Re: Meeting Minutes Published - August 6, 2009

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Brian Cameron wrote:
>     * The Free Software Foundation invited the GNOME Foundation to do a
>       joint outreach program to promote women in open source. The board
>       is supportive, but we need to find volunteers to run the program.
>           o ACTION - Diego will send an email to the gnome-women
>             mailing list and otherwise try to find people to help
>             organize.
> 
>     * The GNOME Foundation will do a joint FSF announcement to support
>       diversity. The FSF is working on a first draft. This should not
>       block the decision about whether we do a joint outreach program,
>       as mentioned above.
>           o ACTION - Stormy to keep following up with FSF.

I'd just like to say that it's great to see these very positive
initiatives and I hope that they accomplish a great deal.

>     * Discussion about printing the annual reports.
>           o ACTION - Lucas will look into the costs of printing the
>             annual report and how many annual report copies should we
>             print, and report back to the board. Lucas will also check
>             with Rosanna to find out how many copies were printed and
>             left over from last year's printing.

I'd suggest printing with Lulu again, but perhaps doing it cheaper, with
a colour cover & greyscale interior. This allows you to completely
master costs by only printing as many copies as you want/need.

I'd suggest sending the report to all individual donors who have given
over $1000 in the past two or three years. A nice way to show what money
was spent on and solicit continuing donations.

In general, I hope we come in under budget for programme printing, given
how much we've spent over the last 2 years.

>     * Find a good time for the next meeting - For now we will keep the
>       meeting at the same time. (Thursday, 17 UTC, and the board will
>       check again in 2 months after Germán gets more free time)

Simon Phipps suggested something to me during the Summer which sounded
like a good idea, although it requires a little planning.

The problem is easy to state. If you have Indian, South and North
American and European board members, finding an appropriate meeting time
in business hours for everyone is impossible. Deciding that one group
has "critical mass" and thus is privileged in the meeting time only
leads to disenfranchisement of the unprivileged board members (for
example, if 5 of 9 people on board calls are in the US, and the meeting
time is fixed for 12 noon PST, that means the Europeans always meet at
8pm, and the Indian at 1am).

Simon's principle was "spread the pain". Establish some arbitrary order
of people on board calls (it could be alphabetical order, for example),
and have the board meeting be at the same time every meeting, in the
local time zone of the board member for that meeting. And then decide
the meeting time (say, 15h). That way, once in a 9 meeting cycle the
meeting will be at 15h Bangalore time, once it'll be French time, twice
in the cycle it'll be London/Dublin time, twice eastern time, once
mountain time, once Peru, once Chile.

And the pain is shared.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org