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Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting

On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 5:43 PM Max via foundation-list <foundation-list gnome org> wrote:
Hi all,

Thanks for running for the board.

Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better.
Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting.

Data and information might be different.
For me - a GNOME foundation member

Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks after.
---- Because maybe the event is already close or over.

Information - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" in 1 week or 10 days. 
---- Because something might be happening and everyone could discuss with board and reply.

====  Here is the question ====

Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the board meeting" in a very close time?

Here is my suggestion.
Maybe there will be a table to record the "Minutes of the board meeting" announcement time and does it announce in short time?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| board meeting  |  Minutes            |   in 10 days ?                      |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 2019/4/29          |   2019/5/22        |      No                                |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 2019/4/8           |   2019/5/15        |      No                                 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 2019/3/13           |   2019/5/15        |      No                               |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe it could be a record in GNOME annual report？
---- There are  ? % for Minutes of the board meeting on time to announce.

I want to say --- It not just secretary task, It's the information we want to get from all GNOME Board member.

Thanks again for all who take time to running the board

Hi Max,

This question seems quite relevant and timely, and as I'm sure you know publishing the minutes has been my responsibility over the last year. You may have noticed that I just replied on another foundation-list thread that I am proposing a guideline to the board for best practices around minutes [1].

I can speak about my experience publishing the minutes. Looking back over the 2018-2019 board term that I've served, sometimes it's been easy for me to get the minutes done by the time of the next board meeting, and sometimes, as you have noticed, it takes longer. As being a director is a volunteer position I don't think it's feasible to always require it to be done in 7 or 10 days. Sometimes it is delayed waiting for information that needs to be included in the minutes or because another director needs to carry out an action item first. It seems to have been inevitable in practice every year that there are sometimes delays despite each secretary's best intentions. My personal opinion in a situation like this where a short schedule has not proved sustainable, is that there's no point in saying "I'll just do the same thing, but faster next time" as that is likely to fail.

We could require the responsibility of writing the minutes to rotate through all 7 directors so that everyone only has to do it once in a few months, but I believe that it's actually important to have the same person continue to write the minutes, so that they are written with a consistent voice and level of detail as much as possible.

Part of my proposal linked above, the section named "Delays" [2], is that the secretary should have the draft minutes ready to be approved after 13 days, to give board members 24 hours to read them before the start of the meeting two weeks later. I hope that by putting the minutes as the first item on the agenda for every board meeting, that will provide a consistent motivation for the secretary to generally have them ready to publish after 14 days, and also normalize that the secretary should ask another director to prepare the minutes when their schedule is busy. I don't think this will eliminate all delays, but I do think it will help share the work among the directors and also make more visible to the membership when delays occur and when to expect the delay to be solved.

I would also like to ask you: what do you think would help encourage the kind of discussion you are looking for, other than minutes published after 7 or 10 days?


Regards,
--
Philip
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