Re: Agenda for board meeting on January 9th

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

Hi Emmanuele,

 

these roles already exist, and are generally assigned to the elected
directors during the first board meeting.

Seems a bit unorthodox, but as long as they're willing and able to manage the additional workload I can't see anything wrong with that. :-)

currently, Andrea Veri is the secretary (hence why he sends the
minutes of the board meetings), and the treasurer is Ekaterina
Gerasimova.

you can see the various roles and who holds them on the wiki:
https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/

Thanks for the information. I notice that there is no contact information for any of the teams or links to indicate who they are and what their currently working on. It seems unlikely that someone would easily be able to figure out how to help them out.

 

I'm not sure what "Research & Development" means. 

if it's a technological role, then everything we do is, broadly
speaking, "research and development".

As far as I am aware, nobody does any statistical research at GNOME. What informs strategic decisions?

I'd very much like to see a team devoted to event planning and sponsoring, working with
local teams where necessary, but mostly driving the organization of
conferences like GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, and the GNOME Summit.

Would the events team not be in charge of that stuff?

 

I'm not entirely sure why these should be "democratically elected". I
personally prefer very much a culture of do-ocracy, where those who
show up and do the work get to decide what and how to do it, as
opposed to various instances of backseat driving that we've all
experienced on various mailing lists.

I can't really comment on the examples you're thinking of, since it is not clear what you're referring to . However, I would have thought that in general people would be inclined to vote for those who they felt were most qualified to fill a role or they wouldn't vote at all. Like a democracy, a "do-acracy" only really works for the benefit of everyone if there is equal access to the same information and opportunities from the outset.

Magdalen