Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting

[Carlos Soriano <csoriano gnome org>]

Hi Max,

Thanks for your question. You raise a very good point, I agree with you that we need to improve participation of the community on board topics, and it's specially difficult if the information is delayed for too long.

This is indeed a difficult situation. Some topics that the board discusses are quite sensible, and sometimes we are in doubt whether parts of it are private or not, so that requires consensus and therefore delays happen. As you can imagine, we rely on volunteer time to discuss and process them, and the availability of each director and secretaries is limited. In all honesty, while this can always be improved with our current processes, I think Philip Chimento and Federico made an excellent job with minutes.

However, let me comment about the lack of participation. I think one of the reasons is that minutes are simply not the best tool for this. Minutes feel to me too much of a one way communication, and on top of that they are over email, which is not the most encouraging tool to manage and track discussions. They are good for keeping a record, but not so good for much else. Improving this situation was one of the reasons we moved our key conversations to GitLab issues, so community members could closely follow them and chime in directly if wanted.

My vision to encourage more participation would be around using more tooling such as GitLab and Discourse for board discussions, and on top of that, keep pushing on our goal to put as early as possible key initiatives there to allow members to actually participate. I believe we have a big room to improve, specially with initiatives that are not time sensible.

Lastly, an interesting idea I think we could do is a round of questions to the membership to know what topics they were interested in and that we could have done better with their minutes. Although I believe the board is always open to feedback, I personally look forward to know about those.

Thanks,

Carlos Soriano

On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 at 02:43, 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

Max

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