Re: steering committee vs foundation

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> writes:

> If it's a regional decision, done with regional money, then it would
> be decided by the regional foundation. If it's a GNOME-wide decision,
> then the main foundation has a fully international membership, and
> should be making that decision.

Good point.

However, we need to make up our mind on how to deal with this
"regional money" thing.

Basically there are two different approaches:

1.) Each of the regional foundations collects their own donations
    and use them to organize shows etc.

2.) Each of the regional foundations gets a certain amount of money
    for the main foundation for their stuff.

Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages.

#1 has the advantage that the regional foundations will be more independent
from the main foundation - if they manage to get a lot of contributions,
they can do a lot of things with the money.

However, if some of the regional foundations gets either way too much or
way too less donations, we'll have a problem.

This is what #2 solves: each of the regional foundations needs to tell
the main foundation how much they need etc. and the main foundation
decides.

It may have the problem of moving money around from the US to Europe etc.

> I think it's better to just elect a slate of board members, who may be
> associated with companies or regional foundations. If we look at
> representing regional foundations on the board, and companies on the
> board, and everyone else on the board, the board will be too big to do
> anything. 9 is a good number. 11 maybe. 13 is too big. There are many
> more than 13 countries in the world.

Well, I don't think we want to create a foundation for each contry -
at most we'll get 2 or 3 of them (Europe, Asia and maybe Africa).

We should be able to cut down the number of people on the board while
keeping the "regional foundation representative must be on the board"
requirement if we choose people who'll be on the board anyways to be
the representative for a particular regionally foundation.
 
> Surely if people vote on a slate for the committee, they aren't going
> to like an all-US slate.

That's what we'll avoid with having

	Mr Foo	- Representative of GNOME Europe
	Mrs Bar	- Representative of GNOME Asia

one the board and choosing Mr Foo and Mrs Bar in a way that they'd be
on the board for some other reason anyways.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin@gnome.org (private)
baulig@suse.de (work)