Well, seeing as none of the candidates’ platforms so far seem to cover all the things I want out of a board, and there’s been practically no discussion on them, I’ll have a go; hopefully this might stimulate something more from them. (PS: note to Athomas, it’s standard practice to only allow people to stand for an election if they get a platform/speech handed in on time by the end of the selection process. Yuri, for instance, has only given people 3 days to process his info! And where’s David’s campaign speech/platform?).
The J* API’s are not my area of expertise, and I believe either Gregory or Shawn would do a much better job with them; one of them is bound to be voted in for this, and I’d usually just support their recommendations.
My major interest in this board is driving the JGO community forward on the following fronts:
[] Community participation
[] Sun-supported marketing
[] Game-driven changes to java, the JDK, the JRE, etc
[] Helping the GTG to understand the JGO community, and avoid some of the unfortunate accidents/misunderstandings in the past
[*] Making sure things actually get done, as opposed to only being talked about.
I want to see regular (once weekly) new articles published on JGO, from the community, on the topics we discuss here. It’s important to understand that these do NOT replace the forums - articles take longer to write, require much more effort, are better thought out, and a single article tends to summarise most of what you want to know. I would typically expect something to be debated in the forums, making us realize an article on that subject would be helpful, then the article would come some time later - taking into account all the debate on the forum, but summarising things more concisely.
Think of articles from flipcode, and to a lesser extent game-dev.net and CFXweb. But our articles would be aimed at us as an audience, mainly covering three topics:
[] Tutorials for doing things in java in particular (e.g. regularly updated tutorials on JOGL, Java2D, sound API’s, etc). Usually aimed at newbie java games programmers, who NEED decent tutorials.
[] Marketing, publishing, selling games - specifically looking at the problems java game developers face here, and including post-mortems from our community of the problems they’ve faced and any successes / tricks they’ve learned.
[*] “Java Games Development tricks” and / or Advanced articles. These tend to be less factual and more personal opinions and tricks, due to the fact that it’s less well-trodden ground - e.g. some of Cas’s opinions on avoiding threads, or e.g. some of my opinions on use of NIO.
These would all be peer-reviewed, just to sanity check them for obvious inaccuracies / problems. You could trust JGO articles never to be glaringly wrong, at least :).
I believe I can find the people within the community both to write and review these articles, and am willing to do a lot of it myself until I’ve got others involved.
I also think there’s a lot more promotion of JGO that Sun could do with very little effort, but they need some advice / help here. I see front-page news articles covering Sun and the games industry that completely omit JGO and the GTG. A little co-ordination with the GTG could get much greater exposure.
From my experience of organizing exhibitions, competitions, etc, I’d also have a particular personal interest in getting the oft-suggested “Sun JGO games competition” made into a reality. Also, I think I can see ways of increasing sun’s presence at industry exhibitions (and taking along demo / beta games from this community with them) which don’t need Sun to spend lots of money, but would take too much time for the GTG to organize themself - I want to do the groundwork etc, so all they have to do is make the final decision. This also applies especially to non-US events, where I think the GTG is even less likely to get involved just because they don’t have anyone outside the US (I’m based in the UK).
On the subject of GTG’s understanding of this community, I think many of us know of some of the major accidents. E.g. the change to games.dev.java.net which killed these forums in the blink of an eye! (until they realised how much we wanted them back -urgently-). Also this election could have been organized much better, with just a tiny bit of feedback from the community before it started. I’ve worked on this problem lots of times before (helping committees to understand their societies’ members, and improve communication between the two).
Finally, I really don’t think most people have what it takes to ensure the things they want the GTG to do actually get done. It’s always had to get corporates to move on anything - even when you have a dept head (e.g. ChrisM) on your side. It’s even harder when you’re not even a salaried employee. The guys at Sun might not like the sound of this ;D but if we agreed to do something I’d sure as heck made sure it actually got done (and if we were progressing too slowly on something or delaying it unreasonably, I’d start making a fuss until we either agreed not to do it, or actually got it done).
I have a lot of experience in:
[] Organizing committees, getting things done, heckling people until they do what they promised (skills honed from working both with corporates who are slow to do anything new, and with volunteer organizations, where no-one is being paid to do anything)
[] Promotional activities for communities - e.g. I’ve arranged and run events for upwards of 2000 people, co-run a £50k business plan competition, arranged 5-figure sponsorship deals etc
[] Shared virtual worlds, game-networking, MMOG tech development, etc (c.f. my company @ grexengine.com)
[] Advising startups and fledgling games developers; e.g. helping people writing their first game to organize themselves and give their best shot at getting it out the door. Helping them understand the steps they must take to get to market, and how hard it’s going to be.
If you’re interested, I have a very short bio here: http://grexengine.com/sections/people/adam/ (or click on moderator info at the top of this page - I’m Adam Martin / blahblahblahh)
…But I think it’s more important what I’d actually do on the board rather than what I’ve already done.
P.S. Just to be clear: I’m not putting down the current candidates, but there are two positions, and those candidates I think would be especially good for one wouldn’t on their own be covering everything I think needs covering.
I think that the platforms we’ve seen already from the candidates are going to leave a gaping hole, and this is a lost opportunity to get some really good stuff going (although I’m sure whoever gets voted in will certainly get really good stuff going as well - it’s just we could have got more).
P.P.S. Yes, I do think it’s stupid that I was cut out of the elections :). And I have already tried to get some of what I mentioned above going - but I seem never to be able to get hold of the GTG people long enough to get much stuff to happen. They’re very busy people.
