Hi Ben, Tobi,
You raise good points and ideas, they are pretty valid, let me try to go through them.
First of all, I think one of the reasons for this understanding gap is that we didn't explain well how the work of the board has changed. I wrote a
blog post to try to improve that, read the section "How does the work of the board look nowadays?". Might not explain everything, but it will at least lay a shared common ground for the discussion.
Hi Carlos, Rob,
thanks for the fantastic answers :)
You've written:
On Wed, 2019-05-22 at 14:18 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote:
> While my duty if I want to continue this work is to apply again and
> convince the membership to vote for me, this have a non-negligible
> overhead. In my case, the uncertainty is making me focusing more on
> preparing for a possible full hand off in less than a month than on
> keep working on it. This is not healthy, and this doesn't work well.
First of all: I agree.
But: I think we'd be better off if we can establish that your work will
still be valuable even if you are not a director (any more).
(And for completeness sake: the "you" is the general "you", not second
person singular.)
I think we'd rather want to enable members to do valuable work for the
Foundation than to limit ourselves to letting Directors do it. Then,
your premise "if I want to continue this work" does not hold, because
you could just do the work. My memory is fading, but I think there was
a time where Board wanted to be more like facilitators than executives.
Indeed, and I believe this should continue to be a goal, and we have worked on that by creating new committees. Specially around execution based tasks.
However, we have already reached a point where the tasks that the board do nowadays are pretty standard for a board, while the other tasks are done either by staff, committees or community members.
As an aside: The scenario that you described is that you are running
again, present your work to the membership as part of your platform and
tell them that they should vote for you in order for you to get that job
done. Then the membership does not give you their vote.
Now considering the proposal at hand, it seems to enforce the director
being in power against the will of the membership. That seems like a
change the members should not like.
I think this point of view is stretching it a bit. You can think the current year term is "enforcing a director for a year" too. I believe a better way to look at this is that terms are about finding the right balance between making sure directors can perform their work effectively and keeping the terms as minimum as possible to give members the ability to choose. The key here is that this balance has changed over the last year, and seems 1 year terms are not enough anymore, but 2 years terms might.
> At the end of the day is a matter of balance, and between the minimum
> term of 1 year and the other extreme of no elections, we can find a
> middle ground that works better with the new responsibilities and kind
> of work the board needs to do nowadays.
yeah, absolutely. I guess we're in the process of finding out :)
>
> It worth to mention that it's easier for any any person to commit to
> just one year
Yes!
So I don't understand the logic that prolonging the term makes it easier
for candidates to step up.
Indeed, it's the downside of a 2 year term (or longer), and it's something we have discussed and concerned us too. Even with that, I think the general agreement is that the change to longer terms will make the work of directors more palatable and effective, which should be a good point towards members thinking about stepping up for directors.
Benjamin,
Your ideas are indeed solutions.
However the goal is also to reduce the overhead of directors and make their work more effective, while your ideas would ensure the work can be done they most probably won't help or even make worse this overhead that we are already experiencing with the new kind of tasks that we have.
In any case, the board needs to discuss the topic more, so your points and ideas are helpful to us.
Cheers
