Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

2015-05-25 12:39 GMT+02:00 Fabiana Simões <fabianapsimoes gmail com>:
> Hi everyone,

Hey Fabiana!

> 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?

During this last term we had to discuss several items that couldn't be
disclosed with the community for the particular subject they were
covering or for the parties involved that wanted to remain private.
I'm mainly referring to the Groupon legal matter and the huge amount
of behind-the-scenes action items each of us took part in during this
last year. It's clear these kind of subjects are (and were in the
Groupon's case) going to be made public when the Board will actually
decide (upon consulting with our legal counsel) that it's time to
disclose the information and the results we gathered. That's intended
to prevent the external entity, party or person involved to know the
plans and next moves of the GNOME Foundation and benefit from it.

We had other similar cases as well and I personally made sure and
asked the whole Board to evaluate how much had to be disclosed about
these specific matters. For example the WHS agreement that was finally
signed during this term was made public at [1], the GNOME Foundation
--> SFC move of Outreachy was included on the minutes of many Board
meetings in a detailed manner. What we probably omitted at first was
the name of the new program as there was an explicit request from the
organizers. That didn't mean we weren't going to let the Foundation
membership know at all about the new name but just that it was going
to take a few weeks for us to make that information available. We
valued transparency a lot during this term and you can notice how
detailed the minutes are going from the items discussed on the meeting
itself to the ones discussed on the mailing list. A few examples [2],
[3], [4]. (and more :-) )

As the Secretary of the Board transparency has been one of my main
goals and will remain as such in case of a re-election.

> 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?

This is a very interesting point.  While right now meeting minutes do
provide a good overview of what's going on within the Board itself and
the items that are being discussed they don't provide a summary of who
worked on what and how long it took for an action item to be
completed. During this term we introduced a tasks system based on [5]
which helped us identifying who was in charge of a certain item. We
might want to bring the meeting minutes to the next level making them
more detailed by including the name, surname of the person who
achieved a certain action item to facilitate the membership to verify
one's involvement. Having some sort of stats every year (also in terms
of meeting's participations for each member) would also help. Although
the new tasks system served the Board great not every member got used
to it and hopefully having a new Board that will start using it from
the beginning will definitely allow everyone to be as much as
productive as we originally thought when we introduced the software.

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/WHSAgreement
[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2015-May/msg00002.html
[3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2015-April/msg00004.html
[4] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2015-April/msg00002.html
[5] http://kanboard.net

-- 
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av