Hello,
The nomination and candidacy submission period is now closed. We had seven individuals nominated, four of which have been accepted.
This is a good time to start thinking of questions to ask the candidates as you will have the chance to ask the candidates anything you'd like to know before you elect them to the board. Please post those questions to the inkscape-devel mailing list.
We will be sending out voting tokens to eligible voters before the end of this week, then you will be able to access the voting website provided by the Software Freedom Conservancy for our election. You will be able to go to that website with your token and cast your vote.[1] We will send out an e-mail after all the tokens have gone out so that you can confirm getting one.
If you are (or think you should be) in the AUTHORS file, and did not receive the test mail sent out by Ted Gould earlier this week, please send a message to inkscape.elections.committee@...3261... so that we can add it to the voters list ASAP.
Thank you and happy voting - and good luck to all our candidates :),
The Inkscape Elections Committee
[1] The voting system used is Scottish STV (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote), the voting software is an open-source fork of openSTV (from a version before it went closed-source).
------------------------------------------------------------ CANDIDATES
== Name == Krzysztof Kosiński
== Current Professional Affiliation == University of Warsaw (until end of September), Intel (probably until end of August), Google (starting in late November)
== Statement of contribution to Inkscape or related technologies == long time contributor starting in 2008, 4x GSoC participant, 2x GSoC mentor. Responsible for clipboard rewrite, multipath capabilities in the node tool, Cairo rendering, render caching, bitmap image handling improvements, recently focusing on lib2geom - general refactoring and Boolean operations.
== Personal statement == Inkscape is a special project for me. It has offered me lots of opportunities to build my experience, earn money through Summer of Code, and has indirectly prompted me to seek a career in software engineering. By serving on the board of Inkscape, I hope to be able to reciprocate some of the positive influence that Inkscape has had on my professional development over the years.
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== Name == Martin W.F. Owens
== Current Professional Affiliation == - Freelance programming contractor, Free Software focus. - Some past inkscape contracting; perl python/django websites, other.
== Statement of contribution to Inkscape or related technologies == I state I have contributed to Inkscape evident in the commit logs of the bazaar repository for the master branch and am the principal author of the inkscape-web project.
== Personal statement == Inkscape is an important tool for the Free Software community, being its primary graphical design and user interface tool as well as its most advanced web standards compliant authoring tool. Its availability and ease of use make it also important in being able to promote Free Software and the wider understanding of Free Culture as a whole.
A large portion of Inkscape's future is in organising and inviting users who participate in the wider community and I wish to be able to help manage the interfaces that serve the community in both their support and involvement in the large landscape of Inkscape's uses.
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== Name == Nicolas Dufour
== Current Professional Affiliation == Sysadmin for the French civil aviation.
== Statement of contribution to Inkscape or related technologies == I first used Inkscape in 2007 to create waypoints and airports icons for aviation maps and it rapidly became the main tool for almost all my personal and professional creative work. So I found it natural to give back to the project in 2008 (first contribution: the Printing Marks extension, in collaboration with Aurium) and never left the project since then. Some of my favorite areas are extensions, internationalization/localization, documentation, triaging bug and fixing forgotten low priority bugs. I have some blueprints pending (extensions presets, multiple preferences management and crash recovery dialog), but unfortunately there's too much to be done in the other areas and I have difficulties finding time to be a real developer. Apart from Inkscape, I also contribute to the Floss Manuals project as technical writer (very occasionally now) and as webmaster of the French FM server.
== Personal statement == I feel there's a real need for non-developer contributions. A FOSS project is not only a question of code, and bringing it to users is basically why we're contributing. That's the reason why I first focused on documentation and internationalization/localization tasks. Answering questions on LP, the Inkscape forum or IRC and helping with the website content are crucial, too (unfortunately it's very time consuming and I can't contribute as much as I'd like). Being on the Board is different, but also helps developers meet other developers and users, and legal and financial issues are very important to keep the project safe. I'd be very happy to help Inkscape that way, too.
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== Name == Alexander (Alex) Valavanis
== Current Professional Affiliation == School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering University of Leeds Leeds LS2 9JT United Kingdom
== Statement of contribution to Inkscape or related technologies == I have been an Inkscape developer since May 2011, with over 550 contributions committed to the project's code. My main involvement has been in improving the quality and maintainability of the code, and making the best use of the programming language features and software libraries available on the many different operating systems used by Inkscape's diverse user community. Specifically, I led the migration of Inkscape to the new GTK+ 3 graphical user interface library, which will "future-proof" our code, allow us to make much better use of touchscreens, and provide better support for OS X. I set up and maintain the Inkscape personal package archives (PPAs), which enable Ubuntu and Debian users to access both the latest stable version of Inkscape and daily builds of our experimental code. I have also taken a lot of interest in improving the build systems, which are used for building the Inkscape program from its source code. I have aimed to ensure that Inkscape can be built reliably on a wide range of systems, and I have liaised closely with the downstream Ubuntu and Debian package maintainers to make sure that we receive user bug reports and distribute new versions of Inkscape to users as efficiently as possible. I was very grateful for the opportunity to attend the Inkscape Hackfest in 2015, and to meet with other developers and board members to work on the code and discuss the future roadmap for the project.
== Personal statement == It is a true honour to have been nominated as a board member for Inkscape. I fully appreciate the high regard in which the project is held by its users, and the wider free software community. My role in Inkscape has, so far, focused mainly on the technical side of improving the quality and longevity of the project, and I am eager now to support the project at board level. It was a real pleasure to meet some of the other board members in person at the Hackfest earlier this year and I look forward to the opportunity to work together with them. As a Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK, I have experience in the financial planning of small to medium-scale ($1000 - $1.5 million) technical projects, and am confident in my ability to take on board responsibilities for Inkscape. I am also interested in the inter-project collaboration aspects of board membership, particularly in promoting the development of shared libraries and resources for common use with other free-software projects.