It's my birthday and it just seemed a good idea to move the needle on Priority
#1. I'm rather uncomfortable about self-nomination yet I figure the
conversations and discussion are of value.
I hereby nominate myself as the replacement for Andrea Pescetti as Apache
OpenOffice PMC Chair.
RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CHAIR
My promise, if selected, is to faithfully deliver on the responsibilities of
a PMC Chair as required of an Officer of the Foundation.
APPROACH TO APACHE OPEN OFFICE
With regard to the PMC, which I am not a member of, my promise is to serve as
an effective member of that community and with particular attention to PMC
responsibilities to the Foundation but also to the cultivation of a
sustainable, thriving project.
As an AOO committer, my personal itch is around intake of new developers and
reducing the friction and learning curve that goes with that. I am also
personally committed to furthering the interoperability among ODF-supporting
products of all kinds in whatever ways that works for Apache OpenOffice. I
have been training to become more involved in the code, as slow as I am at
that. I am also interested in how user support can be broadened and materials
brought current and highly-available.
WHERE'S DENNIS BEEN?
Folks who've been here since OpenOffice came to the ASF will recall that I was
a member of the PPMC and did not continue after graduation to a Top Level
Project. On the PPMC I was an initial committer and I contributed to
administrative activities for some mailing lists, intake of new committers and
PPMC members. I was particularly pleased to participate in the preservation of
the OpenOffice Forums.
I have no difficulty with administrative, procedural, and policy matters. My
departure was more from recognition that I was not equipped to work on the code
and that I did not just want to continue as an administrative resource. I also
left the OASIS ODF TC around the same time.
Meanwhile, I engaged in some training, including in security and cryptography,
an interest of mine with respect to document privacy. Last year I became
interested in change-tracking and I'm currently putting the final touches on
two workshop papers I presented last September. I also did some course-work in
software development and I am continuing that.
It was renewed interest in tracked changes and other aspects of ODF
interoperability that brought me back to following AOO lists. My participation
has increased to the current level over the past few months. I also joined the
Apache Corinthia Incubator as an initial committer and PPMC member of that
newborn podling.
NO REALLY, WHERE HAS DENNIS BEEN?
I wrote my first line of code when I was 19. That was in May, 1958. I went
through the usual progression of development from programmer to becoming a lead
developer on what we called systems software, including assemblers, compilers
and utilities for the machines of the time. I also did some
programming-language design work. I had the good fortune to work at Sperry
Univac, in Seattle, New York City, and Blue Bell Pennsylvania during the peak
of Grace Hopper's presence there. Although she knew me, I did not do much
directly with her (although I graded papers for her once when she was teaching
a course in the Wharton School). Later I became a consultant, and after two
tours at Xerox Corporation, serving as a software architect and technical-staff
member, first in Rochester, New York, and finally in Palo Alto, I retired at
the end of 1998. I recommend retirement as a career.
I began working in industry standards when ASCII was a new-born and ALGOL 60
was expected to revolutionize programming. Document formats became of interest
while I was at Xerox and I participated in development of consortium agreements
for document management. Most of my internal work in my later Xerox years was
around interoperability provisions of various kinds. I dug into OOXML and ODF
only after my retirement when those standardization efforts were moving along.
There are words of mine in both of those specifications.
SO WHAT?
Most of us are only acquainted on the Internet and, while I have met others on
AOO, those occasions are rare and fleeting.
More than that, I want to offer, in my nomination, an opportunity to say what
doesn't work with regard to me personally. I welcome that. And please express
more of what is wanted from the Project that is not happening and how any
contributors are expected, not just the PMC and its Chair, to make a difference
with respect to the expectations this community has.
I respect all feedback and discussion and I will still be here whatever the
outcome of this Priority #1 activity happens to be. I am not attached to being
PMC Chair. I am offering to take on those duties as a means for us to move
forward onto other priority challenges for the Project.
-- Dennis E. Hamilton
orc...@apache.org
dennis.hamil...@acm.org +1-206-779-9430
https://keybase.io/orcmid PGP F96E 89FF D456 628A
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