Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Elections and Nomination process

The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year. Currently the election will be at the 2011 Kernel Summit at one of the Joint events (probably on the Wednesday 29 August) and will be open to all attendees of the Weeks events (Kernel Summit, LinuxCon and Plumbers).

Anyone is eligible to stand for election, simply send your nomination to:

[email protected]

We currently have four nominees (the incumbents):

Chris Mason <[email protected]>
Hugh Blemings <[email protected]>
James Bottomley <[email protected]> John W. Linville <[email protected]>

The deadline for receiving nominations is up until the beginning of the event where the election is held (Currently thought to be the evening of August 29th Pacific Daylight Time). Although, please remember if you're not going to be present that things go wrong with both networks and mailing lists, so get your nomination in early).

James Bottomley (TAB Chair)

Will you please summarize what the TAB has done (i.e., accomplishments) in the past year?

thanks,

~Randy

Was this too much to ask?

~Randy

No, of course not! :-)

You probably realize that the TAB tends to keep a low profile. We have tended to prefer "soft diplomacy" where possible, at least so long as I've been on the TAB. I think this is a good policy overall, and it is conducive to the non-partisan, 'all for the benefit of Linux' nature of the TAB. But, it isn't necessarily great for self-promotion...

In general, the TAB does the following:

	-- provides some oversight/assistance/feedback to the KS/LPC
	organizers;

	-- provides feedback to LF staff on event planning;

	-- provides a source of community/technical contacts for LF
	members that want a hand to hold;

	-- provides a pool of 'volunteers' to help the LF fill
	last-minute speaking slots or other random requests;

More specifically, in the past year we reviewed the plans for LF to take over the kernel.org administration. We were also quite involved with the discussions about what services needed to be prioritized to bring kernel.org back on-line in a timely and secure fashion. You can also blame us for the 'web of trust' (aka key signing) stuff from last Fall. Greg provided a great deal of leadership on all the kernel.org bits, of course.

Another point of interest during the last year were some discussions between the TAB and the Software Freedom Conservancy to address some concerns that had been raised about GPL enforcement, particularly regarding such enforcement for the kernel. After some back-and-forth, I think those issues were mostly addressed in an amicable fashion.

Also during the last year, the TAB has spent a lot of time grappling with the UEFI secure boot thing and discussing how the Linux community can influence and/or deal with the ramifications of it. Some of that is still on-going, of course.

So, anyway...I think that provides a rough overview of the types of things the TAB does. I'm sorry if it lacks some specifics -- there is a lot of details that really amount to a bunch of long discussions and talking on the phone. Still, I think the TAB fulfills an important role in the community even if it isn't always particularly visible.

Hth!

John

John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
[email protected]			might be all we have.  Be ready.