Re: Draft of Proposal for the GNOME Foundation.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Rusty Conover <rconover@zootweb.com> writes: 
> Yes I would also like to be able to join (on a listening capacity
> only) in on the conference call even if I'm not on the board.  I
> hope it would have an open meeting policy.  Is this allowed now?
> 

That's pretty infeasible, it would cost a lot of money. The calls cost
money according to number of participants, and it's already several
hundred per call I think for 9 people. This has already been discussed
on gnome-hackers or gnome-devel-list with respect to the steering
committee.

Also of course, much of the purpose of the board is to talk to
corporations about confidential information. Right now such
corporations can only talk to individuals, so there are lots of de
facto decision-making persons when confidential information is
involved. Certainly when Eazel appeared for example, all their initial
contact was with a relatively arbitrary group of people. We knew about
Eazel for many months before it was announced.

It's better to elect the group of people who talk about confidential
stuff, instead of having the de facto group. But we can only do that
if the elected group can keep things confidential.

An earlier proposal was to require the board to publish complete
minutes of each meeting, except for confidential information which
should be removed.

I think requiring all discussion to go via electronic means is a
non-solution; the phone call has really been invaluable for improving
communication IMHO. We can certainly require that all decisions are
discussed on a public list, but we can't require that they are _only_
discussed there. If we do, people will just have their own informal
phone calls. Also of course, email and IRC are almost certainly less
secure than a phone call.

BTW, this has been discussed some; people who just joined the list
should read the archives so we don't have to rehash everything. The
archives are here:

 http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list

Havoc