Candidacy to the BoD elections: Gábor Kelemen

Dear Community

My name is Gábor Kelemen, I’m a long time contributor as Hungarian translator & bugreport-generator; member of the Foundation since 2013.

I’d like to run for membership in the Board of Directors for the first time.

During the last five years I had the opportunity to get in touch with a great cross-section of people working in the public administration of my country; and an even greater cross-section of files they create and use on daily basis.

Another huge experience was creating a small but talented in-house developer team from scratch, and seeing the great results they achieved in terms of interoperability of the formerly mentioned files.

In this project I was frequently reminded of common end users’ expectations of a tool that aspires to replace the tool they use for doing their job: it is day-to-day reliability and interoperability with the outside world - because there is always a bigger fish that does not take “no” for an answer; maybe in the corner office, or in an independent institution or even in another country.

Let that thought sink in for a moment.

Based on this unique experience I’d like to serve in the Board to strengthen the communitys offering for similarly diverse user bases:

  • Understanding users’ needs is key. I was looking a lot at the Bugzilla reports and in most cases it’s hard to see what’s the actual problem, let alone seeing the bigger picture: what popular features are missing/unreliable?

  • Therefore, I think the Foundation would need to put more manpower into the QA area, to get and present useful data out of Bugzilla - for internal and external use alike - for decisions about future development direction.- Interoperability is a gate into our user base.

  • The Foundation might want to open this gate as wide as possible by both sponsoring and enabling further development/improvement of popular but missing/unreliably working features, identified by hard QA data.- Further enhancement of the ODF standard is the logically following step, so that users that came through the interoperability gate can stay in the land of open standards.

  • Therefore I’d like to see the Foundation to be a supporter for standardization of new feature additions.

Based on my experience I think steps in these directions can help increasing the global relevance of the product and the community.

Formalities:

Full name: Gábor Kelemen

Email: kelemeng@ubuntu.com

Corporate affiliation: allotropia GmbH

<75 words candidacy:

“I would like to serve in the Board with patience and perseverance to strengthen the Foundations ability to understand both end users’ and organizational users’ needs and enable development decisions focusing on interoperability and to support the further development of the ODF standard.”

I’m open to questions!

All the best

Gábor Kelemen