Re: Minutes of the GNOME Board meeting Mar 12 2002

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 07:52:55PM -0600, Eric Baudais wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2002 at 07:47:12PM -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >  - Meeting of members at GUADEC.
> > 
> >     Our not-yet-ratified bylaws require an annual meeting of the
> >     members of the GNOME Foundation. Last year the "update on GNOME
> >     Foundation took that role".
> >     Typically it will be a report back from the board, around 30mn
> >     long during lunch.
> 
> I know there will be a lot of members of the Foundation not attending GUADEC.  

  Yep we know. This would be the case for any face to face meeting
independantly of the location.

> I would like to know if there are any provisions for a proxy or absentee 
> voting system for any actions that will be voted on such as adopting the 
> bylaws.

  We don't plan to make any decision at that meeting. It is expected to
be a presentation of our annual activity as well as taking input from
the audience. BTW it was pointed out that 30 minutes may be too short and 
that one hour would be a better duration.

> I also think it would be good to post an agenda along with a list of 
> actions the board will recommend that the Foundation approve.

  We we don't intend to make any vote or such at this meeting. But I expect
the content of the presentation to be made available in an electronic form and
to also provide minutes of the meeting, especially the feedback received.
Then the "normal" processing on the list should not be harder for someone
who could not attend.

> If the membership of the Foundation will be holding an annual meeting, I would 
> like to see it moved around the world.  GUADEC is an European conference and 
> therefore will not be convient for members from Australia or Japan or America 
> to attend.  Since we have members from around the globe it would be purdent to 
> rotate this annual meeting to different parts of the world on a regular basis.

  I agree in principle, but we don't have that many opportunity, GUADEC is
so far the main GNOME membership meeting, and doing too many meetings can also
dilute our efforts, participation welcome, but it's a lot of work.

  It is very clear that we cannot do face to face decision making meetings
without hampering seriously the representativity of our membership. I think
this was a clear goal when designing and reviewing the bylaws, so all the
decision making process at the membership level allow electronic submission.
  Actually it's a good point for someone interested, rereviewing the bylaws
to make sure that nothing actually requires an in-person meeting for foundation
level decisions.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/