[maemo-community] Council nomination: Graham Cobb (gcobb)

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Saturday 12 September 2009 20:36:19 Andrew Flegg wrote:
> http://maemo.org/profile/view/gcobb/
>
> Graham is another long term contributor to the Maemo community. His
> experience as a developer, and the ever-patient maintainer of the GPE
> PIM suite makes him another ideal candidate for the Maemo Community
> Council.

Thank you for the kind words, Andrew.  I have decided to accept the nomination 
and stand for the council.

Some background about me:

I am one of the oldest members of the community but I hope you won't count 
that against me.  By day I work in marketing, for a software company.  But I 
used to be a professional software developer, for about 15 years, before I 
turned to the dark side.  My background was in real-time software in data 
networking (routers and similar devices) -- so I really don't know much about 
GUIs!

I am a strong supporter of open source and am proud to consider myself (a 
small) part of that community, having made modest contributions to a few OS 
communities before (Tivo, OpenWRT, Linux kernel, Rex 6000).  

Of course, the Maemo community is the leading community for open source 
development on personal devices so I am very excited to be part of it.

I have been active developer on the Internet Tablets since soon after the 770 
came out.  I work on things that I need for myself but try to make them 
useful for as many people as possible.  I am currently the most active 
maintainer in the GPE project and maintain the various Maemo ports (I still 
support gregale, bora and chinook/diablo as well as porting to Fremantle).  I 
enjoy fixing bugs as well as helping users.

I follow the -users, -developers and -community mailing lists closely and 
often contribute (you hadn't noticed?).  I am not as active in ITT/talk or on 
IRC.

If elected, my focus will be on empowering and further building the developer 
community.  I think that with the arrival of the N900 this is going to be a 
very exciting time for Maemo and I want to make sure that both commercial and 
hobbyist developers feel at home and can make an active contribution to the 
community.  My goal will be to do what I can to help make Maemo become the 
platform of choice for all the neat new applications because of its openness 
and its community as well as its devices.

My strengths are:

o my experience of working in large companies, both in development and in 
marketing, so I can relate to Nokia and to the new breed of developers who 
will be attracted to the platform, as well as other hobbyists like myself

o my interest in providing tools for developers to allow them to create and 
manage both large and small applications and ensuring they are well supported 
by Nokia and the Maemo council and staff

o my concern for the users, who are the people who will ultimately decide 
whether the Maemo platform is successful

One of my weaknesses is that my emails are too long!