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Who I Am

My name is Bdale Garbee, and I ask you to re-elect me to the board of 
directors of Software in the Public Interest for another term.  

My first personal contribution to what we now call Free Software was in
about 1979.  I joined the Debian project in late 1994, and have contributed
in many ways over the years:  maintaining packages, architecting and
implementing some of the early debian.org infrastructure, instigating or
aiding ports of Debian to 5 processor architectures, serving as Debian
Project Leader, to my current role as chairman of the Debian Technical 
Committee.  

I have observed SPI nearly since its founding, became an official advisor to 
the board on behalf of Debian during my term as DPL, and have remained active
as an advisor to or member of the SPI board ever since.  I was elected by the
board to serve as SPI President a year ago, and if re-elected to the board 
this year, I have expressed my willingness to continue serving as President 
for another year if the board so chooses.

I think of myself as both a technologist and a community builder.  I take
some pleasure in the fact that others have told me that the many public 
presentations I've made about Debian, the community development process, and 
various technical aspects of software development over the years have
helped influenced them to contribute in their own diverse ways.

I serve as Secretary of the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) board of 
directors, am a non-voting observer of the board of directors of the Open
Source Initiative (OSI), and provide advice to and have an extensive network 
of contacts in various other open source communities.

I am employed as Chief Technologist of HP's Open Source & Linux business.


Thoughts on the Past Year

During the past year, SPI has made significant progress towards resolving
long-standing procedural problems that were impeding our ability to meet
the basic service expectations of our associated projects.  Our treasurer 
and assistants have made significant progress towards bringing our financial
records up to standards and into a maintainable state, and caught up on our 
government paperwork filing.  We no longer have routine difficulty in making 
board meeting quorum, we have better documentation and practices for handling
resolutions of the board, and we're nearly caught up on publication of past 
meeting minutes.  

A measure of our success is that we were able to accept several significant
new associated projects in the past year.

These accomplishments are of course not my own, but I hope and believe that 
my focus on the fundamentals and effort to maintain a productive environment
for action by everyone involved in SPI as a board member and as President 
helped these things happen.


What Comes Next

The board needs to remain focused on our ability to deliver basic services
to our associated projects.  Financial transaction processing and other basic
processes aren't glamorous, but if we can't get them right, there's little 
point in trying to do anything else.  And there remain issues with our bylaws
that I think deserve to be addressed.

One of the reasons I agreed to serve as SPI President last year is that I 
sensed in the new board a real willingness and desire to fix some of the
problems the organization was experiencing.  I'm very encouraged by the
progress we've made in the last year, and I would like to have the 
opportunity to continue working on your behalf as we continue to improve 
SPI's processes and consider expanding the list of SPI activities and 
associated projects.

Thank you for your time, your attention, and your vote!