Re: Questions for the candidate

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 06:51:20PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> >   Okay, I restate, can you give us examples of lost time spent on the board
> > on topic you or others were not interested into. Then we can discuss to what
> > extend people think delegating to Tim or someone else is really needed.
> 
> The discussions on the board were needless chit-chat of events, hence
> irrelevant, and hence why I think they could have been delegated to
> someone else, and hence me not remembering them nor having an interest
> in digging the archives.

  So you see no value in the archives of the 3 years of board meeting I
made. It is an interesting statement to say the least ... It's your words
people will appreciate accordingly.

> But if there were so many important discussions, would you then feel
> comfortable saying that the board took 26 solid decisions that year that
> must have had the input of the eleven board members involved?

  depend what year. A lot of the discussions done figuring out the bylaws
were clearly important and needed exposed consensus.
I also note that all attempts at doing decisions by emails FAILED, if people
don't have the kick of having to go to that phone meeting they would just
ignore the issue and let things rot in their inbox. I don't see what would
have changed now that was different about it from 2001-2003.

> Please list those 26 crucial decisions that required those eleven people
> involved. 

  If you're too lazy or not interested enough in debating about it,
I will take your challenge taking the last year we had minutes:

  December 17 2002
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2002-December/msg00003.html
  1/  old + new board meeting
  2/  Gnome Summit at the OLS: Board agreement of principle
  
  January  7 2003
  3/  Richard Stallman request to remove link to ggobi
  4/  FundRaising discussion of approaches.

  January 28 2003
  5/  discussion on "Desktop Linux Consortium"
  6/  Select backups for chairman / secretary; select a new treasurer.

  February 11 2003
  7/  Representative of GNOME on SPI
  8/  Desktop Linux Consortium again 

  February 25 2003
  8/  again 
  9/  Jeff "World Tour" in June/July

  March 11 2003
  10/ FSF communication : how to get in touch better
  11/ work on the joint announcement between KDE and GNOME
      on the future of the X Window later published as
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2003-March/msg00002.html

  March 25 2003
  12/ discussion with Jim Gettys on XFree evolution
  13/ GNOME BOOK preparation
  14/ Discussion of management of Tim

  April 8 2003
  15/ GUADEC final steps, selecting a firm date for the Advisory Board

  April 22 2003
  16/ Financial report from Tim
  17/ Advisory board meeting - preparation/discussion.

  June 3 2003
  18/ Newsletter discussion
  19/ XFree86 issue
  20/ GUADEC Board meeting annual face to face preparation

  Skipping the June 15 2003 face to face board meeting, you were not 
  present for the full day.

  Skipping the Advisory Board meeting June 19 2003, you were again not
  present at all.

  2003 Aug 12
  21/ Mini-Summit discussion
  22/ GNOME Deutschland e.V.
  23/ Advisory board meeting tentative phone meeting

  Aug 26 2003
  24/ GNOME Summit accepting offer of NY
  25/ GUADEC proposal from Norway/Stuttgart
  26/ 2.4 Release: marketing side

  Im' down to the 26 items which I think were all in the Board attributions,
quite before the end of the year.
Most of them are about internal processing/review, communication with
other entities, final decisions about places or time for events and meetings.
There were only selected items.

  Now that you have the list, and if you remember about them, what had to
be dropped from the board work load and why ?
  Maybe all this was "needless chit-chat", apparently that's what you think.

> I personally, can only remember a few times when a vote had to be taken
> because there was wild disagreement.

  Often it is needed to be sure we have consensus.
  Democracy is a process.
  If you don't have opportunity to raise your voice, or only too late
  what is the point.

> Going back to your example about France: your president meets with his
> group every week or so.  Good.  Notice how there is a president, mhm,
> presiding?

  The board has a chair running the minutes. The French President basically
take that role at the meeting.
  The French president is not the person who happen to be delegated all the
day to day decisions as you are suggesting it should at the board level.

  I think my comparison was relevant, but yours is not.

Daniel

-- 
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veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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