Re: Some comments

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

Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> writes:

> Some examples:
> 
>  - Eazel wants to talk to the board about how to approach the 
>    GNOME community, and wants help from the board planning their
>    GNOME announcement
> 
>  - A GNOME member wants to discuss some personal issue (I can't think 
>    of what this might be, but it seems possible)

Let me another example:

When the board can talk confidentally, this does not only help external
companies which want to talk with us, but it also helps the GNOME Project
itself.

Currently, basically all decisions in the project are made by the steering
committee which was never democratically elected. In addition to this, the
steering committe knows about most, but not about all things concerning the
project which need to be kept secret.

Sometimes, a GNOME hacker is asked by some person whether he or she (the
person) can talk to him (the GNOME hacker) confidentally about some kind
of thing.

Now, this GNOME hacker has a problem: either he or she can simply say no
to the other person - but the information may be important for the GNOME
projects and the other person may also feel pissed off - or he or she says
yes, but then comes the next problem - namely the problem which the current
steering committee has at the moment - now, someone knows about a confidental
thing, but to whom talk about it - just Miguel, or the steering committee,
or some company ?

This leads to the - in a democracy - very bad situation that decisions are
made just by a few people simply because they can't talk about it to anybody
else.

With the GNOME Foundation and its Board of Directors, this'll change.

Any GNOME Hacker will know that he or she can always talk to the board and
the the board will always to the best for the project.

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