Re: Your help needed to define guidelines for the foundation committees

[Carlos Soriano <csoriano gnome org>]

Hey Andrea,

Thanks for answering thoroughly and sorry for the delay, I set up a filter for the membership committee since I'm the liason and this email felt in the cracks.

Seems the committee is indeed in good health and it seems to me like a good example to follow, thanks!

On Thu, 20 Sep 2018 at 09:26, Andrea Veri <av gnome org> wrote:

2018-09-18 21:01 GMT+02:00 Carlos Soriano <csoriano gnome org>:
> Hi membership committee,
>
> On the board we are trying to draw up guidelines for each committee of the
> GNOME Foundation, specifying the committee's responsibilities and how the
> committee relates to the board and the Foundation members. The idea is to
> promote transparency and accountability. Since the committees all do very
> different work, we expect that the guidelines will be slightly different for
> each committee so we would like to get your input.
>
> I'd appreciate your opinions on the questions below. You don't have to
> answer all of them exhaustively, but we'd like to use your input as much as
> possible. If you have differing opinions within the committee about any of
> these, I'd also appreciate hearing the pros and cons that you see.
>
> Regular Activity
> - What are the activities of the committee, and where are they defined and
> kept up to date?

The activities the Committee takes care of and the policies and
procedures we use when evaluating applications are defined and kept
up-to-date at [1], [2].

[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/Roles
[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee

> - What is the definition of an active/inactive committee member?

Mainly someone that has been contributing to the team processing new
applications during the past 3 months.

> - How does the committee keep its members active?

The chairman usually reaches out to the committee via IRC or the
mailing list pointing out individual tickets he'd like the team to
have a look at.

> - What is a reasonable response time for time-sensitive inquiries and
> requests from the GNOME community?

Usually a day or two, we're pretty responsive :-)

> Reporting and Transparency
> - What should be the responsibility of the chair of the committee?

Those are defined at [3].

[3] https://wiki.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/HowWeWork#Chair_of_the_committee

> - How often should the committee meetings be?

We're not having a meeting since a few years already. There was a need
in the past to discuss specific items via IRC but all the recent
interactions happen via RT tickets or the mailing list.

> - How and where are the committee meeting minutes published?

They were published under [4].

[4] https://wiki.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/Meetings

> - Whose responsibility is it to keep committee membership up-to-date?

Mine :)

> Relationship with Board
> - How and how often should the committee report to the board? Last time we
> mentioned once every 6 months, but I would like your input.

Depends on what kind of report the Board needs. Mainly active/inactive
members? If that's the case [5] is always up-to-date with the current
status.

[5] https://wiki.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee

> - What would you like the board liaison's responsibilities to be in the
> committee?

I'd say mainly making sure the Board is aware of the membership
committee's work by looking at the amount of processed tickets,
elections that are organized and run successfully.

> - What should the board do if the committee goes silent, or there are other
> issues with the membership?

The chairman should likely be involved to figure out what to do in the
case of issues arising from the membership. I can however tell you
things have been going well since several years with no complaints
from the membership base whatsoever. Applications are processed in a
timely manner, the queue is current [6].

Thanks,

[6] https://rt.gnome.org/stats/membership.html

--
Cheers,

Andrea

Red Hatter,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
Former GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av