Suggestions for the board

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

Hi all,

I posted these suggestions to the Foundation Board, but they should really
be posted here for open discussion. I've cut out bits of them for brevity's
sake.

Thanks,

- Jeff

----- Forwarded message from Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> -----

Subject: Mini Teams + Reports

Hi all,

There was a lot of discussion about smaller teams and organisation of GNOME
during the run up to the election. As it happens, we already have quite a
few of these groups, but we have not succeeded in closing the communication
loop between them all.

First off, there's the vendor groups. Red Hat, Ximian, Code Factory, Sun,
etc., all have hackers working on stuff, and have very high internal
communications bandwidth. ie. all the hackers are able to discuss things
face-to-face, in real time, without the hassle of irc or mailing lists (and
the occasional miscommunications caused by them).

Then we have a number of project groups, such as the bindings authors,
office apps, some large 'third-party' apps such as Galeon, etc. They're
generally a bit less organised, and further distributed, so don't have as
great an advantage with communication as the vendor groups.

It would be good to encourage these groups - especially the vendor groups -
to send regular status reports to more general public lists (gnome-hackers).
I think this is an appropriate thing for the board to consider, even if it's
simply identified as something to discuss and encourage on the lists.

----- End forwarded message -----

[ Dan Mueth followed up the above email with some details of the discussions
that the previous board had. Further work by the present board to encourage
this kind of reporting would be WAY COOL MAN. ]

----- Forwarded message from Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> -----

Subject: First Suggestion?

[ That subject sounds too much like 'first post' - apologies. ;) ]

Hey all,

Congratulations everyone, what a great board we have again!

Here's something that I've been meaning to mention for a while, and is
probably most appropriate as a Foundation board / marketing thing...

I'm sure our foundation member companies have researched our licenses
(GPL/LGPL) to the nth degree. I'd be very surprised if they haven't, given
the contributions they are making.

Published results of this research may be a valuable contribution both to
GNOME and Free Software in general, whilst providing an interesting and
different pro-community/pro-business marketing angle for the companies
concerned.

Smaller ISV's would feel more comfortable working with GNOME and Free
Software, having big names 'rubber-stamping' the L/GPL. The community would
(should?) be impressed with this information being made available in good
faith.

I hope this is a positive and worthwhile task for the Foundation to work on.

Good luck this year! :)

----- End forwarded message -----

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