Platform for Neil McGovern

My name is Neil McGovern, and I'm standing for a position on the SPI Board of Directors.

I've been involved with Debian since early 2003, and I'm currently:

• An Application Manager
• A member of the Testing Security team
• One of the organisers of DebConf, the annual Debian Developers' conference
• One of the authors of the WebApps common packaging policy
• A package maintainer, maintaining drupal, drivel, bootbot and tpctl

I'm one of the founding members of OpenVAS, an open source fork of the security scanner Nessus, which became a SPI project in November, 2005.

I'm also currently re-implementing the SPI Website, which is reaching its final stages. I've been a regular attendee of SPI board meetings, and it is on #spi that I was encouraged to stand for election :) Should I be elected to the board of directors, I intend to stand for the position of secretary.

My main goal for SPI is to achieve a greater degree of involvement from its member projects, and the community in general. At the latest count, we have 10 member projects, with over 1500 members. However, we have only around 350 contributing members of SPI. I believe that we should try to expand SPI's membership base and encourage a greater participation from our membership.

Secondary goals include:

• Documentation There is a lack of documentation about the procedures of SPI, and the benefits that SPI brings. I would like to see clearer guidelines, for example, on the requirements to become a member project, the joining process, and what member projects can expect from SPI.
• Press releases/news In order for SPI to appear active, we need to keep the main website updated, and inform people of what we're doing. News on the main page, and press releases when we have a major announcement, will help bring SPI further into the public eye.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me (neilm@debian.org) or catch me on IRC as 'Maulkin' on most networks. Thank you for your time