Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of September, 26th, 2017

[Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 10:14 AM, Ekaterina Gerasimova
<kittykat3756 gmail com> wrote:
> Hi board,

Hi!

> we have not seen any meeting minutes in over two months now.

Indeed. I’m only addressing this in this email, setting the lack of ED
reports aside for now.

> As a foundation member, I do not feel that I can weigh in on any
> matters if I am not aware that they are being discussed.

Yes, that is clearly an issue and I share your concerns.

> I would have
> thought that with hiring an ED, some of the workload should be lifted
> off the board which should have given the board more time to ensure
> that minutes are sent out promptly.

While having an ED certainly helps with the workload and facilitates
other things, I don’t think it impacts publishing the minutes at all.

> I would like to propose to the board that if the board is not able to
> publish the minutes within a reasonable period of time, you should
> consider calling for a secretary outside of the board who has the time
> to do it or making it part of an employee's job description.

The problem is not exactly lack of time. If you look at the dates, you
may notice we haven’t published minutes since we had the hackfest in
Berlin. As I said in [my blog
post](https://www.alexandrefranke.com/blog/20171010-Foundation-hackfest-in-Berlin/)
we agreed on new policies, and there are pending announcements. Now
the reason the minutes have not been published is because some items
read as “ACTION: X to announce Y” or “ACTION: A to talk to B” and we
decided to delay the minutes a bit because it would be weird for
people to learn about Y or for B to see it in the minutes before the
announcement/contact actually took place. Unfortunately some of those
actions took longer than anticipated and we’re now lagging behind
quite a bunch. We did acknowledge the issue during last meeting and
what needs to happen now is going over the minutes and checking
whether these announcements/contacts have been done, and eventually
publish the minutes.

> This is a comment on the lack of communication from the board rather
> than on the work being done. I realise that this is only the second
> time that I've raised the issue this year, but I feel that this is
> something so trivial that it should not be a problem.

Right, and we should have communicated what the underlying reason was.
Sorry about that.

> When I was
> helping the Secretary send out minutes some years ago, it was a 15
> minute job at most for me. I'd be happy to share my workflow from back
> then if that would help :)

Well in normal circumstances it takes me about 10 minutes to process
the minutes, so I guess we’re good.

> Thanks!
> Kat

Thank you for raising this!

-- 
Alexandre Franke
GNOME Hacker & Foundation Director