<quote who="Quim Gil"> > Also, looking backwards we also see that our time and issues could have > been invested much better.
I think that's probably true, but I strongly disagree with your examples. I also think that with such high expectations, we can beat ourselves up pretty badly even when we do great things. What follows on from that is bitterness, defensiveness, and a dysfunctional group of people. We could have done a lot better with debriefs and general meeting conversation to avoid some of this. > What is left from the 10th anniversary? Imagine if some of that time would > have been put in a Boston Summit planning. I've explained this a few times now, but I'll do it again here: The Board could not have done significantly more about the Boston Summit to avoid or avert the crisis we had. It's that simple. Due to unrepresentative and ill informed noise on board-list, it has been turned into a much bigger issue that it ever was. At precisely the time when the Boston Summit was ready to announce and work could begin on the (much more interesting) detail of catering, what we were going to do, how we were going to run it, and calling for local volunteers to run the show, our apparently booked venue pulled the plug. This started a lengthy period of going through other channels to get the venue back, trying for a different venue with the same organisation, looking at different dates and hosts, and finally, a last-minute splurge on a venue as we were down to the wire and couldn't feasibly change the dates. It was not a lack of time, planning or local volunteers that set off this chain of events... It was a *horribly* timed disappearance of the most important piece of the Summit's organisational puzzle: The venue. If there's no venue, there's no Summit. Of course, massive thanks go to Zana and Owen for pulling it all together for a very successful Summit despite the roadblocks and challenges. In the end, the Board only received one complaint about the Summit, and that was before it was held, and by someone who did not go to it. (If anyone *does* have complaints about the Summit, please mail the Board!) I am more (personally) disappointed with the 10th anniversary execution and results than those of the Boston Summit. > How much time did we put in aligning the election period with GUADEC? > Imagine if instead we had been dealing with this poisoned OOXML > discussion. It took *one* Board member's time and leadership to pursue the term length bylaws change (in addition to discussion among members and the time of the membership committee to run the vote). This is a very important and worthy change, which will have a positive impact from 2009 onward - that's a long time away, but we had to change it now or it would languish until the 2010 term! Given that this has come up nearly every term I've been on the Board, I regard actual execution on this issue as a great success of this term. It would have taken *one* Board member's time (and a bit of review) to ship a timely announcement and clarification when we joined ECMA and TC45-M. It would have created an outburst itself, with mildly different properties to what we're experiencing now -- unless we had done a *spectacular* job with the messaging, it would've been "GNOME announces support for OOXML". I have been dealing with the shrill voices for days now, so I might sound a bit rankled on this front. ;-) Different people were responsible for these tasks, there was no substantial cross-over in time or topic, so they're basically incomparable. - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2008: Melbourne, Australia http://lca2008.linux.org.au/ "And the only time I met George W Bush, he said to me, 'Hey Mike! Go find real work.' Of all people!" - Michael Moore _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
