Re: Special GNOME event in California next week

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

As a footnote, I'm pretty sure one of the original reasons we created 
the board back in the day was to be able to do things like this - give 
GNOME a way to coordinate press releases without "breaking" them (press 
releases simply don't work if discussed in public in advance). Another 
reason for the board is to be able to talk to companies that aren't 
ready to go public with their plans.

It has been discussed before and led to both positives and negatives 
before. Maybe digging in the archives would be fruitful.

Ultimately I think GNOME would miss out on a lot of opportunities if the 
board could not keep things secret when appropriate, and ultimately 
there is no way to say what can be secret except that the board members 
have to use their judgment - so the accountability comes down to the 
board elections.

But in the past, there may have been some more nuanced discussion that 
may be helpful. Heck there may even be a standing policy that nobody 
remembers ;-) I don't know.

Let's do have some perspective. I think excitement and new 
ideas/directions and new commercial participation would all be big 
pluses for GNOME and we should not bikeshed too much when there are 
efforts in those directions.

Havoc