Re: Temporaray enlargement of the GNOME Board with 3 persons

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

ted gould cx wrote:
> As for getting people involved, perhaps posting to this list?  I realize
> it's hard to find tasks that someone might be able to pick up and do,
> but it is usually worthwhile in the end.  Perhaps a "TODO" list on
> live.gnome.org of things that the board is planning on doing, and will
> do, but if someone wants to beat them to it :)  Perhaps something in the
> meeting minutes?

This point has come up a couple of times. Getting people onto the board
(or at least onto board-list and on the conference calls) is useful,
because a fair amount of what the board isn't doing well this year
(primarily because we don't have an employee, it has to be said) is
private, or requires a mandate. Things like lodging cheques or
withdrawing money from the bank account, dealing with our accountant to
get official forms or information on the foundation, invoicing companies
for money, being aware of donations coming in and thanking donors (who
potentially want to stay anonymous), things like that.

There are many things that we could perhaps do more out in the open, and
filtering our agendas and minutes better into public/private parts (as
we started to do at the beginning of the year), posting them in a more
regular and timely manner, and so on. All of those tasks take time,
along with all of the other slack we've been picking up, and (as Anne
pointed out) the changes in the personal and work lives of a few board
members, distribution releases, births, job changes, travel with work
and so on.

But all the stuff that we're struggling with at the moment is kind of
private stuff - which means having some kind of non-public inner circle
of people - perhaps not on the board, but at least in some way engaged
to respect board secrecy. Anything that we have been able to do in
public (or avoid doing by delegating), we've been mostly doing.

For what it's worth, I think most of our problems will go away once we
have an employee, but back in October, I said that one reason why we
shouldn't be afraid to reduce the number was because we would always
have the possibility to increase it again if we realised we had made a
mistake. I definitely thought that a few months ago, but when we had
Zana as our admin, she not only caught up with the backlog, we had the
impression that things were really moving forward.

At the moment, we don't have 7 active, regularly answering their board
mail board members. I think 6 active board members is probably enough to
hold down the fort, if no important functions are missing, but we're
more likely to have 6 or 7 active out of 9 than out of 7.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
bolsh gimp org
Lyon, France