Joseph Carter's Leadership Platform
I keep thinking I should apply the obligatory background information here, so I will do that and get it out of the way. Uninterested parties are invited to skip the following portion of this thing. Much of this background is found in Lalo's interview anyway, but there's new info for people who want to know me better. My full name is Thomas Joseph Carter but I don't look like a "Thomas" and my father was also a Thomas so you can see why I don't use the name. I am 20 years old and currently live in Modesto, California. I moved three times in 1998 ending up here in October, but don't plan to move again for some time unless of course a job gives me good enough reason to move. Up until this month I was unable to actually land a "real" job due to medical insurance and have been stuck living off disability and odd consulting-type jobs to make a little extra cash. Yes, I said disability. I am legally blind with vision that is 20/310 and cannot be corrected above 20/200 by normal means. I'm investigating abnormal means, but no promises there. I read my monitor from less than the width of my keyboard away. This is hard on my eyes and gives me awful headaches, though I manage anyway. To those out there who believe this would cause me to be a less effective project leader, I challenge you to elect me and find out for yourself how much it doesn't limit me. Sure it keeps me mostly in text mode because of the 14" monitor and it causes me to need to take a break more often than I want to, and yes it means my means of transportation around parts of town I can't walk to involves hopping on a bus or getting a ride, but it has no effect on my ability otherwise. I don't have many non-computer hobbies and am studying handy stuff that will hopefully be useful to me when I attempt to get myself a Real Job, almost certainly computer/internet related and likely working with Linux. I'll tollerwate stuff from the Evil Empire if I'm being well paid to do so, but on my home machine I have only a little dos partition which I use for BIOS flashing. Dear me, my dos partition isn't y2k compliant! (Did I mention I have a sense of humor?) While some might consider my experience of just over a year now with Linux at all to be quite limited, I don't believe so. I upgraded a bo system to hamm by hand (the only way possible at the time) and learned how to configure, patch, and compile devel kernels back in the 2.1.70's. I've learned simple and not so simple bash scripting, the basics of C, how to configure firewalls and masquerading, various servers, and with the exception of C that was all before March of last year. I've been a long time contributor to debian-devel and was mistaken many times for a developer before I became one. I finally managed to get my first package and a key signed shortly before the hamm release and have been learning more since. And I don't intend to stop learning, ever. Hopefully this means that any measure of my experience once written is already obsolete. I hope so anyway! As others running this term have said, there are a number of things I will try to do as DPL, but I intend to try to do them anyway whether I'm elected or not. I've worked with Anthony Towns before on the package pool archive structure and have since the last time either of us bothered to write anything concrete down come up with a number of thoughts which I plan to hash out with him and hopefully we can offer another proposal to the group which would be nicer for the ftp admins and the many mirrors than our last proposal. My primary goal with that project is to help us be able to release on a more timely schedule without sacrificing stability and quality as some distributions have done. Leader or not I plan to continue to try and make the world more aware of Debian. Red Hat here, Red Hat there. Red Hat is NOT synonymous with Linux, but often times by reading places like Slashdot and Freshmeat, you get that impression. I have yet to see a mainstream article about Debian. It is my belief that the Project Leader's job is partly to make Debian visible to the public eye. I'm not sure some of my running mates agree with me on this issue, but I consider it important. Debian is number two only because more people haven't heard about us. We know we're running the best distribution there is don't we? I think perhaps the most important thing I can offer Debian as Project Leader is my ears. Oh sure I have a big mouth---that's easy and hardly a rare quality. Still, the largest complaint I have heard in recent months is that Debian seems to always be creating new procedures and policies to make sure all developers' voices are heard and matter. I don't intend to undo any of the procedures already established and I voted for the Debian Constitution because it was right to do so. I believe the best way to avoid new procedures that only complicate matters for us is to listen to what the majority of developers are saying, not just to a few vocal ones---or not so few vocal ones as in debates such as those we've had over KDE among other things. This means not taking two weeks to reply to messages in a thread or sometimes even the inbox and keeping track of where the project is going.