Re: Questions for the candidate

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 05:56:38PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> >   If you think your time is scarce for going though those thing,
> > what do you expect to do instead ?
> >   I can't believe that you think giving one hour of your time every too
> > week is too much for the good standing of the project. And clearly, not
> > doing so - as this year board has shown - reflect badly on the project
> > organization !
> 
> You are clearly not interested in understanding the problem, you are
> interested in a flame war, because you clearly do not want to understand
> the point am trying to make, and instead you are choosing to vilify and
> twist my words.

  I may have misunderstood or taken out of context words, but I want
to go back to regular every 2 weeks meetings. I remember it's something
that had been in issue even in the past, it is clear that if I'm elected
I will push to get back to that mode.

> If you were actually paying attention instead of trying to start a
> fight, you might have realized that this year, I was not on the board.

  I know that, that's why I suggested to make references to board minutes
from 2001 to 2003 because we were both on those calls, i.e. something 
we can both debate about. You are saying time was spent on too trivial
task that should be delegated, and I can't really agree with that and
suggest you hint us on the subject. Wherer either of us get elected, at least
whoever sits on the board may benefits from skipping them and delegating
(to Tim the director or whoever they thing would do this better).

> So maybe this reflects badly on you.  I do not know.
> 
> That being said, and back to the topic from your gratuitous attempt at a
> flame:

  I did not try to flame. I stated I want to get back to a predictable
minuted way of doing board meetings. I also asked to get examples of
topic where the director (or whoever run the casual business).

> My proposal to have a president is to better utilize the time of the
> members of the board.  Does the whole board need to be involved in every
> decision?  No.

  Usually for the past of the board I know:
    - either we handled things ourselves if something was to be done
    - or we delegated on the specific topic (release, communications,
      finances, GUADEC, etc...) to either an independant subset of the
      board or to a subcomitee.
I won't say this was always a success, but I don't think "be involved in
every decision" reflect in any way how we operated. The director is paid
by the Fundation now to do some of the day to day work, for other topic
working by consensus wasn't in my memory of 3 years of the board a loss
of our time, and I asked you to give such examples.

> That is why boards elect presidents in real life, and that is why every
> other organization (profit and non-profit) has these kinds of
> structures: to be more efficient.

  We have a director, we pay for it. For decision making, we should
operate by consensus. Maybe we agree, but it seems not, you want to create
a hierarchy amoung the board, I don't think it has more usefulness than
drawback, especially since we already have a single person in charge of
the day to day administration.

> The every-two-weeks meeting is a drag to most people: only a couple

  If you can't do it, don't do it ! But it is needed IMHO. Here in France
the president and all ministry meets every week, and make public announcement
at that point. Maybe in a non-elected, slow moving kind of hierarchy this
is not the norm, but for an elected set responsible of a project, I do
think predictable meeting and feedback are one of the key principle to
keep a clear democratic process.
  I'm very sorry but if elected I will ask for regular meetings, maybe
your agenda would be too tight to make them, maybe I will be put in the
minority, I can't guess the future, but I will ask for those regular meetings.

> really participate in a discussion, because the topics are not of the
> interest to everyone.

  Okay, I restate, can you give us examples of lost time spent on the board
on topic you or others were not interested into. Then we can discuss to what
extend people think delegating to Tim or someone else is really needed.

Daniel

-- 
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veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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