Luis Villa Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School It should be noted that I maintain some organizational ties to Fedora and SUSE (neither paid), and am an Ubuntu user, so maybe I should count 1/3rd for affiliations for each of those ;)
Why I want to be on the board: Because I think the board is broken, and after three terms, I think I finally have some ideas on how to fix it. :) What I think the board should look like in a year: The board should be a group of people whose main role is oversight, inquiry, and delegation, not doing. In the past, candidacy statements have been of the form of 'I will get the board to do X', which I'm now pretty convinced is the wrong tack. The board should be in the business of encouraging other people to do X, giving advice on X when asked, and overseeing things to make sure X is generally accomplished in a manner which serves the needs and desires of the foundation membership. The board should not generally be in the business of acting itself. I think that the belief that the board should act itself has in the past skewed expectations of the board, prevented good people from running, and perhaps most damagingly, generally reduced the amount of new people brought on board and gotten involved with the running of the Foundation. The release team is the model here- the board doesn't do releases itself, it delegates that task to others. This relationship might need to be re-formalized- there is no longer a formal board representative on the release team, and the release team no longer regularly reports to the board, as it used to, so arguably the board is failing in the oversight role (though obviously the release team has been doing a great job, so practically speaking this is not a problem.) But in general the model the board followed here ages ago was the right thing- identify a problem, recruit good people to solve the problem, and let it go. The elections committee is in the same mold. GUADEC is potentially also a model here, sort of, but also points out how we can go wrong. The board has basically delegated that task (good), and has given advice when asked. The board has, however, failed to exercise oversight- there has been no formal feedback mechanism between board and GUADEC team, and so (arguably) GUADEC has strayed from its intended mission, with no process in place to check that drift, or even to provide feedback to let the GUADEC organizers know that perhaps there are problems. Things that are definitely not models, and which must be fixed: our oversight of finances and employees has been poor. We're getting there with both- Tim's feedback to the board is much more regular now, and financials are posted now. Neither is perfect, IMHO, and we should continue to push each. [Employee management is one probably exception to the rule to delegate, delegate, delegate.] As far as problems the foundation faces, I'd like to see a formal marketing team, and potentially a fundraising team as well, charged with organizing and improving GNOME's performance in each of those areas, and reporting back to the board regularly. Likely each of those teams would have board members on them (I'm certainly not saying board *members* should stop doing things :) but they would be partcipants and representatives who should lead or not lead independent of their status as board members. I'll try to post a summary comparing my goals for last year and my achievements tonight or tomorrow, but hopefully this will do for now :) Luis _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
