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Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting

Hi Max,

I first want to thank you for your question, as it is a very valid
point. I agree with Carlos that we already have better collaboration
(GitLab) and communication (Discourse) tools which we should look into
instead of a plain-text email.

For the rest, I think it's wise to consider a few things before making
conclusions:

1) This is a question that is a bit hard to give a good answer to as
someone who hasn't served a term yet (as Tristan mentioned). This
might explain why 3 out of 4 people at the bottom of your list are
would-be first-termers. ;)

2) Extrapolating how busy someone's life is by looking at a period of
2 days might not be really representative. For a personal example: I'm
actually moving to a new place this month, which means it's harder to
get a response out as soon as possible. That does not mean I don't
have time allocated for the board in the rest of the year. I think we
can safely assume the latter also applies to the other people who
haven't answered yet.

Thanks again for your feedback!

Kind regards,
Niels

On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 3:27 AM Max via foundation-list
<foundation-list gnome org> wrote:


Hi Allan, Tristan, Carlos, Robert

Thanks for the quick response.
Thanks all of you give us more choice and tool.
GNOME.Asia team also use gitlab issue board to co-work together.

During the GNOME.Asia role, I learn about --- "Pass the information to the team members fast" is more 
better than "Think all method alone".
We are all volunteer  live in different time zone, we have real job and life.  So we will do community task 
at rest time of real life.
It's good to do community task in reasonable time.
I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might be see how busy they are in real 
life.
To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community  tasks.
If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, she / he might be have no time to 
help.

The date is for UTC +08:00 in my  local time.

* Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4
* Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4
* Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4
* Allan Day: 2019/6/4
* Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4
* Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4
* Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5

* Britt Yazel
* Niels De Graef
* Federico Mena Quintero
* Christopher Davis

On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen <ramcq gnome org> wrote:


Hi Max,

For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The community seems very "latched on" to 
minutes as the only/best way to hear from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and 
Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as could reasonably be expected of 
them, in terms of keeping the process running and making sure the minutes happen and are published within 
weeks rather than months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've seen it during the past 
few years, and as a time-starved collection of volunteers, I don't think it's feasible for an incoming 
director to promise that the preparation of minutes will change significantly.

That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but really - poring over summarised 
board minutes looking for decisions (or conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is 
not a good way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more intentional and directed, 
ideally the board should be more accessible. This is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were 
aiming to do from our hackfest last year.

I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and maybe there are some other things we 
could consider - some round table / AMA things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership 
more frequently than the big Q&A "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact time, the new board don't 
really know what they're doing (or about to do) - at least I certainly didn't - so you might get 
intentions/aspirations but very little insight into what is actually ongoing and why.

(As a side point, I am also not used to the concept that a board or other panel would /not/ periodically 
approve it's previous minutes - but I would also not expect a board to ordinarily meet every two weeks. 
We've moved from weekly to bi-weekly meetings during this board term, which is great, but ideally as we 
build trust/process/oversight in the ED and staff, the board should ideally have to meet less often.)

As the staff team grows, more of the "stuff the foundation does" should move away from the board making 
micro-decisions, and more towards "business as usual" for the staff. Then the reporting and transparency 
requirement moves from the board to the staff - especially as they are (by their very existence) consuming 
donor funds. So I feel this transparency is also very important. As the ED line manager, I think we've 
made some progress during this term and have converted some of Neil's reporting to the board into eg a 
blog post visible to the community, but clearer and more frequent updates on "what is the foundation 
doing" particularly through the activities of staff is something I would hope to be able to continue 
working on with Neil and his team over the coming year.

Thanks,
Rob

On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 22:22 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote:

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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