I should have written the subject as it is in the corrected version above.
Nat On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 02:13 -0400, Nat Friedman wrote: > The board of the GNOME foundation is populated by elected directors. > > These people are elected to make decisions. > > But, the board has almost no decision-making power. > > In fact, about the only power the board has is to spend money. For > example, hiring Tim Ney. Or, firing him. Right now, Tim is already > working for the foundation. So just about the only thing the board can > do is fire him. > > In theory, another power the board has is to decide where GUADEC is. > > In reality, only one or two groups apply to host GUADEC every year and > it is usually immensely obvious which one is better suited. > > Even so, this decision can take weeks and weeks. Why? Because the only > thing the board can do is to decide to fire Tim Ney or choose where > GUADEC is going to be hosted. And naturally, the board has to savor > this power. Quick decisions would just ruin the fun! Besides, there's > nothing else to do but argue over the one or two decisions the board can > make. > > So we have an elected board of directors with a de minimus rationing of > power. > > That what the *board* has. > > What the *foundation* has is work that needs doing to promote GNOME and > make it better. Lots and lots and lots of work to do. > > Work to make the GNOME web site better, work to market GNOME better and > explain it, work to solicit sponsorship and endorsement of governments, > work to organize global training seminars like Trolltech does for Qt. > And on and on and on. Jeff Waugh has summarized this work nicely a > number of times. > > Right now, much of that work de facto falls on the shoulders of an > elected board. Most of the people on the board are very busy and cannot > do that work. And because the board of the GNOME foundation is a set of > elected positions, the set of people who are first drawn upon to do that > work *is limited to the set of people who were elected*. It is a > limited set. It cannot grow. > > Electing people to positions makes them feel good about themselves but > doesn't necessarily motivate them to do a bunch of boring work. It > would be better to find volunteers to do all that work, and remove the > silent chilling power of the board to discourage people from > "officially" taking on the work of GNOME. > > Another thing to do would be to give the GNOME board more power. > > The original idea of the GNOME foundation was as a way of funneling > money around. In 1999 GNOME won $30,000 in the beanie awards and it was > stored with the FSF because there was no GNOME foundation. So we said: > let's create a nonprofit that can accept and direct money. > > You could give the board more power by giving them money. Then they'd > have to figure out something to do with it. They're good people, they'd > probably work out a way to make GNOME better. > > That was the original idea, after all. > > Nat > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
