Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability

[Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com>]

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Fabiana Simões
<fabianapsimoes gmail com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,

Hi,

> I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and
> accountability on the Board.
>
> How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What
> should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent
> enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in
> your priorities would be to do so?

The board should communicate almost everything they do to the members.
I say almost because I see a few exceptions.

There are cases such as the groupon campaign where they can't
unfortunately say anything about what's going on because that could
play against the foundation.

There are also cases that don't need to be advertised. For instance
say the board is mediating in an issue involving two members. The
decision to make this public does not belong to the board, but to the
member that complained to the board.

So far, I guess the board was good on transparency. There are always
times where the community is impatient and wants to know more about
something that's going on, but I trust that when the board says
"there's nothing we can say right now" it is actually true.

> In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the
> Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals
> and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and
> context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation
> have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board?

Meeting notes are difficult to read, and more precisely it is hard to
follow an ongoing agenda item over several meetings. Each member has
to do some digging on their own to find out what happened (and who was
involved).

It would be nice to have a place to sum up the activities of the
board. I'm not sure yet which form it would take, but it could be a
wiki page per term, or a quarterly report… I also hear the board has
been experimenting with a kanban app, I wonder if this could come in
handy to craft the reports.

In the past we had some reports by our employees (sysadmin and ED) and
I found them very valuable, so I reckon the board should provide
something similar in some way.

-- 
Alexandre Franke