Re: A question to candidates

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

Le jeudi 22 novembre 2007, à 18:11 +0100, Dave Neary a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> I did send these to the membership committee, but voting's nearly open,
> and I think they're important, so I guess I'll just ask...
> 
> The foundation's role is essentially to facilitate the enthusiasm of the
> GNOME project, as Andrew Cowie blogged earlier [1]. This consists of two
> major elements - managing/improving the finances that the foundation
> has, and identifying areas where those finances can help remove
> roadblocks or encourage productive contribution.
> 
> After two years without a full-time employee, the foundation's finances
> are in a decent state, with $150K cash and $50K receivables [2].
> 
> What do you see as the best way to spend this money?

We've started sponsoring small face-to-face meetings, and this will
continue. This is probably one of the best way to spend this money.
Hiring is also important (see below).

> In terms of hiring, do you prefer hiring a sysadmin, or an executive
> director?

Can I cheat and say "both"? :-)

There has been issues with our infrastructre too frequently in the past
few months (bugzilla being unresponsive for quite a long time, eg). We
can't blame our current infrastructure team since they're already doing
a great job. It's just that we have quite some infrastructure and making
everything work (and adding new services or upgrading some others) is
time-consuming. So it seems to me that we need a sysadmin.

We also clearly need an "executive director" (using quotes here since
we've tried to avoid this term when posting the job description) so the
Foundation can grow a bit, get more funding, have someone working on
getting new perspectives, etc.

We've seen this year that hiring an "executive director" is hard, very
hard. I'm hopeful that hiring a sysadmin would be (comparatively)
easier. And I'm also hopeful that we can get some funding to hire the
sysadmin. So my plan is to hire a sysadmin using part of what he have in
our back account now and using some new funding, and keep enough cash so
that we can hire an "executive director" too. It might sound too
ambitious, but I think it's doable and that it's the best way to go.

> What other priorities do you have for expenditure this year, outside
> of our usual cost centers (GUADEC + salaries + travel sponsorship)?

Face-to-face meetings on specific topics.
Replying positively to requests from local groups (as long as they're
reasonable ;-)).

> A second question to all candidates: what do you see as the weak points
> of the current board, and how do you propose addressing those weak points?

[it's probably a hard question for candidates that weren't on the board
this year]

Keeping track of everything: I've already written about this in my
reply to the 10 questions. It's just need to be a task taken seriously,
with a good tool. And someone to do it.

Difficulties to delegate: known issue again. I think sending private
mails to one or two people instead of waiting for people to propose to
help is the way to go.

Taking too much time to decide: it sometimes happen that we wait for a
meeting or for another event to take a decision, while the decision is
pretty trivial. It might be related to my first item, since pinging
people so they say +1/-1 could be enough.

There are probably other weak points... Can't think of them right now,
though.

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.