Re: Initial slate

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi Martin,

I think it does make sense to have at least 1 person associated with Helix
Code, Eazel, Red Hat, and let's not forget Sun.  But if it turns out that
there's 2 people from one or two of these companies, I wouldn't obsess about
that.  After all, the board will be a bunch of individuals elected for their
contribution to Gnome, not for their corporate affilition.  And 2 people from
each of those companies feels like too much corporate influence.  I would
recommend at least 3 or 4 people without any corporate affiliation.

I also think it is very important to have one or two really strong process
people on the board: people who are going to be great meeting facilitators,
and who are going to keep an eye on keeping the group functioning as an
effective team.  And so it's also important to have personalities that
balance each other out.  For example, you don't want 3 people with corporate
affiliations who are really vocal, and then a bunch of folks without
corporate affiliations who are shy and are very quiet.  The net effect then
is that there's too much corporate influence.

And it would also be great to have a "wise elder" of the open source movement
on board.  For example, it's been really great to get input from Jim Gettys,
and John Gilmore, and Brian Behlendorff, on this list.  They provide a lot of
perspective.

And yeah, it's great to not have 100% hackers but also someone who's
passionate about marketing Gnome to the world.

So that's a lot of constraints.

Yesterday, I sent a recommendation to the current steering committee that
they make a little committee of 3 people or so to try to take all these
constraints and put together an initial slate that would be proposed by the
steering committee.  I think that's probably the cleanest way to proceed.
Although I think there's nothing wrong with having competing slates.  So if
there's a group of people on this list who feel strongly that the slate
shouldn't come from the steering committee, than those people might work
together to propose an alternate slate.

Bart




Martin Baulig wrote:

> Joe Shaw <joe@helixcode.com> writes:
>
> > > b) the release coordinator(s) of the next GNOME release
> > >    (counting as one person) [Jacob,Maciej]
> >
> > I would prefer that no seats be held by more than one person.
>
> Well, I was thinking about the function "release coordinator".
>
> But it may be really better to have one person per seat.
>
> > > Now let's add some more constraints:
> > >
> > > i)   at least 2 people from Helix Code, but at most 3
> > > ii)  at least 2 people from Eazel
> > > iii) at least 2 people from Red Hat
> > > iv)  at most  1 person from another company
> > > v)   at lesat 2 people without corporate affiliation
> >
> > I think the proposed bylaws already prevent one company from controlling
> > the board, so I don't really think that these constraints are necessary,
> > although we ought to keep a representative balance in place.
>
> For the initial slate it may be good to have the three most important
> companies (Helix Code, Eazel, Red Hat) being equally represented.
>
> --
> Martin Baulig
> martin@gnome.org (private)
> baulig@suse.de (work)
>
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