Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Karen Sandler

[Jeff Fortin <nekohayo gmail com>]

Le mardi 20 mai 2014 à 21:17 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova a écrit :

> I am glad that so many of the candidates did take the time to respond
> to this question. Going by the current responses, I honestly think
> that some of the candidates are underestimating the time that board
> duties take and that they may not be flexible enough to put in the
> hours in times of need (such as the current financial situation).


With regard to comments in this thread on candidates' time involvement,
and to Andreas Nilsson's earlier message on candidates "falling behind"
for not having answered the 130+ (!) messages posted in the last day or
two on this list:

If I am to be judged on the speed at which I can rapid-fire answers to a
hundred-mails-long multi-threaded mailing list topic, or by the clocked
amount of hours spent on something (vs work delivered/value brought to
the table), then I may look like the wrong candidate indeed.

In a similar line of thought to what Sriram hinted at in one of his
replies in this thread, the assumption that "time spent equals
commitment (or value)" is of questionable validity in my eyes - perhaps
I have been too used to work environments where I don't have to punch
in/out a timecard or work fixed hours. In one of those traditional
"time-based" places where I used to work many years ago, I was ten times
more efficient than the average - but since I was bound to clock in and
out (because work was not actually evaluated on accomplishment), I spent
the vast majority of my time doing unrelated activities (Free Software
involvement, if you have to ask) while still being a "model" worker. So
my point is, one should look at motivation and ability to deliver
quality services (whatever time it takes) to the foundation.

Not to say that candidates shouldn't have a minimum commitment/know what
the heck they're getting into, but at the same time, there's only so
much people can do *in their spare time* with their daily life
commitments. A board like this is advisory in nature, it happens to
advise employees whose role include the daily execution of the
foundation's operations - otherwise, you might as well say everyone is
an employee.

(I'm playing devil's advocate here, so please don't take this the wrong
way :)