The X window system has been a free software project for nearly 20 years.
The community has been through many different political structures
during this time.

This talk will describe the relationship between the political
structure, technical direction and community involvement in the
project. I will focus on how different structures have been reflected
in the technical direction of the project.

The culmination of the presentation will present the current political
structure of the X.Org Foundation and describe how it finally offers the
free software community an opportunity to effect change in the
direction of this fundemental piece of the GNU/Linux desktop
environment.

There are two separate goals for the presentation:

1) Encourage *all* Debian developers to remain engaged in the
political process in both the Debian project and others in which
they are technically involved. I've seen a dispiriting lack of
high-level involvement by some of our more technically capable
members who become too frustrated by the politics and bow out of
that very important part of our community. Object lessons in how
this behaviour can go catastrophically wrong may help to pull them
back into action.


2) Gather free software advocates into becoming members of the X.org
foundation so that we make X.Org more responsive to the needs of
free software distributions and less beholden to the former
corporate masters of the X consortium.