New volunteer

[Bruce Miller]

The KDE quality teams HOWTO recommends that one announce his intention 
to participate by posting to the Quality Team mailing list. Hence this 
message.

I am a career civil servant who has worked (mainly in policy fields) in 
the Government of Canada in Ottawa and am approaching retirement which, 
I guess, makes me "d'un certain age".

My addiction to computers began in 1982 with an Osborne 1a, a five-inch 
square screen displaying 52x24 characters and CP/M 2.2. I have always 
enjoyed working from a command line but my primary interest in IT has 
been its application to the job of the so-called knowledge worker and 
how IT can make him/her more efficient and more effective. I do not "do 
code", except for relatively trivial scripts. I am accustomed to 
following a recipe to ./configure & make & su & make install but 
experience, not training, is my only guide when one of these steps 
fails.

My particular government department (the foreign ministry) has an 
especially sharp divide between the "business lines" and the IT 
section. Some years ago, Departmental management detached six Foreign 
Service Officers to work in IT to try to bridge that divide and to 
improve communications and understanding in both directions. I was in 
the first group of six and enjoyed it immensely until a serious 
accident to an immediate family member added to personal health 
problems forced me to go on extended leave. I am well on the way to 
recovery but expect to remain on leave for a still "undefined" period.

There is considerable overlap between this previous job and the tasks 
proposed for non-developers on KDE quality teams. The big difference is 
the opportunity to become more involved in the technical development 
proccess in KDE. That suits me fine.

My background and interests would suggest the following roles:
1. bug triage. Attempting to reproduce bugs, verifying which versions 
they apply to, assessing their severity and proposing priorities for 
bugfixes.
2. documentation: I have many years experiencing writing in English and 
in editing and translating other languages.
3. feature development: analysing input from users with a view to 
providing input on priorities for future development. Working on 
deciding which itches get scratched.

I will lurk on these lists for a while in order to get a feel for the 
nature of the work and for the current issues.