well. I don't
believe the Zope Foundation board has a role in directly taking charge
of development of any software, but it could help out structuring the
way the community is organized and picking up on issues that don't get
taken care of otherwise.

I hope you consider me in your vote. Thank you for your attention!

Martijn