Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting 8 April 2001

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

[ The board also had a meeting at Guadec on Sunday, here are the minutes ]

	  Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting 8 April 2001
	  ===============================================


Presents:
=========

    Owen Taylor             
    Maciej Stachowiak       
    Miguel de Icaza
    Jim Gettys
    Dan Mueth               
    Bart Decrem
    Daniel Veillard  (minutes)
    Havoc Pennington


Missing:
========

    Raph Levien             
    John Heard              
    Federico
 
Decisions:
==========
   - It wasn't a chaired meeting with a precise agenda but a get
     together and discuss issues which were raised recently
   - no real decision, this meeting was rather prospective and looked
     at problems we are facing, trying to find ways to solve them.

Discussion:
===========

   - Ximian missing the advisory meeting
     Nat and Miguel apologize for having missed the advisory meeting
     We need to plan our face to face meeting more precisely
     All organization need an alternate advisory representative,
     Nat need one too.

   - We need to have liaison people on the Board for each of the
     advisory board.

   - Handling of problems
     We need mechanisms to raise problems
     Status report and avoiding surprise, the Gnome Love project was one
     of them.

     People in general need to behave better on mailing-list because
     keeping faith in doing decision and design in the public mailing list.

     Analysis of the way the Gnome-2.0 proposals went out.

     Though there was a lot of agreement the way we proceeded to 
     try to set up a final proposal was not good.

     Release planning and maintainership are likely to stay a hot topic.
     Using the list to discuss the general problem and raise issues
     is the best and less likely to raise arbitrary walls between people.

     KDE get team of hackers to hack togetther in some places for one week
     on a regular basis. Getting subgroups together tends to be far more
     efficient and high bandwidth communication solves problems smoothly.

     Problem, people are very forcused on a single project usually within
     the boundaries of their companies. It also doesn't help the 'hacking
     together' mentality which is one of the forces of the project. Getting
     regular report like reports Havoc used to produce is an efficient way
     to minimize this effect.

     Try to keep public IRC communication and public mailing-list.

     Havoc spend most of his time doing communication. As the number of
     people developping on a project grows the fact that the ratio
     coding/communicating decreases is normal and cannot be avoided.

     Quote for 1.4 release, we are moving from a benevolent dictator
     model to a way to proceed more like Apache. Miguel is clearly
     the founder of the project and one of the main leaders. But we
     are not working in an Apache group way because the board is not
     making technical decisions. We just define what Gnome is, try
     to lead the project in an homogenous way, and solve the conflits
     when they arose.


Daniel

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