Position statement for Jonathan McDowell

I am Jonathan McDowell, Noodles on IRC, and I'm standing for re-election to the SPI board.

I have been an SPI director since July 2009 and served as the secretary since December 2009. During that time I've helped to ensure that our monthly meeting goes smoothly, from sending timely meeting reminders and announcements, to producing the meeting agendas and minutes. I'm pleased to say that we have at no point had a substantial backlog of meeting minutes during my time as secretary.

I joined SPI as a contributing member in 2002 and am a regular user of many of the services and software offered by SPI associated projects.

My primary project affiliation is with Debian; I've been a user since 1999 and a developer since 2000. Originally I maintained a small handful of packages, but I've also been involved with Application Manager work bringing new members into Debian. These days my main involvement is maintaining the OpenPGP keyring used to authenticate Debian contributors.

During my time so far with SPI I've been involved in moving us to a new website. I believe this has been an overall success - we are now in a situation where the details on the site are largely up to date and most of the board have found it easy to make contributions. I have also helped new projects with the process of joining SPI. If re-elected I plan to continue with this work, and will also continue to offer my services as secretary.

I believe that there are ways the organisation can improve, but where we're currently at is working well as a baseline. In particular I'd like to see us work out how we can scale larger as an organization. I think Robert Brockway's efforts to plan for our business continuity are an excellent start to this, and I intend to assist with any institutional knowledge that I'm able to provide.