Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi everyone, I've created an issue for this topic, so we don't forget about it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Board/issues/102 Allan On Fri, 14 Jun 2019 at 00:04, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > > On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > > > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as > > a whole? > > All the previous replies have good ideas. We should definitely enable > remote hackfests. Is this "just" about gnome.org hosting a WebRTC > service which we can already use through practically any web browser? > I don't know! > > In terms of engagement, we need conferences on the scale of GUADEC or > Gnome Asia, but in the Americas, and outside the United States, where > travel+visas are problematic. But in terms of environmental impact, I > am not sure whether this would enable fewer people to fly across the > ocean for their yearly "big GNOME conference", or if it would encourage > *more* people to fly cross-continent to the new conference. > > I wonder if it is possible to get reports on power consumption from > things like our CI runners. Maybe even power profiles for individual > runs? Or does the way things run in datacenters, where *our* CI runs > are not the only thing running on a server, make this not entirely > trivial to do? > > Federico > > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as > a whole? All the previous replies have good ideas. We should definitely enable remote hackfests. Is this "just" about gnome.org hosting a WebRTC service which we can already use through practically any web browser? I don't know! In terms of engagement, we need conferences on the scale of GUADEC or Gnome Asia, but in the Americas, and outside the United States, where travel+visas are problematic. But in terms of environmental impact, I am not sure whether this would enable fewer people to fly across the ocean for their yearly "big GNOME conference", or if it would encourage *more* people to fly cross-continent to the new conference. I wonder if it is possible to get reports on power consumption from things like our CI runners. Maybe even power profiles for individual runs? Or does the way things run in datacenters, where *our* CI runs are not the only thing running on a server, make this not entirely trivial to do? Federico ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Britt It's good to hear from you. :) Everyone start with zero -- I think the point is we could see what do you think. Thanks for want to made pubic as timely and reasonable. Thanks again for running the board. Max * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 * Niels De Graef: 2019/6/5 * Britt Yazel: 2019/6/6 * Federico Mena Quintero * Christopher Davis On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 12:44 AM Britt Yazel wrote: > Hi Max, > > Sorry for my late response, however as I have never held a board seat > before I do not have the experience to comment either way on the timing of > the release of board meeting minutes. > > With that said and after reading the prior responses, my personal > preference is to be as quick as is possible in releasing the minutes while > the conversations and points are fresh in our minds. I have found that the > longer things sit, the more likely they are to fall by the wayside, and the > Foundation members deserve to have a timely and transparent board of > directors. > > I hesitate to promise anything as far as a time table commitment, as it > would not be up to me alone when the minutes are released, and without > having personally experienced these board meeting structure, promising > anything of the sort would, in my opinion, be irresponsible. I can say that > the best of my ability I will see that the meeting minutes are made public > as timely and efficiently as is reasonable. I am also happy to revisit the > conversation once the board is elected to see if as a team we can agree on > a reasonable timetable. > > Thanks, > > -Britt Yazel > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:13 AM Max via foundation-list < > foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > >> Hi Robert >> >> Thanks for reply my question again. >> We could have many information when we see the reply. >> Just like my last mail -- the list could be "Answer" or "Not Answer", >> "Date" or "None" >> >> I just check the foundation-list@gnome.org mail list last year( 2018 ). >> " There is no question to board candidates " >> At 2017, only 1 question to board candidates. >> >> I just explain why I do that -- If there is no reply from candidates -- >> We just have their bio :p >> >> >> Max >> >> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 6:48 PM Robert McQueen wrote: >> >>> Hi Max, >>> >>> On Wed, 2019-06-05 at 09:26 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: >>> >>> We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and >>> life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. >>> It's good to do community task in reasonable time. >>> I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might >>> be see how busy they are in real life. >>> To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. >>> If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, >>> she / he might be have no time to help. >>> >>> >>> Serving on the board is a form of volunteering your time to help the >>> GNOME community. It comes with specific and quite predictable time >>> commitments in terms of the board meetings, e-mails, etc that being a board >>> member entails - usually around 2 hours a week, and usually at the same >>> time each week. As Carlos points out, these are rarely urgent. The board >>> has actually been trying to take a more "hands off" role - focusing on >>> oversight, strategy, etc rather than day to day or urgent decisions. The >>> Foundation now has 7 full-time staff and they should be able to dedicate >>> far more time and be more responsive. >>> >>> So - provided the board candidate is able to dedicate these specific >>> times, I don't think response time or availability to volunteer for >>> additional things should necessarily be considered while assessing board >>> candidates for election - if someone isn't available to volunteer for >>> community tasks that doesn't mean they will be a bad board member. I hope >>> in my case the opposite is true - I am very busy in my personal and >>> professional life because I am on the leadership team of Endless, a company >>> that works with GNOME - but this means I have experience as a >>> director/executive which I think I can use to help the Foundation board set >>> a good strategy and sensible policies, manage it's resources well, manage >>> the ED, etc. Whether a board member takes on additional >>> community/volunteering tasks (eg organising a conference, joining a >>> committee, being an officer like secretary or treasurer, etc) is a separate >>> decision. (I personally don't have a lot /more/ time to give, but when I do >>> I choose to spend it on Flatpak/Flathub because I think the app ecosystem >>> is a blocker to the Linux desktop's overall growth and impact.) >>> >>> Cheers, >>> Rob >>> >>> >>> The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. >>> >>> * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 >>> * Christel Dahlskjaer:
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, Sorry for my late response, however as I have never held a board seat before I do not have the experience to comment either way on the timing of the release of board meeting minutes. With that said and after reading the prior responses, my personal preference is to be as quick as is possible in releasing the minutes while the conversations and points are fresh in our minds. I have found that the longer things sit, the more likely they are to fall by the wayside, and the Foundation members deserve to have a timely and transparent board of directors. I hesitate to promise anything as far as a time table commitment, as it would not be up to me alone when the minutes are released, and without having personally experienced these board meeting structure, promising anything of the sort would, in my opinion, be irresponsible. I can say that the best of my ability I will see that the meeting minutes are made public as timely and efficiently as is reasonable. I am also happy to revisit the conversation once the board is elected to see if as a team we can agree on a reasonable timetable. Thanks, -Britt Yazel On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:13 AM Max via foundation-list < foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > Hi Robert > > Thanks for reply my question again. > We could have many information when we see the reply. > Just like my last mail -- the list could be "Answer" or "Not Answer", > "Date" or "None" > > I just check the foundation-list@gnome.org mail list last year( 2018 ). > " There is no question to board candidates " > At 2017, only 1 question to board candidates. > > I just explain why I do that -- If there is no reply from candidates -- We > just have their bio :p > > > Max > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 6:48 PM Robert McQueen wrote: > >> Hi Max, >> >> On Wed, 2019-06-05 at 09:26 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: >> >> We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and >> life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. >> It's good to do community task in reasonable time. >> I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might >> be see how busy they are in real life. >> To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. >> If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, >> she / he might be have no time to help. >> >> >> Serving on the board is a form of volunteering your time to help the >> GNOME community. It comes with specific and quite predictable time >> commitments in terms of the board meetings, e-mails, etc that being a board >> member entails - usually around 2 hours a week, and usually at the same >> time each week. As Carlos points out, these are rarely urgent. The board >> has actually been trying to take a more "hands off" role - focusing on >> oversight, strategy, etc rather than day to day or urgent decisions. The >> Foundation now has 7 full-time staff and they should be able to dedicate >> far more time and be more responsive. >> >> So - provided the board candidate is able to dedicate these specific >> times, I don't think response time or availability to volunteer for >> additional things should necessarily be considered while assessing board >> candidates for election - if someone isn't available to volunteer for >> community tasks that doesn't mean they will be a bad board member. I hope >> in my case the opposite is true - I am very busy in my personal and >> professional life because I am on the leadership team of Endless, a company >> that works with GNOME - but this means I have experience as a >> director/executive which I think I can use to help the Foundation board set >> a good strategy and sensible policies, manage it's resources well, manage >> the ED, etc. Whether a board member takes on additional >> community/volunteering tasks (eg organising a conference, joining a >> committee, being an officer like secretary or treasurer, etc) is a separate >> decision. (I personally don't have a lot /more/ time to give, but when I do >> I choose to spend it on Flatpak/Flathub because I think the app ecosystem >> is a blocker to the Linux desktop's overall growth and impact.) >> >> Cheers, >> Rob >> >> >> The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. >> >> * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 >> * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 >> * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 >> * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 >> * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 >> * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 >> * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 >> >> * Britt Yazel >> * Niels De Graef >> * Federico Mena Quintero >> * Christopher Davis >> >> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen wrote: >> >> Hi Max, >> >> For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The >> community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear >> from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and >> Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as >> could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Robert Thanks for reply my question again. We could have many information when we see the reply. Just like my last mail -- the list could be "Answer" or "Not Answer", "Date" or "None" I just check the foundation-list@gnome.org mail list last year( 2018 ). " There is no question to board candidates " At 2017, only 1 question to board candidates. I just explain why I do that -- If there is no reply from candidates -- We just have their bio :p Max On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 6:48 PM Robert McQueen wrote: > Hi Max, > > On Wed, 2019-06-05 at 09:26 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: > > We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and > life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. > It's good to do community task in reasonable time. > I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might be > see how busy they are in real life. > To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. > If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, > she / he might be have no time to help. > > > Serving on the board is a form of volunteering your time to help the GNOME > community. It comes with specific and quite predictable time commitments in > terms of the board meetings, e-mails, etc that being a board member entails > - usually around 2 hours a week, and usually at the same time each week. As > Carlos points out, these are rarely urgent. The board has actually been > trying to take a more "hands off" role - focusing on oversight, strategy, > etc rather than day to day or urgent decisions. The Foundation now has 7 > full-time staff and they should be able to dedicate far more time and be > more responsive. > > So - provided the board candidate is able to dedicate these specific > times, I don't think response time or availability to volunteer for > additional things should necessarily be considered while assessing board > candidates for election - if someone isn't available to volunteer for > community tasks that doesn't mean they will be a bad board member. I hope > in my case the opposite is true - I am very busy in my personal and > professional life because I am on the leadership team of Endless, a company > that works with GNOME - but this means I have experience as a > director/executive which I think I can use to help the Foundation board set > a good strategy and sensible policies, manage it's resources well, manage > the ED, etc. Whether a board member takes on additional > community/volunteering tasks (eg organising a conference, joining a > committee, being an officer like secretary or treasurer, etc) is a separate > decision. (I personally don't have a lot /more/ time to give, but when I do > I choose to spend it on Flatpak/Flathub because I think the app ecosystem > is a blocker to the Linux desktop's overall growth and impact.) > > Cheers, > Rob > > > The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. > > * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 > * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 > * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 > * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 > * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 > * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 > * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 > > * Britt Yazel > * Niels De Graef > * Federico Mena Quintero > * Christopher Davis > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen wrote: > > Hi Max, > > For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The > community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear > from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and > Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as > could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the process > running and making sure the minutes happen and are published within weeks > rather than months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've > seen it during the past few years, and as a time-starved collection of > volunteers, I don't think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise > that the preparation of minutes will change significantly. > > That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but > really - poring over summarised board minutes looking for decisions (or > conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is not a good > way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more > intentional and directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This > is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from > our hackfest last year. > > I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and maybe > there are some other things we could consider - some round table / AMA > things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership more > frequently than the big Q "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact > time, the new board don't really know what they're doing (or about to do) - > at least I certainly didn't - so you might get intentions/aspirations but > very little insight
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Carlos Thanks for your reply. Just like my last mail. I think it's good to get more detail and information how hard to be a board member. Let every foundation member know the board hard and work hard is mean to me. Thanks again for your reply and thank for make GNOME forward with board for 2 years. Max On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 2:00 PM Carlos Soriano wrote: > Hi Max, > > Just an honest insight from working in the board for two years. The tasks > the board do rarely require immediate action, in fact the most immediate > important action we can do is a special meeting, which requires 48h notice > in advance. > > In general, it's more valuable to allocate a chunk of time over the > weekend, and for big tasks that can happen once every month or two months. > If my memory serves me correctly, we had around 3-4 emergencies in the last > two years, and almost all directors found some time to deal with them. > > Cheers > > On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 03:27, Max via foundation-list < > foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > >> Hi Allan, Tristan, Carlos, Robert >> >> Thanks for the quick response. >> Thanks all of you give us more choice and tool. >> GNOME.Asia team also use gitlab issue board to co-work together. >> >> During the GNOME.Asia role, I learn about --- "Pass the information to >> the team members fast" is more better than "Think all method alone". >> We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and >> life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. >> It's good to do community task in reasonable time. >> I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might >> be see how busy they are in real life. >> To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. >> If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, >> she / he might be have no time to help. >> >> The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. >> >> * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 >> * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 >> * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 >> * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 >> * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 >> * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 >> * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 >> >> * Britt Yazel >> * Niels De Graef >> * Federico Mena Quintero >> * Christopher Davis >> >> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen wrote: >> >>> Hi Max, >>> >>> For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The >>> community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear >>> from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and >>> Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as >>> could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the process >>> running and making sure the minutes happen and are published within weeks >>> rather than months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've >>> seen it during the past few years, and as a time-starved collection of >>> volunteers, I don't think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise >>> that the preparation of minutes will change significantly. >>> >>> That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but >>> really - poring over summarised board minutes looking for decisions (or >>> conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is not a good >>> way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more >>> intentional and directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This >>> is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from >>> our hackfest last year. >>> >>> I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and >>> maybe there are some other things we could consider - some round table / >>> AMA things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership more >>> frequently than the big Q "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact >>> time, the new board don't really know what they're doing (or about to do) - >>> at least I certainly didn't - so you might get intentions/aspirations but >>> very little insight into what is actually ongoing and why. >>> >>> (As a side point, I am also not used to the concept that a board or >>> other panel would /not/ periodically approve it's previous minutes - but I >>> would also not expect a board to ordinarily meet every two weeks. We've >>> moved from weekly to bi-weekly meetings during this board term, which is >>> great, but ideally as we build trust/process/oversight in the ED and staff, >>> the board should ideally have to meet less often.) >>> >>> As the staff team grows, more of the "stuff the foundation does" should >>> move away from the board making micro-decisions, and more towards "business >>> as usual" for the staff. Then the reporting and transparency requirement >>> moves from the board to the staff - especially as they are (by their very >>> existence) consuming donor funds. So I feel this transparency is also very >>> important. As the ED line manager, I think we've made some progress during
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Niels Thanks for reply my question. :) 2) Extrapolating how busy someone's life is by looking at a period of 2 days might not be really representative. - It's not for 2 days, it might be answer or not answer the question, right ? :) If everyone don't ask questions or ask question but there might be someone doesn't answer any question. How could we know that candidates -- just from the bio? -- Maybe everyone ( okay, at least me... ) want to hear more from candidates. With many reply and information -- We could know how hard to be GNOME board and they work very hard, it's good, right? * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 * Niels De Graef: 2019/6/5 * Britt Yazel * Federico Mena Quintero * Christopher Davis Thanks again for your reply Max On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 1:41 PM Niels De Graef wrote: > Hi Max, > > I first want to thank you for your question, as it is a very valid > point. I agree with Carlos that we already have better collaboration > (GitLab) and communication (Discourse) tools which we should look into > instead of a plain-text email. > > For the rest, I think it's wise to consider a few things before making > conclusions: > > 1) This is a question that is a bit hard to give a good answer to as > someone who hasn't served a term yet (as Tristan mentioned). This > might explain why 3 out of 4 people at the bottom of your list are > would-be first-termers. ;) > > 2) Extrapolating how busy someone's life is by looking at a period of > 2 days might not be really representative. For a personal example: I'm > actually moving to a new place this month, which means it's harder to > get a response out as soon as possible. That does not mean I don't > have time allocated for the board in the rest of the year. I think we > can safely assume the latter also applies to the other people who > haven't answered yet. > > Thanks again for your feedback! > > Kind regards, > Niels > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 3:27 AM Max via foundation-list > wrote: > > > > Hi Allan, Tristan, Carlos, Robert > > > > Thanks for the quick response. > > Thanks all of you give us more choice and tool. > > GNOME.Asia team also use gitlab issue board to co-work together. > > > > During the GNOME.Asia role, I learn about --- "Pass the information to > the team members fast" is more better than "Think all method alone". > > We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and > life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. > > It's good to do community task in reasonable time. > > I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might > be see how busy they are in real life. > > To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. > > If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, > she / he might be have no time to help. > > > > The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. > > > > * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 > > * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 > > * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 > > * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 > > * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 > > * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 > > * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 > > > > * Britt Yazel > > * Niels De Graef > > * Federico Mena Quintero > > * Christopher Davis > > > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen wrote: > >> > >> Hi Max, > >> > >> For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The > community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear > from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and > Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as > could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the process > running and making sure the minutes happen and are published within weeks > rather than months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've > seen it during the past few years, and as a time-starved collection of > volunteers, I don't think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise > that the preparation of minutes will change significantly. > >> > >> That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but > really - poring over summarised board minutes looking for decisions (or > conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is not a good > way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more > intentional and directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This > is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from > our hackfest last year. > >> > >> I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and > maybe there are some other things we could consider - some round table / > AMA things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership more > frequently than the big Q "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact > time, the new board
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, On Wed, 2019-06-05 at 09:26 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: > We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job > and life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. > It's good to do community task in reasonable time. > I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we > might be see how busy they are in real life. > To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community > tasks. > If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real > life, she / he might be have no time to help. Serving on the board is a form of volunteering your time to help the GNOME community. It comes with specific and quite predictable time commitments in terms of the board meetings, e-mails, etc that being a board member entails - usually around 2 hours a week, and usually at the same time each week. As Carlos points out, these are rarely urgent. The board has actually been trying to take a more "hands off" role - focusing on oversight, strategy, etc rather than day to day or urgent decisions. The Foundation now has 7 full-time staff and they should be able to dedicate far more time and be more responsive. So - provided the board candidate is able to dedicate these specific times, I don't think response time or availability to volunteer for additional things should necessarily be considered while assessing board candidates for election - if someone isn't available to volunteer for community tasks that doesn't mean they will be a bad board member. I hope in my case the opposite is true - I am very busy in my personal and professional life because I am on the leadership team of Endless, a company that works with GNOME - but this means I have experience as a director/executive which I think I can use to help the Foundation board set a good strategy and sensible policies, manage it's resources well, manage the ED, etc. Whether a board member takes on additional community/volunteering tasks (eg organising a conference, joining a committee, being an officer like secretary or treasurer, etc) is a separate decision. (I personally don't have a lot /more/ time to give, but when I do I choose to spend it on Flatpak/Flathub because I think the app ecosystem is a blocker to the Linux desktop's overall growth and impact.) Cheers,Rob > The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. > > * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 > * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 > * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 > * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 > * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 > * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 > * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 > > * Britt Yazel > * Niels De Graef > * Federico Mena Quintero > * Christopher Davis > > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen > wrote: > > Hi Max, > > For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The > > community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way > > to hear from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole > > Philip and Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing > > as good a job as could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of > > keeping the process running and making sure the minutes happen and > > are published within weeks rather than months. It's certainly as > > good or as close to as good as I've seen it during the past few > > years, and as a time-starved collection of volunteers, I don't > > think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise that the > > preparation of minutes will change significantly. > > That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency > > but really - poring over summarised board minutes looking for > > decisions (or conspiriacies) and second-guessing > > justifications/motivations is not a good way to build trust and > > transparency. Communication should be more intentional and > > directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This is why > > I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from > > our hackfest last year. > > I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, > > and maybe there are some other things we could consider - some > > round table / AMA things - so that the board is in discussion with > > the membership more frequently than the big Q "meet the new > > board" at GUADEC. At this exact time, the new board don't really > > know what they're doing (or about to do) - at least I certainly > > didn't - so you might get intentions/aspirations but very little > > insight into what is actually ongoing and why. > > (As a side point, I am also not used to the concept that a board or > > other panel would /not/ periodically approve it's previous minutes > > - but I would also not expect a board to ordinarily meet every two > > weeks. We've moved from weekly to bi-weekly meetings during this > > board term, which is great, but ideally as we build > > trust/process/oversight in the ED and staff, the board should > > ideally have to meet less often.) > > As the staff team grows, more of the
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, Just an honest insight from working in the board for two years. The tasks the board do rarely require immediate action, in fact the most immediate important action we can do is a special meeting, which requires 48h notice in advance. In general, it's more valuable to allocate a chunk of time over the weekend, and for big tasks that can happen once every month or two months. If my memory serves me correctly, we had around 3-4 emergencies in the last two years, and almost all directors found some time to deal with them. Cheers On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 03:27, Max via foundation-list < foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > Hi Allan, Tristan, Carlos, Robert > > Thanks for the quick response. > Thanks all of you give us more choice and tool. > GNOME.Asia team also use gitlab issue board to co-work together. > > During the GNOME.Asia role, I learn about --- "Pass the information to the > team members fast" is more better than "Think all method alone". > We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and > life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. > It's good to do community task in reasonable time. > I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might be > see how busy they are in real life. > To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. > If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, > she / he might be have no time to help. > > The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. > > * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 > * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 > * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 > * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 > * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 > * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 > * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 > > * Britt Yazel > * Niels De Graef > * Federico Mena Quintero > * Christopher Davis > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen wrote: > >> Hi Max, >> >> For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The >> community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear >> from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and >> Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as >> could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the process >> running and making sure the minutes happen and are published within weeks >> rather than months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've >> seen it during the past few years, and as a time-starved collection of >> volunteers, I don't think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise >> that the preparation of minutes will change significantly. >> >> That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but >> really - poring over summarised board minutes looking for decisions (or >> conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is not a good >> way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more >> intentional and directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This >> is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from >> our hackfest last year. >> >> I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and >> maybe there are some other things we could consider - some round table / >> AMA things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership more >> frequently than the big Q "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact >> time, the new board don't really know what they're doing (or about to do) - >> at least I certainly didn't - so you might get intentions/aspirations but >> very little insight into what is actually ongoing and why. >> >> (As a side point, I am also not used to the concept that a board or other >> panel would /not/ periodically approve it's previous minutes - but I would >> also not expect a board to ordinarily meet every two weeks. We've moved >> from weekly to bi-weekly meetings during this board term, which is great, >> but ideally as we build trust/process/oversight in the ED and staff, the >> board should ideally have to meet less often.) >> >> As the staff team grows, more of the "stuff the foundation does" should >> move away from the board making micro-decisions, and more towards "business >> as usual" for the staff. Then the reporting and transparency requirement >> moves from the board to the staff - especially as they are (by their very >> existence) consuming donor funds. So I feel this transparency is also very >> important. As the ED line manager, I think we've made some progress during >> this term and have converted some of Neil's reporting to the board into eg >> a blog post visible to the community, but clearer and more frequent updates >> on "what is the foundation doing" particularly through the activities of >> staff is something I would hope to be able to continue working on with Neil >> and his team over the coming year. >> >> Thanks, >> Rob >> >> On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 22:22 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote: >> >> Hi Max, >> >> Thanks for your
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, I first want to thank you for your question, as it is a very valid point. I agree with Carlos that we already have better collaboration (GitLab) and communication (Discourse) tools which we should look into instead of a plain-text email. For the rest, I think it's wise to consider a few things before making conclusions: 1) This is a question that is a bit hard to give a good answer to as someone who hasn't served a term yet (as Tristan mentioned). This might explain why 3 out of 4 people at the bottom of your list are would-be first-termers. ;) 2) Extrapolating how busy someone's life is by looking at a period of 2 days might not be really representative. For a personal example: I'm actually moving to a new place this month, which means it's harder to get a response out as soon as possible. That does not mean I don't have time allocated for the board in the rest of the year. I think we can safely assume the latter also applies to the other people who haven't answered yet. Thanks again for your feedback! Kind regards, Niels On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 3:27 AM Max via foundation-list wrote: > > Hi Allan, Tristan, Carlos, Robert > > Thanks for the quick response. > Thanks all of you give us more choice and tool. > GNOME.Asia team also use gitlab issue board to co-work together. > > During the GNOME.Asia role, I learn about --- "Pass the information to the > team members fast" is more better than "Think all method alone". > We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and life. > So we will do community task at rest time of real life. > It's good to do community task in reasonable time. > I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might be > see how busy they are in real life. > To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. > If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, she / > he might be have no time to help. > > The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. > > * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 > * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 > * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 > * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 > * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 > * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 > * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 > > * Britt Yazel > * Niels De Graef > * Federico Mena Quintero > * Christopher Davis > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen wrote: >> >> Hi Max, >> >> For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The community >> seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear from or >> understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and Federico as >> Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as could >> reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the process running and >> making sure the minutes happen and are published within weeks rather than >> months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've seen it during >> the past few years, and as a time-starved collection of volunteers, I don't >> think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise that the preparation >> of minutes will change significantly. >> >> That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but really >> - poring over summarised board minutes looking for decisions (or >> conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is not a good >> way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more >> intentional and directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This >> is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from >> our hackfest last year. >> >> I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and maybe >> there are some other things we could consider - some round table / AMA >> things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership more >> frequently than the big Q "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact >> time, the new board don't really know what they're doing (or about to do) - >> at least I certainly didn't - so you might get intentions/aspirations but >> very little insight into what is actually ongoing and why. >> >> (As a side point, I am also not used to the concept that a board or other >> panel would /not/ periodically approve it's previous minutes - but I would >> also not expect a board to ordinarily meet every two weeks. We've moved from >> weekly to bi-weekly meetings during this board term, which is great, but >> ideally as we build trust/process/oversight in the ED and staff, the board >> should ideally have to meet less often.) >> >> As the staff team grows, more of the "stuff the foundation does" should move >> away from the board making micro-decisions, and more towards "business as >> usual" for the staff. Then the reporting and transparency requirement moves >> from the board to the staff - especially as they are (by their very >> existence) consuming donor funds. So I feel this transparency is also very >> important. As the ED line
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Allan, Tristan, Carlos, Robert Thanks for the quick response. Thanks all of you give us more choice and tool. GNOME.Asia team also use gitlab issue board to co-work together. During the GNOME.Asia role, I learn about --- "Pass the information to the team members fast" is more better than "Think all method alone". We are all volunteer live in different time zone, we have real job and life. So we will do community task at rest time of real life. It's good to do community task in reasonable time. I think ask question to candidates during the election time -- we might be see how busy they are in real life. To guess how much time the candidates could spend on community tasks. If someone is real great but he / she is 100% or 90% busy in real life, she / he might be have no time to help. The date is for UTC +08:00 in my local time. * Philip Chimento: 2019/6/4 * Christel Dahlskjaer: 2019/6/4 * Benjamin Berg: 2019/6/4 * Allan Day: 2019/6/4 * Tristan Van Berkom: 2019/6/4 * Carlos Soriano: 2019/6/4 * Robert McQueen: 2019/6/5 * Britt Yazel * Niels De Graef * Federico Mena Quintero * Christopher Davis On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 4:55 AM Robert McQueen wrote: > Hi Max, > > For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The > community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear > from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and > Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as > could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the process > running and making sure the minutes happen and are published within weeks > rather than months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've > seen it during the past few years, and as a time-starved collection of > volunteers, I don't think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise > that the preparation of minutes will change significantly. > > That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but > really - poring over summarised board minutes looking for decisions (or > conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is not a good > way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more > intentional and directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This > is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from > our hackfest last year. > > I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and maybe > there are some other things we could consider - some round table / AMA > things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership more > frequently than the big Q "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact > time, the new board don't really know what they're doing (or about to do) - > at least I certainly didn't - so you might get intentions/aspirations but > very little insight into what is actually ongoing and why. > > (As a side point, I am also not used to the concept that a board or other > panel would /not/ periodically approve it's previous minutes - but I would > also not expect a board to ordinarily meet every two weeks. We've moved > from weekly to bi-weekly meetings during this board term, which is great, > but ideally as we build trust/process/oversight in the ED and staff, the > board should ideally have to meet less often.) > > As the staff team grows, more of the "stuff the foundation does" should > move away from the board making micro-decisions, and more towards "business > as usual" for the staff. Then the reporting and transparency requirement > moves from the board to the staff - especially as they are (by their very > existence) consuming donor funds. So I feel this transparency is also very > important. As the ED line manager, I think we've made some progress during > this term and have converted some of Neil's reporting to the board into eg > a blog post visible to the community, but clearer and more frequent updates > on "what is the foundation doing" particularly through the activities of > staff is something I would hope to be able to continue working on with Neil > and his team over the coming year. > > Thanks, > Rob > > On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 22:22 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote: > > Hi Max, > > Thanks for your question. You raise a very good point, I agree with you > that we need to improve participation of the community on board topics, and > it's specially difficult if the information is delayed for too long. > > This is indeed a difficult situation. Some topics that the board discusses > are quite sensible, and sometimes we are in doubt whether parts of it are > private or not, so that requires consensus and therefore delays happen. As > you can imagine, we rely on volunteer time to discuss and process them, and > the availability of each director and secretaries is limited. In all > honesty, while this can always be improved with our current processes, I > think Philip Chimento and Federico made an excellent job with minutes. > > However, let me
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, For what it's worth - I agree very strongly with Carlos here. The community seems very "latched on" to minutes as the only/best way to hear from or understand the board. I believe that on the whole Philip and Federico as Secretary and Vice-Secretary have been doing as good a job as could reasonably be expected of them, in terms of keeping the process running and making sure the minutes happen and are published within weeks rather than months. It's certainly as good or as close to as good as I've seen it during the past few years, and as a time- starved collection of volunteers, I don't think it's feasible for an incoming director to promise that the preparation of minutes will change significantly. That said; we hear the concerns about timeliness and transparency but really - poring over summarised board minutes looking for decisions (or conspiriacies) and second-guessing justifications/motivations is not a good way to build trust and transparency. Communication should be more intentional and directed, ideally the board should be more accessible. This is why I blogged about the key topics and things we were aiming to do from our hackfest last year. I think that Carlos' GitLab and Discourse suggestions are great, and maybe there are some other things we could consider - some round table / AMA things - so that the board is in discussion with the membership more frequently than the big Q "meet the new board" at GUADEC. At this exact time, the new board don't really know what they're doing (or about to do) - at least I certainly didn't - so you might get intentions/aspirations but very little insight into what is actually ongoing and why. (As a side point, I am also not used to the concept that a board or other panel would /not/ periodically approve it's previous minutes - but I would also not expect a board to ordinarily meet every two weeks. We've moved from weekly to bi-weekly meetings during this board term, which is great, but ideally as we build trust/process/oversight in the ED and staff, the board should ideally have to meet less often.) As the staff team grows, more of the "stuff the foundation does" should move away from the board making micro-decisions, and more towards "business as usual" for the staff. Then the reporting and transparency requirement moves from the board to the staff - especially as they are (by their very existence) consuming donor funds. So I feel this transparency is also very important. As the ED line manager, I think we've made some progress during this term and have converted some of Neil's reporting to the board into eg a blog post visible to the community, but clearer and more frequent updates on "what is the foundation doing" particularly through the activities of staff is something I would hope to be able to continue working on with Neil and his team over the coming year. Thanks,Rob On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 22:22 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote: > Hi Max, > Thanks for your question. You raise a very good point, I agree with > you that we need to improve participation of the community on board > topics, and it's specially difficult if the information is delayed > for too long. > > This is indeed a difficult situation. Some topics that the board > discusses are quite sensible, and sometimes we are in doubt whether > parts of it are private or not, so that requires consensus and > therefore delays happen. As you can imagine, we rely on volunteer > time to discuss and process them, and the availability of each > director and secretaries is limited. In all honesty, while this can > always be improved with our current processes, I think Philip > Chimento and Federico made an excellent job with minutes. > > However, let me comment about the lack of participation. I think one > of the reasons is that minutes are simply not the best tool for this. > Minutes feel to me too much of a one way communication, and on top of > that they are over email, which is not the most encouraging tool to > manage and track discussions. They are good for keeping a record, but > not so good for much else. Improving this situation was one of the > reasons we moved our key conversations to GitLab issues, so community > members could closely follow them and chime in directly if wanted. > > My vision to encourage more participation would be around using more > tooling such as GitLab and Discourse for board discussions, and on > top of that, keep pushing on our goal to put as early as possible key > initiatives there to allow members to actually participate. I believe > we have a big room to improve, specially with initiatives that are > not time sensible. > > Lastly, an interesting idea I think we could do is a round of > questions to the membership to know what topics they were interested > in and that we could have done better with their minutes. Although I > believe the board is always open to feedback, I personally look > forward to know about those. > > Thanks, > Carlos Soriano > > On Tue, 4
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, Thanks for your question. You raise a very good point, I agree with you that we need to improve participation of the community on board topics, and it's specially difficult if the information is delayed for too long. This is indeed a difficult situation. Some topics that the board discusses are quite sensible, and sometimes we are in doubt whether parts of it are private or not, so that requires consensus and therefore delays happen. As you can imagine, we rely on volunteer time to discuss and process them, and the availability of each director and secretaries is limited. In all honesty, while this can always be improved with our current processes, I think Philip Chimento and Federico made an excellent job with minutes. However, let me comment about the lack of participation. I think one of the reasons is that minutes are simply not the best tool for this. Minutes feel to me too much of a one way communication, and on top of that they are over email, which is not the most encouraging tool to manage and track discussions. They are good for keeping a record, but not so good for much else. Improving this situation was one of the reasons we moved our key conversations to GitLab issues, so community members could closely follow them and chime in directly if wanted. My vision to encourage more participation would be around using more tooling such as GitLab and Discourse for board discussions, and on top of that, keep pushing on our goal to put as early as possible key initiatives there to allow members to actually participate. I believe we have a big room to improve, specially with initiatives that are not time sensible. Lastly, an interesting idea I think we could do is a round of questions to the membership to know what topics they were interested in and that we could have done better with their minutes. Although I believe the board is always open to feedback, I personally look forward to know about those. Thanks, Carlos Soriano On Tue, 4 Jun 2019 at 02:43, Max via foundation-list < foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board. > > Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. > Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. > > Data and information might be different. > For me - a GNOME foundation member > > Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks after. > Because maybe the event is already close or over. > > Information - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" in 1 week or 10 days. > Because something might be happening and everyone could discuss with > board and reply. > > Here is the question > > Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the board > meeting" in a very close time? > > Here is my suggestion. > Maybe there will be a table to record the "Minutes of the board meeting" > announcement time and does it announce in short time? > > > > | board meeting | Minutes| in 10 days ? > | > > > | 2019/4/29 | 2019/5/22| No > | > > > | 2019/4/8 | 2019/5/15| No > | > > > | 2019/3/13 | 2019/5/15| No > | > > > > Maybe it could be a record in GNOME annual report？ > There are ? % for Minutes of the board meeting on time to announce. > > I want to say --- It not just secretary task, It's the information we want > to get from all GNOME Board member. > > Thanks again for all who take time to running the board > > > Max > > > > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list > ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, Thanks for your question. The other candidates responded with lot of good ideas, I just want to say that they all look quite good to me and that If implementing some of those is helpful for the environment and increases mindshare about environment impact, that sounds like a win-win for all of us. So I won't add more on that side, the others already answered excellently. Let me try however to give another point of vision, as is not about what we can do to reduce our environmental impact, but rather what can we do to reduce it overall. As an organization, I think GNOME is already on the lowest environmental impact range already, we don't travel every day to an office in contrast with other organizations/companies as Jeremy very well pointed out. While we can lead by example, and we should, we have a greater power. That's our political reach. On the past I have been in doubt whether GNOME as an organization should take sides on certain possible political matters. This one however could be a good case. I believe we have the capacity to do a great social impact here by doing public statements, coordinating those with other FOSS organizations or contacting with companies that might be interested in this topic. From my studies in environmental science (I did one year at university, before switching to CS) what I learnt that we need most to reduce environmental impact is mindshare, social pressure and political impact, and that's what we excel at doing. I'm not sure how much is in our scope to do, but if we believe this is important for the community and helps with our mission I think it worth to try. Thanks, Carlos Soriano On Mon, 3 Jun 2019 at 19:11, Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > Obviously, those who have already served on the board will have some > insight to share about what the board already does, and concrete ways > it could improve; hopefully this doesn’t disadvantage those who haven’t > already served on the board. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list > ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, Hi Philip, > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? Great question! Keeping us on our toes... :) As others have suggested, I think our ecological impact as a Foundation is most acute in travel, then after a significant gap, energy usage of our services, then probably anything else. As Allan pointed out, we've been pushing for increasing travel to hackfests etc as after our staff, hosting and organising events is the most significant and impactful way we can add momentum to project initiatives, giving something of an "opposing force" to any initiative to reduce travel. We've also (with only modest success) been trying to rotate the location of some of the conferences so that we're able to provide more local face to face events, potentially alleviating some of the requirement to travel larger distances. In terms of where the Board "legislates" I see two main places which we've looked at over the past year and could make some changes to what is required - the travel sponsorship policy, and the templates (and requirements) for evaluating hackfests and conference bids. Both seem very feasible to improve the consideration of environmental factors. In the travel policy, we could go ways potentially place requirements there, such as taking ground transfer when it is safe to do so and does not increase the journey time / cost more than a certain percentage - and/or (IRS permitting) making ground travel more comfortable/pleasant (eg allowing a first class upgrade etc) so we have both carrot and stick. The travel committee might have some more insight here. In the event approval processes, simply updating the templates to add a requirement to assess and then ameliorate the environmental impact means we can engage the ingenuity of the volunteers who are helping us to set up these events. Monitoring something changes the behaviour. Best practices or requirements could emerge from this (ie, if we see good ideas, we could roll them out as something we ask/look for specifically). In terms of energy usage, Andrea & team are already using cloud technology (OpenShift) to make more effective/dynamic use of our donated computing resources, which is a good way to get more "bang for buck" versus having statically scheduled machines idling away. Generally dynamic scaling for CI and other "intensive" workloads is a best-practice we do and should continue to follow. We should never use any crypto currencies. I think providing some "gold standard" real-time audio/video infrastructure for the use of the project would be a superb investment in time/infrastructure to allow more effective collaboration outside of events. We certainly practice this in the Board and make extensive use of Bluejeans and Uberconference for effective voice and video collaboration. It would be great to have a self-hosted and FOSS system we can use and make available for the project. There is quite a lot of other "cute stuff" like avoiding single-use plastics at conferences, un-necessary swag, having non-meat-eating days during events that are catered to reduce the carbon impact of food preparation, etc, but I suspect that one person taking a single transatlantic flight would obliterate the cumulative benefit from all of that. I think these things can and should be done "at the leaves" as everything helps, but the policy changes outlined above would be more impactful in effecting that change in a more persistent manner. > Obviously, those who have already served on the board will have some > insight to share about what the board already does, and concrete ways > it could improve; hopefully this doesn’t disadvantage those who > haven’t > already served on the board. My decision to "sleep on this" has made my answer look significantly less original. C'est la vie - however I think it's clear that there is some good alignment between candidates and we should be able to make concrete moves on at least high-level policy changes so that some of these factors are considered in the board's day to day activities. > Ta, > Philip Thanks, Rob > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list > > ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 08:42 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board. > > Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. > Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. > > Data and information might be different. > For me - a GNOME foundation member > > Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks after. > Because maybe the event is already close or over. Thanks for expressing your concern about getting timely reports from the board, I understand that this is important for transparency and helps people to feel confident and well represented. In the past, I can recall going without any updates for many months and this can be frustrating, and I think the last few years have been much better by comparison. I would love to be able to promise to do better if elected, but as I have never served on the GNOME board before I am honestly not familiar with the obstacles to getting the minutes out in a timely manner. On the other hand, I am very familiar with circumstance of being suddenly swamped with urgent responsibilities, and I can understand that situations arise which cause one to fall behind on reporting ones activities. I think the most that we can expect of any board is that they do their best, and I am thankful that in times when their efforts as volunteers has been stretched thin, they have been able to prioritize on getting things done, even if we do not always get timely reports as a result. In all honesty I can only promise that we will do our best to be transparent and report in a timely manner, as I am sure other boards have made efforts, and have not always been as successful in this as recent boards have. Best Regards, -Tristan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, Max via foundation-list wrote: ... > Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the board > meeting" in a very close time? Thanks for the question and for raising this issue. It's really helpful for the board to know what the ongoing concerns of the membership are. I agree that fast publishing of the minutes is a good thing, and is something that we should improve on. In the past I did a short stint as secretary, and during that time I made it a priority to get the minutes out quickly, which I think I did, and I seem to recall that people reacted positively. The challenge is that speed of publishing depends on the board's capacity. To be blunt: we're busy there often aren't people queuing up to do the job. For example, Philip Chimento is our current secretary, but he's been tied up with some urgent, fairly time-consuming work for the Foundation (thanks Philip!), and no one has been able to take up the slack. But I do think that the board should work on this issue, and I can think of some options for what to do: 1. When the officers and responsibilities for the new board are decided, the board could opt to reduce the workload on the secretary. For example, they could be exempt from committee liaison responsibilities. 2. We can create a mechanism so that the board is updated about which minutes have been published. This could be an update from the secretary at the beginning of each meeting, or it could be an issue to which the board is subscribed. 3. The secretary doesn't have to be a director, so if there's no one on the board who is able to perform the role adequately, we could ask for volunteers and appoint someone from the community. The first point is something to consider when the new board takes over, the second is something that the board should look at as soon as its able, and the third is probably a fallback option to consider if things aren't going well. Thanks agin, Allan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Christel and Benjamin Thanks reply my question. I think people ask question -- Because they want to improve or resolve some problem, maybe the status is optimization. Thanks both of you give some suggestions. I remember there are few questions for Board candidates and not sure every candidates answer all of the question. Here is my thinking, I want to know. * Is there any way to improve Minutes of the board meeting? or something happen in GNOME. * What is the logic -- the board candidates will do? " Because it is a rule in wiki so keep it? " " I have an idea xx " " Do nothing or just vote because " I think maybe now is the best status or way to minutes of board meeting. But if no one say that " Now is the optimization the best one, there is no way to improve ", how could we know? I will ask the question because I meaning to me, If not every candidates answer most the question or no one ask question, how could we know if there are something happen, what will they do with them? Thanks again to Christel, Benjamin and Philip Max On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 5:16 PM Benjamin Berg wrote: > Hi, > > On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 08:42 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: > > Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. > > Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. > > So, with the publication of the guidelines by the current board, the > expected time frame appears to be that minutes will usually be > published at the earliest 2 weeks after the meeting (I don't expect > minute approval to happen during a "working session"[1]). To be honest, > I not think that this is a time frame that allows Foundation members to > closely follow what is happening and to engage with the Board if there > is a topic of interest to them. > > I remember that in the student-council we generally published draft > minutes immediately after the meeting. This publication was posted on a > board (inside the university building), had to happen within three days > and would be signed by the secretary and session chair. The formal > approval would only happen in the next meeting (usually one week > later). > > Now, I don't expect that we can do exactly the same thing for the GNOME > Board. On the one hand there because are likely more topics that are of > a sensitive nature, on the other hand because it does not seem like a > good idea to post such preliminary minutes to a public mailing list. > > But maybe it is possible to create a faster path for information to > reach the membership. One thing I can imagine is to create a members > only mailing list specifically for posting preliminary minutes. But I > am really not sure whether such changes are at all feasible. > That said, this seems like a topic that may be worth exploring further, > for example by talking about it as part of a public "working session" > of the Board. > > Benjamin > > [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard#Meetings > > > Data and information might be different. > > For me - a GNOME foundation member > > > > Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks > > after. > > Because maybe the event is already close or over. > > > > Information - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" in 1 week or 10 > > days. > > Because something might be happening and everyone could discuss > > with board and reply. > > > > Here is the question > > > > Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the > > board meeting" in a very close time? > > > > Here is my suggestion. > > Maybe there will be a table to record the "Minutes of the board > > meeting" announcement time and does it announce in short time? > > > > --- > > - > > | board meeting | Minutes| in 10 days ? > > | > > --- > > - > > | 2019/4/29 | 2019/5/22| No > > | > > --- > > - > > | 2019/4/8 | 2019/5/15| No > >| > > --- > > - > > | 2019/3/13 | 2019/5/15| No > > | > > --- > > - > > > > Maybe it could be a record in GNOME annual report？ > > There are ? % for Minutes of the board meeting on time to > > announce. > > > > I want to say --- It not just secretary task, It's the information we > > want to get from all GNOME Board member. > > > > Thanks again for all who take time to running the board > > > > > > Max > > > > > > > > ___ > > foundation-list mailing list > > foundation-list@gnome.org > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list >
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi, On Tue, 2019-06-04 at 08:42 +0800, Max via foundation-list wrote: > Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. > Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. So, with the publication of the guidelines by the current board, the expected time frame appears to be that minutes will usually be published at the earliest 2 weeks after the meeting (I don't expect minute approval to happen during a "working session"[1]). To be honest, I not think that this is a time frame that allows Foundation members to closely follow what is happening and to engage with the Board if there is a topic of interest to them. I remember that in the student-council we generally published draft minutes immediately after the meeting. This publication was posted on a board (inside the university building), had to happen within three days and would be signed by the secretary and session chair. The formal approval would only happen in the next meeting (usually one week later). Now, I don't expect that we can do exactly the same thing for the GNOME Board. On the one hand there because are likely more topics that are of a sensitive nature, on the other hand because it does not seem like a good idea to post such preliminary minutes to a public mailing list. But maybe it is possible to create a faster path for information to reach the membership. One thing I can imagine is to create a members only mailing list specifically for posting preliminary minutes. But I am really not sure whether such changes are at all feasible. That said, this seems like a topic that may be worth exploring further, for example by talking about it as part of a public "working session" of the Board. Benjamin [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard#Meetings > Data and information might be different. > For me - a GNOME foundation member > > Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks > after. > Because maybe the event is already close or over. > > Information - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" in 1 week or 10 > days. > Because something might be happening and everyone could discuss > with board and reply. > > Here is the question > > Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the > board meeting" in a very close time? > > Here is my suggestion. > Maybe there will be a table to record the "Minutes of the board > meeting" announcement time and does it announce in short time? > > --- > - > | board meeting | Minutes| in 10 days ? > | > --- > - > | 2019/4/29 | 2019/5/22| No > | > --- > - > | 2019/4/8 | 2019/5/15| No >| > --- > - > | 2019/3/13 | 2019/5/15| No > | > --- > - > > Maybe it could be a record in GNOME annual report？ > There are ? % for Minutes of the board meeting on time to > announce. > > I want to say --- It not just secretary task, It's the information we > want to get from all GNOME Board member. > > Thanks again for all who take time to running the board > > > Max > > > > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip! Philip Withnall wrote: ... > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? I composed this in my head before seeing the other responses to your mail, so you'll have to forgive me if I repeat any of the points that have already been made First, thank you for raising this issue - we haven't seriously looked at the Foundation's environmental impact, and given the climate crisis we ought to look at this. Maybe the Foundation could even take a lead on this issue, which other free/open source projects could follow. I suspect that the biggest environmental impact that the Foundation has is through travel. The one concrete idea I've had for this in the past would be to amend the travel policy, to allow people to take ground transportation rather than flying, even if it comes at additional cost (within certain limits, of course). This would have to be discussed with the Travel Committee but it seems like a fairly straightforward, practical step. Outside of this, it gets a bit trickier. One of the Foundation's goals has actually been to facilitate *more* travel: we want more hackfests, greater attendance at our conferences, and so on. The other factor that makes it tricky is that the Foundation can only influence behaviour to a certain degree: we can encourage the community to hold certain types of events, and we can decide whether to support plans that are brought to us or not, but we can't independently decide which events will be held or where they will be held. That said, I think we should investigate all the options for both our travel policy and our events strategy. This might include some of the following: - Have hackfest organisers consider the carbon footprint of their event, particularly when it comes to picking a location - Encourage regional (ie. continental) events rather than global ones, and take steps to reduce the amount of intercontinental travel to these events - this might mean things like flying fewer people from Europe to GNOME.Asia and to our North American events (self-sustaining regional events are something that the Foundation should push to support anyway, I think) - Work to increase the number of local keynote speakers at our conferences, rather than those from other continents - Come up with innovative ways to avoid or limit travel. Ideas for this: - Remote "sprints" could replace hackfests in some cases. - Have linked events happen simultaneously in multiple-locations; for example, you could have a hackfest happen in one location in Europe and another in South America, and link them using video conferencing, or organise the work into location-specific streams. - Work to provide a reliable video conferencing solution for all Foundation members This is just a preliminary list of ideas and I think that we should ask the community to provide their own suggestions. The board should then consider the ideas we have, and ensure that any agreed changes are implemented. This is something that I'd be enthusiastic about and would certainly support, if I were re-elected. Thanks again, Allan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
El mar, 4 de jun 2019 a las 8:12 AM, Philip Chimento via foundation-list escribió: I think it would be interesting to experiment with all-remote hackfests, where we try to build an experience in between the normal "type text, hit submit, wait for text in return" interaction, and the resource- and time-intensive hackfest/conference experience. Not to replace either of them, but to supplement them. The board can't dictate that community members do this, but I would be interested in seeing how we could facilitate it. I think this is a great proposal. I've the same feeling, I want to participate more in some gnome hackfests but I don't have the time or energy to be travelling around the world, so this kind of remote hackfests sounds really interesting. There are tools that can help a lot with this, I think that we don't need *video*, something like mumble [1] will works for that kind of hackfests, with a room, or multiple rooms, and people working together and talking to each other. I hope this kind of hackfests will become a reality so we can collaborate from all around the world with people in real time and maybe we are able to find a mixed solution to have people in place and remote. Thanks a lot [1] https://www.flathub.org/apps/details/info.mumble.Mumble ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 18:10 +0100, Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? > Thanks for raising this interesting and unexpected question. I do think that the limited resources we have at our disposal, such as compute resources for our infrastructure and CI and travel to conferences and hackfests are quite crucial to our mission, and it is probably in our interest as an organization to increase rather than decrease. However, we could see more efforts in being conscientious about how we use the resources we do use, and in our choices in terms of travel options and compute resources. Unfortunately having a limited budget implies reduced freedom of choice, it might make more environmental sense for attendees to a conference who live on the same continent to travel by train, but if that is more expensive, this would mean that we sponsor less contributors overall. Asides from how we use our own resources, we may be able to make some impact as a publicly visible organization with sponsors. For instance, if there were some way for us to commend or endorse some of our more environmentally friendly sponsors via the friends of GNOME programme (or similar), it may at least contribute to a trend of incentivizing companies to be more environmentally friendly, at the same time as being good publicity for sponsors who may choose to participate in such a "clean computing" campaign for instance. Of course a campaign like this would require a lot more thinking and work than my brief brainstorm reply here, just trying to throw something creative out there to chew on. Perhaps this could be material for a focus group to consider too, I'm sure that if some volunteers were to create such a group to focus on this, the GNOME board will be happy to discuss and support initiatives they come up with for environmental friendliness. Cheers, -Tristan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 10:11 AM Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > Obviously, those who have already served on the board will have some > insight to share about what the board already does, and concrete ways > it could improve; hopefully this doesn’t disadvantage those who haven’t > already served on the board. > I tend to think it's more likely to disadvantage those who answer later, since the candidates who responded already have mentioned a number of ideas that I wish I had thought of first. So I had better get my response in now :-P I am trying to think what I can contribute to this discussion that others haven't already, and what I've come up with that I'm personally interested in, is figuring out how it might be possible to change the GNOME culture to make it easier to participate in hackfests remotely. I have tried remote participation with a few GNOME hackfests and it's difficult. That may sound odd coming from me since I have worked 100% remote for the last 6 years but I do have to say it's a lot harder to do it in GNOME than in a work environment. We tend to go either fully text-based/asynchronous, or fully face-to-face. Either we send our merge requests and our blog posts, and most of the time we don't pay too much attention to the human side, or we go to the other extreme and travel to a hackfest or conference where we spend 16 hours a day hacking, presenting, and celebrating in each others' company for a short, intense time. There is no in between. In fact I believe this is problematic for other reasons than the environment, as I've seen a number of instances of flame-first-ask-questions-later on GNOME mailing lists in the past year, that I hope would not have escalated so badly if people were actually talking out loud with their voices to another person's face on their screen. I see a few reasons for these extremes, first of all it's difficult to get human connection outside of the face-to-face events. People don't have time (e.g. I personally am okay to write this email to foundation-list at 11 PM whereas I would not get on a video call at that time). Also people have varying levels of comfort with video calls which we need to respect. Second, we don't really have much precedent for remote participants in hackfests. On the occasions when I've tried it, I've been the only one. Third, the free software tools for video calling and remote collaboration are quite far behind the proprietary tools. Furthermore I'm not sure that fixing this is where the expertise of the GNOME community lies. I think it would be interesting to experiment with all-remote hackfests, where we try to build an experience in between the normal "type text, hit submit, wait for text in return" interaction, and the resource- and time-intensive hackfest/conference experience. Not to replace either of them, but to supplement them. The board can't dictate that community members do this, but I would be interested in seeing how we could facilitate it. Regards, -- Other Philip ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip, First of all, thanks for awareness on this issue. As the board, I think we can make 2 areas of impact here: to add (hard/soft) requirements to the travel policy and to give guidelines for events. Whether the decisions we make should be considered as rules/guidelines or hints will of course depend on how strictly we enforce them. Hence, these shouldn't be too restrictive (or no-one will follow them) nor without exceptions (because every situation is different in its own right). The first and most obvious aspect is to give extra requirements/guidelines for the travel policy. One example is to ask people to take public transport (train/bus/...) if the event is within a fixed distance -decided by the board- of their home. As sponsors, we should consider the possible extra cost of the train over other modes of transportation. Valid motivations for the contrary exist (little to no public transport available; big increases in travel time or expenses; ...), but should become more of an exception than the rule. For organisers of sponsored events, we can publish some useful guidelines, such as always having to post online on how to get there using public transport. Exceptions can exist here also, but we should consider if we really want to go somewhere that requires everyone to take a car. For attendees of events/hackfests, we can make a small set of "reminders" that can be used as a basis on events. As an example, we can ask attendees to bring their own refillable cups/bottles (which is useful when the venue provides a way of washing them). It might even be nice to sell some GNOME-themed cups/bottles, which gives us a small stream of revenue and gives people a cool accessoire. Kind regards, Niels On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 7:11 PM Philip Withnall wrote: > > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > Obviously, those who have already served on the board will have some > insight to share about what the board already does, and concrete ways > it could improve; hopefully this doesn’t disadvantage those who haven’t > already served on the board. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Max, and thank you for the question, Generally speaking I tend to be of the opinion that meetings should be efficient and expedient, and for a large distributed community where meetings are generally held behind closed doors I believe communication should be expedient too so as to ensure transparency and foster engagement; I appreciate that all members of the Board of Directors will be volunteering their time and that sometimes an agenda item might not get closed during the meeting at which the item is raised due to outstanding action points and the need to follow up on information. That said, the board meets weekly and while not all of these meetings result in public minutes, I cannot see any reason why a future board couldn't look at (considering the frequency of meetings) the fairly standardised approach of having the approval of the previous meeting minutes be a fixed agenda item to ensure that the minutes are published no later than around one week after the meeting in question. Any ongoing action items, etc., could and should be noted as such and revisited in the agenda for subsequent meetings and updates provided in relevant later minutes. Cheers, Christel On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 6:15 AM Max via foundation-list < foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > Hi Philip and all > > Thanks for reply the mail. > Yes, I know the guidelines for meeting minutes. > I know the 2 weeks and I want to say 10 days just an example not a real > number. ( So my question is ask Board to think a way, I just suggestion ) > During the my role of GNOME.Asia team, I wrote some minutes [1] too. > > For your question: > "I would also like to ask you: what do you think would help encourage the > kind of discussion you are looking for, other than minutes published after > 7 or 10 days?" > I want to encourage more discussion with GNOME Board, in the other > hands, how many discussion with Minutes of Board meetings or directly to > GNOME board last year? > So my thinking is -- if the minutes cloud mail in more close time ( 2 > weeks is a good time ), I think people might be more discuss with others > or GNOME board ( Or maybe not? ) > > I know the correct information is also important, but I just want to know > if the minutes is more close -- maybe people would discuss more or want to > do more. > for example: some minutes about GNOME.Asia --- when I see it with > Board minutes -- it already over and I just know what discuss in the board. > --- and that's the reason I want to ask the question. > > Thanks again to Philips work hard and reply my e-mail, and sorry for my > poor English :p > > > [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/Minutes > > > Max > > On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:57 AM wrote: > >> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 5:43 PM Max via foundation-list < >> foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: >> >>> Hi all, >>> >>> Thanks for running for the board. >>> >>> Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. >>> Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. >>> >>> Data and information might be different. >>> For me - a GNOME foundation member >>> >>> Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks after. >>> Because maybe the event is already close or over. >>> >>> Information - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" in 1 week or 10 days. >>> Because something might be happening and everyone could discuss >>> with board and reply. >>> >>> Here is the question >>> >>> Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the board >>> meeting" in a very close time? >>> >>> Here is my suggestion. >>> Maybe there will be a table to record the "Minutes of the board meeting" >>> announcement time and does it announce in short time? >>> >>> >>> >>> | board meeting | Minutes| in 10 days ? >>> | >>> >>> >>> | 2019/4/29 | 2019/5/22| No >>> | >>> >>> >>> | 2019/4/8 | 2019/5/15| No >>>| >>> >>> >>> | 2019/3/13 | 2019/5/15| No >>>| >>> >>> >>> >>> Maybe it could be a record in GNOME annual report？ >>> There are ? % for Minutes of the board meeting on time to announce. >>> >>> I want to say --- It not just secretary task, It's the information we >>> want to get from all GNOME Board member. >>> >>> Thanks again for all who take time to running the board >>> >> >> Hi Max, >> >> This question seems quite relevant and timely, and as I'm sure you know >> publishing the minutes has been my responsibility over the last year.
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
Hi Philip and all Thanks for reply the mail. Yes, I know the guidelines for meeting minutes. I know the 2 weeks and I want to say 10 days just an example not a real number. ( So my question is ask Board to think a way, I just suggestion ) During the my role of GNOME.Asia team, I wrote some minutes [1] too. For your question: "I would also like to ask you: what do you think would help encourage the kind of discussion you are looking for, other than minutes published after 7 or 10 days?" I want to encourage more discussion with GNOME Board, in the other hands, how many discussion with Minutes of Board meetings or directly to GNOME board last year? So my thinking is -- if the minutes cloud mail in more close time ( 2 weeks is a good time ), I think people might be more discuss with others or GNOME board ( Or maybe not? ) I know the correct information is also important, but I just want to know if the minutes is more close -- maybe people would discuss more or want to do more. for example: some minutes about GNOME.Asia --- when I see it with Board minutes -- it already over and I just know what discuss in the board. --- and that's the reason I want to ask the question. Thanks again to Philips work hard and reply my e-mail, and sorry for my poor English :p [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/Minutes Max On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 11:57 AM wrote: > On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 5:43 PM Max via foundation-list < > foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> Thanks for running for the board. >> >> Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. >> Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. >> >> Data and information might be different. >> For me - a GNOME foundation member >> >> Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks after. >> Because maybe the event is already close or over. >> >> Information - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" in 1 week or 10 days. >> Because something might be happening and everyone could discuss with >> board and reply. >> >> Here is the question >> >> Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the board >> meeting" in a very close time? >> >> Here is my suggestion. >> Maybe there will be a table to record the "Minutes of the board meeting" >> announcement time and does it announce in short time? >> >> >> >> | board meeting | Minutes| in 10 days ? >> | >> >> >> | 2019/4/29 | 2019/5/22| No >> | >> >> >> | 2019/4/8 | 2019/5/15| No >>| >> >> >> | 2019/3/13 | 2019/5/15| No >> | >> >> >> >> Maybe it could be a record in GNOME annual report？ >> There are ? % for Minutes of the board meeting on time to announce. >> >> I want to say --- It not just secretary task, It's the information we >> want to get from all GNOME Board member. >> >> Thanks again for all who take time to running the board >> > > Hi Max, > > This question seems quite relevant and timely, and as I'm sure you know > publishing the minutes has been my responsibility over the last year. You > may have noticed that I just replied on another foundation-list thread that > I am proposing a guideline to the board for best practices around minutes > [1]. > > I can speak about my experience publishing the minutes. Looking back over > the 2018-2019 board term that I've served, sometimes it's been easy for me > to get the minutes done by the time of the next board meeting, and > sometimes, as you have noticed, it takes longer. As being a director is a > volunteer position I don't think it's feasible to always require it to be > done in 7 or 10 days. Sometimes it is delayed waiting for information that > needs to be included in the minutes or because another director needs to > carry out an action item first. It seems to have been inevitable in > practice every year that there are sometimes delays despite each > secretary's best intentions. My personal opinion in a situation like this > where a short schedule has not proved sustainable, is that there's no point > in saying "I'll just do the same thing, but faster next time" as that is > likely to fail. > > We could require the responsibility of writing the minutes to rotate > through all 7 directors so that everyone only has to do it once in a few > months, but I believe that it's actually important to have the same person > continue to write the minutes, so that they are written with a consistent > voice and level of detail as
Re: Question to candidates - Minutes of the board meeting
On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 5:43 PM Max via foundation-list < foundation-list@gnome.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board. > > Thanks everyone who want take times to make GNOME better. > Just a simple question about Minutes of the board meeting. > > Data and information might be different. > For me - a GNOME foundation member > > Data - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" after 1 month or 2 weeks after. > Because maybe the event is already close or over. > > Information - Get "Minutes of the board meeting" in 1 week or 10 days. > Because something might be happening and everyone could discuss with > board and reply. > > Here is the question > > Could you promise to think a way --- Everyone get "Minutes of the board > meeting" in a very close time? > > Here is my suggestion. > Maybe there will be a table to record the "Minutes of the board meeting" > announcement time and does it announce in short time? > > > > | board meeting | Minutes| in 10 days ? > | > > > | 2019/4/29 | 2019/5/22| No > | > > > | 2019/4/8 | 2019/5/15| No > | > > > | 2019/3/13 | 2019/5/15| No > | > > > > Maybe it could be a record in GNOME annual report？ > There are ? % for Minutes of the board meeting on time to announce. > > I want to say --- It not just secretary task, It's the information we want > to get from all GNOME Board member. > > Thanks again for all who take time to running the board > Hi Max, This question seems quite relevant and timely, and as I'm sure you know publishing the minutes has been my responsibility over the last year. You may have noticed that I just replied on another foundation-list thread that I am proposing a guideline to the board for best practices around minutes [1]. I can speak about my experience publishing the minutes. Looking back over the 2018-2019 board term that I've served, sometimes it's been easy for me to get the minutes done by the time of the next board meeting, and sometimes, as you have noticed, it takes longer. As being a director is a volunteer position I don't think it's feasible to always require it to be done in 7 or 10 days. Sometimes it is delayed waiting for information that needs to be included in the minutes or because another director needs to carry out an action item first. It seems to have been inevitable in practice every year that there are sometimes delays despite each secretary's best intentions. My personal opinion in a situation like this where a short schedule has not proved sustainable, is that there's no point in saying "I'll just do the same thing, but faster next time" as that is likely to fail. We could require the responsibility of writing the minutes to rotate through all 7 directors so that everyone only has to do it once in a few months, but I believe that it's actually important to have the same person continue to write the minutes, so that they are written with a consistent voice and level of detail as much as possible. Part of my proposal linked above, the section named "Delays" [2], is that the secretary should have the draft minutes ready to be approved after 13 days, to give board members 24 hours to read them before the start of the meeting two weeks later. I hope that by putting the minutes as the first item on the agenda for every board meeting, that will provide a consistent motivation for the secretary to generally have them ready to publish after 14 days, and also normalize that the secretary should ask another director to prepare the minutes when their schedule is busy. I don't think this will eliminate all delays, but I do think it will help share the work among the directors and also make more visible to the membership when delays occur and when to expect the delay to be solved. I would also like to ask you: what do you think would help encourage the kind of discussion you are looking for, other than minutes published after 7 or 10 days? [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/Guidelines [2] https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/Guidelines#Appendix:_Delays Regards, -- Philip ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
Hi Philip and thank you for the question, I currently have little insight into how environmental impact factors into the cost-benefit analyses that the Foundation carries out in relation to meetings, events and general expenditure so my answer will be fairly broad and a bit open-ended perhaps. Open-ended in so far that perhaps the upcoming BoD should, if no such work has been carried out already, assess what measures the organisation does and could take to limit environmental impact without harming the future governance of the project and without making the threshold for contributing and becoming part of the community higher. Ideally such an assessment would result in a proposed policy document to govern the way in which the organisation makes the decisions while also taking the environment into account. More specifically, albeit broad due to the lack of insight into any such current or previous activities, I would say that there are several smaller steps we can take; - Ensuring that we make responsible decisions when it comes to our supply chain for swag, event materials, etc., (and packaging of same) aiming to strike a balance where we look at using suppliers that use recycled materials without this being offset by innumerable travel miles or other costs that it would be difficult for a non-profit of our size to cover. - Ensuring that we encourage event organisers (whether local bid winners for the larger events such as GUADEC and GNOME.ASIA or those arranging smaller hackfests, etc.) to consider the materials they use for event signage, etc., discouraging the use of plastic and, as appropriate, encouraging the printing of reusable materials for recurring events (provided the reduction in waste does not result in a steep financial outlay and a greater carbon footprint due to subsequent storage and shipping). - Discouraging unnecessary travel/meetings while also being mindful of the benefits face-to-face events and meetings have and the positive impact those improved interpersonal dynamics may have on collaborative projects in general and aiming to strike a balance that looks after both the health of the community, interests of the organisation and the planet alike. - We could even take tiny steps such as ensuring that when we remind those attending GUADEC in Thessaloniki to stay hydrated in the Greek heat, we also encourage seasoned GUADEC attendees to bring their GNOME water bottles and to refill to refuel rather than buying a new single-use bottle each time thirst sets in! - Encourage the use of virtual events/meetings/hackfests/whatever to reduce travel while also encouraging broader participation from those community members who are prevented from travelling due to cost and personal/professional commitments that otherwise make it difficult for them to attend an in-person event. - Continuing to ensure that we minimise our reliance on hardcopies when it comes to paperwork, aiming to receive and send electronically where possible. I am sure there are a number of other things we could look at too, but those are the things that pop into mind without having a greater understanding of the current situation when it comes to leaving our GNOME footprint on planet earth! Best, Christel On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 6:11 PM Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > Obviously, those who have already served on the board will have some > insight to share about what the board already does, and concrete ways > it could improve; hopefully this doesn’t disadvantage those who haven’t > already served on the board. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list > -- *Christel Dahlskjaer* *Chief Communications Officer* chris...@londontrustmedia.com UK: 07475431271 International: +44 7475431271 London Trust Media, Inc. // Private Internet Access https://londontrustmedia.com // https://privateinternetaccess.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org
Re: Question to candidates: eco-friendliness
This one hits me where I live :-). I work for a company which has over 100,000 employees, all of whom it forces to commute into central offices, despite being one of the planer's largest internet companies. Quite frankly, it's insane. I would argue for face-to-face meetings to be the exception, rather than the rule, and encourage Gnome developers to help create the world's best videoconferencing collaboration stack. I understand that personal travel for young developers can be a great way to integrate them into FLOSS teams (I'm on the way to a conference hoping to do that right now) but I feel this should be focussed on new/early stage career developers and more established folks should really try and motivate local talent without having to fly around the world producing an obscene carbon footprint. I'd encourage local groups, connected by Gnome developed internet technology. The more we use this ourselves, the better we're going to have to make it work. With the end of Moore's law we also need to start making our code more efficient on smaller machines. Avoiding crypto-currencies which seem to me to be an alien conspiracy to burn as much power as possible to cook the planet would also help (FYI, in case anyone misunderstands me, that's a joke. I don't really believe this :-). This is a long term problem which will require effort on many fronts to help everyone. Jeremy On Mon, Jun 3, 2019, 10:11 AM Philip Withnall wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks for running for the board! > > What steps do you think the Foundation could take to reduce its > environmental impact, and the environmental impact of the project as a > whole? > > I’m asking in more of an organisational sense than a technical sense. > It’s up to individual maintainers to ensure their software is not > resource-hungry, etc. > > I imagine this is the kind of question where it’s easy to just say > “yes, I care about environmental friendliness”, so I suggest you might > want to reply with your ideas about things the board could do to reduce > environmental impact — whether those things are big, small, incremental > steps to reduce our physical resource usage, or fundamental changes to > how we organise the project to reduce the impact of travel. It would be > interesting to hear them all, and how feasible/practical you think any > improvements are. > > Obviously, those who have already served on the board will have some > insight to share about what the board already does, and concrete ways > it could improve; hopefully this doesn’t disadvantage those who haven’t > already served on the board. > > Ta, > Philip > ___ > foundation-list mailing list > foundation-list@gnome.org > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list > ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
On Sun, 2015-05-24 at 21:52 +0100, Magdalen Berns wrote: Hi Andreas, I think most of us haven't seen latest the accounts yet, but I think it's probably fair to assume that a war chest of ~$100,000 is probably a wee bit excessive. ;-) It doesn't sound like a lot of money to me. It's probably not enough to fight a single trademark case in court in the US - you'd need two or three times as much money [1, 2]. Regards, Liam [1] http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2013/05/23/trademark-protection-is-litigation-worth-the-cost/ [2] http://tcattorney.typepad.com/ip/2011/05/trademark-infringement-lawsuits.html -- Liam R. E. Quin l...@holoweb.net http://www.fromoldbooks.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
Hey Andreas, Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se wrote: Dear candidates. Thank you all for running! As part of the GNOME Trademark Fundraiser [1], the Foundation raised $102 608 USD. Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on that. What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? Really good question. From my perspective, there are two critical issues here: 1. It is important that people who have donated money see that it is being put to good use. If they don't, they might not be willing to donate again in the future. 2. We don't want donors to feel that they have been tricked, or that the money is being spent in a different spirit to how it was donated. Therefore, my view is that we need to speak publicly about the funding as quickly as possible, so people know what is happening with it, and we need to identify a use for the funds that reflects the goals of the fund-raising campaign - defending GNOME. Investing it in ways that strengthens the legal position of the project would make sense here, and we could seek advice on this. That said, I don't have a particularly strong opinion on what the money should be specifically spent on (and we don't have to spend it all on one thing). What I do believe is that we need to act to ensure that people feel that their donation is being put to good use. Allan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
Hey Fabiana, Fabiana Simões fabianapsim...@gmail.com wrote: ... I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and accountability on the Board. How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? I agree with the general thrust of the question: Foundation members should feel that their votes count, and that they have a stake in the Foundation. More than that: I think we need a Foundation that is more visible, and more integrated with the rest of the project. This is something that I would like to help improve, and have ideas about (although I also expect there to be constraints and pressures that limit what we can do in this area). We need to recognise that transparency isn't always simple or straightforward. It takes work to make things transparent (such as writing reports or blog posts), and we all know that Board members are busy and have limited time. Additionally, more transparency wouldn't necessarily make the Foundation easier to understand or more engaging: posting the transcript of every meeting, or making all the finances public, wouldn't make the Foundation more engaging. Likewise, many of the matters that the Board deals with probably aren't that interesting to the membership, and more transparency around them might not make people more active within the Foundation. So I think we need to be smart: we need to identify opportunities where information about the Board will be interesting and meaningful; we need to figure out how to produce that information efficiently, and we need to present it in a way that is easy to digest. It's not a question of more transparency, but when and how to be transparent. I would like us to keep this issue in mind during the day-to-day running of the Board. Also, I do have some ideas for increasing transparency: First, we need to regularly review the Board's communications. Ensuring that agendas and minutes are sent out in a timely fashion and are meaningful is an obvious thing to keep an eye on. Second, I think that there needs to be more information about the performance of individual board members. Right now, when Board members run for re-election, there is very little information about how they have performed in the past year. This risks turning the elections into a popularity contest, and doesn't help us to ensure that we have an effective Board. One thing we could do is keep a record of how board members have voted over the year, as well as the tasks that they have successfully completed. These records could be published ahead of the elections. Third, I'm interested in trying to break down the barrier between the Board and other teams, so that Foundation business is spread out more widely. It would be great if the Engagement Team could be more involved in campaigns that are run by the Board, for example. If I am elected to the Board, I'd be interested in hearing peoples' ideas for increasing transparency, and would be happy to pursue them when possible. Thanks, Allan ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
On Mon, 2015-05-25 at 12:39 +0200, Fabiana Simões wrote: Hi everyone, I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and accountability on the Board. How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? Having served on the board, I do think the board is transparent about its activities. The meeting minutes that get published have everything that the board is able to disclose. Sometimes there are things that can't be disclosed. As for accountability, I know in the past some people have asked for a list of who voted how on issues. But the board generally works toward consensus whenever possible, so dissenting votes aren't common. When a board member wishes to have his or her objection noted for the public, that shows up in the minutes. Now, I do think we could do a better job of making this information more digestible. Keeping up with meeting minutes isn't fun. Minutes are full of mundane activities, and it's hard to get the story in your head if you don't read them all and pay close attention. A long time ago, we used to publish reports. We had an annual report and quarterly reports. The reports had synopses from various teams in GNOME, as well as from the board. They were a lot more fun to read than minutes and made it easier to see what's happening at a glance. Getting back to doing reports would be nice, but they are a lot of work. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
On Sun, 2015-05-24 at 19:23 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: Dear candidates. Thank you all for running! As part of the GNOME Trademark Fundraiser [1], the Foundation raised $102 608 USD. Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on that. What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? We should allocate at least some of that money towards hiring a new Executive Director. An ED is expensive, easily the largest single line item in the budget. But a good ED will help us bring in more money, allowing us to run more campaigns and more hackfests. -- Shaun ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
Hi Fabiana, On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 3:39 AM, Fabiana Simões fabianapsim...@gmail.com wrote: How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? I value transparency a lot, and I think the Board should be as transparent as it can - but not more. That is, I understand that some discussions need to happen first behind closed doors. For instance, when discussing a matter publicly might negatively impact the outcome for the Foundation (legal matters for instance), or when some dispute arises between Foundation members that wish to stay private. I think the board has been transparent enough in the last term, and I much appreciated the minutes being more timely than in the past. I share Allan's feeling that the activities of the Foundation would be naturally perceived as more transparent, among other things, if other teams were more often delegated tasks that are currently the sole responsibility of the Board members. In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? I very much agree with this sentiment; the way information is presented today does not lend itself to that kind of visualization. I wouldn't suggest that a quantitative approach to e.g. tasks completed by a Board member during one term would be a fair assessment of all the work that particular person has done, but I can see how a different presentation of the Foundation activities, where tasks can be easily followed and information found in a single place, would be beneficial to making members feel more engaged. Moving off e-mail and towards publicly accessible tools like kanban boards, among others, is a direction worth exploring IMO. Cosimo ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
Hi, On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:23 PM, Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se wrote: As part of the GNOME Trademark Fundraiser [1], the Foundation raised $102 608 USD. Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on that. What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? Keeping it all as a war chest doesn't make much sense to me. As others have already said, we should spend it to bolster and improve GNOME but what this will mean remains to be defined. I think this will mostly mean that when a proposal to spend some money on something will arrive, we'll be a bit more confortable as this reserve gives us some leeway. However I don't think we can decide to spend a huge chunk of it on a specific item as this was not raised with a specific goal apart from the trademark issue which is no more. -- Alexandre Franke ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:39 PM, Fabiana Simões fabianapsim...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, Hi, I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and accountability on the Board. How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? The board should communicate almost everything they do to the members. I say almost because I see a few exceptions. There are cases such as the groupon campaign where they can't unfortunately say anything about what's going on because that could play against the foundation. There are also cases that don't need to be advertised. For instance say the board is mediating in an issue involving two members. The decision to make this public does not belong to the board, but to the member that complained to the board. So far, I guess the board was good on transparency. There are always times where the community is impatient and wants to know more about something that's going on, but I trust that when the board says there's nothing we can say right now it is actually true. In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? Meeting notes are difficult to read, and more precisely it is hard to follow an ongoing agenda item over several meetings. Each member has to do some digging on their own to find out what happened (and who was involved). It would be nice to have a place to sum up the activities of the board. I'm not sure yet which form it would take, but it could be a wiki page per term, or a quarterly report… I also hear the board has been experimenting with a kanban app, I wonder if this could come in handy to craft the reports. In the past we had some reports by our employees (sysadmin and ED) and I found them very valuable, so I reckon the board should provide something similar in some way. -- Alexandre Franke ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 1:23 PM, Alexandre Franke alexandre.fra...@gmail.com wrote: It would be nice to have a place to sum up the activities of the board. I'm not sure yet which form it would take, but it could be a wiki page per term, or a quarterly report… I also hear the board has been experimenting with a kanban app, I wonder if this could come in handy to craft the reports. In the past we had some reports by our employees (sysadmin and ED) and I found them very valuable, so I reckon the board should provide something similar in some way. Sorry, I forgot to mention the awesome President's report Jeff did. This is really welcome and is an example of the things the board should do, but doesn't solve the difficult-to-follow issue described earlier. -- Alexandre Franke ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
Hi Andreas, One of the things is an ED, I think everyone agrees here... On the other hand, I have specific items in mind, but I really don't know the drawbacks of them, since I don't know why we didn't do it before. So it needs discussion. I think we have to fix the where is the money I gave to the foundation went? Did it achieve the goals? How does it affect me directly? One thing that I had in mind is, show the community that their money is spend in something that directly affects them (and not only long-time developers, like spending the money on GUADEC or so). I really think we have to show that to those people. For example allocating some money for bountysource or so, in this way we can choose some bugs that we think are priority to fix, and we can say part of your money was spend in this specific thing that will affect directly to you. Another thing I had in mind is a GNOME excellency program. Read as, a GSOC for one person and directly paid by GNOME. The problem with GSOC is that is only for students. And the issue with Outreachy is that is only for women. So the way I imagine it is, one important specific project that people has to compete to be elected to do it, and we offer a little bigger amount than GSOC to promote it. In this way we can achieve a specific goal, independent of the person, so here the goal is not to gain new people, but to achieve the goal of the project. In this way we can also say to the community part of your money was spend in a very great developer, to fix this long-standing issue that directly affects you. I think spending 10% of the money in those initiatives are not that much, and send a message to the community and improves the image of GNOME towards them. But I also believe we need to have a little war chest and I understand big part of the money goes to hackfests, etc. Cheers, Carlos Soriano - Original Message - | Dear candidates. Thank you all for running! | | As part of the GNOME Trademark Fundraiser [1], the Foundation raised | $102 608 USD. | Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was | withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on | that. | What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War | Chest [2] or spent on something specific? | | 1. https://www.gnome.org/groupon/ | 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_chest | - Andreas | ___ | foundation-list mailing list | foundation-list@gnome.org | https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list | ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
Hi Fabiana, - Original Message - | | | Hi everyone, | | I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and | accountability on the Board. | | How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What I think the transparency should be complete. Since GNOME relies on money from the community. | should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent | enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in I think it should be communicated when something big happens (ED contracted, Hackfests, programs like outreachy, etc.) and then after a fiscal year or so. | your priorities would be to do so? I think the last year in GUADEC GNOME showed a very detailed graphic on expenses, actually it was too complex to understanding it at first in my humble opinion =) I think a good way is a simple graphic with the income/outcome/balance and the important items where the outcome went and if it accomplished the expected result. I could understand that the income can need some privacy (companies that doesn't want to show its name or so?) | | In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the | Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals | and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and | context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation | have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? I think this needs improvement, and I don't have a clear solution without putting more work on the board right now. | | Thanks, | Fabiana | | ___ | foundation-list mailing list | foundation-list@gnome.org | https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list | Cheers, Carlos Soriano ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
2015-05-25 12:39 GMT+02:00 Fabiana Simões fabianapsim...@gmail.com: Hi everyone, Hey Fabiana! How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? During this last term we had to discuss several items that couldn't be disclosed with the community for the particular subject they were covering or for the parties involved that wanted to remain private. I'm mainly referring to the Groupon legal matter and the huge amount of behind-the-scenes action items each of us took part in during this last year. It's clear these kind of subjects are (and were in the Groupon's case) going to be made public when the Board will actually decide (upon consulting with our legal counsel) that it's time to disclose the information and the results we gathered. That's intended to prevent the external entity, party or person involved to know the plans and next moves of the GNOME Foundation and benefit from it. We had other similar cases as well and I personally made sure and asked the whole Board to evaluate how much had to be disclosed about these specific matters. For example the WHS agreement that was finally signed during this term was made public at [1], the GNOME Foundation -- SFC move of Outreachy was included on the minutes of many Board meetings in a detailed manner. What we probably omitted at first was the name of the new program as there was an explicit request from the organizers. That didn't mean we weren't going to let the Foundation membership know at all about the new name but just that it was going to take a few weeks for us to make that information available. We valued transparency a lot during this term and you can notice how detailed the minutes are going from the items discussed on the meeting itself to the ones discussed on the mailing list. A few examples [2], [3], [4]. (and more :-) ) As the Secretary of the Board transparency has been one of my main goals and will remain as such in case of a re-election. In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? This is a very interesting point. While right now meeting minutes do provide a good overview of what's going on within the Board itself and the items that are being discussed they don't provide a summary of who worked on what and how long it took for an action item to be completed. During this term we introduced a tasks system based on [5] which helped us identifying who was in charge of a certain item. We might want to bring the meeting minutes to the next level making them more detailed by including the name, surname of the person who achieved a certain action item to facilitate the membership to verify one's involvement. Having some sort of stats every year (also in terms of meeting's participations for each member) would also help. Although the new tasks system served the Board great not every member got used to it and hopefully having a new Board that will start using it from the beginning will definitely allow everyone to be as much as productive as we originally thought when we introduced the software. [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/WHSAgreement [2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2015-May/msg2.html [3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2015-April/msg4.html [4] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2015-April/msg2.html [5] http://kanboard.net -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator, GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
2015-05-24 19:23 GMT+02:00 Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se: Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on that. What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? The Board this year didn't have much time to discuss further how to spend this amount or even a chunk of it. While I would be for keeping part of this amount as part of the Foundation's cash reserves (for when we'll be hiring an ED, possible other legal issues) I'm open to ideas from the community and will be more than happy to discuss with other Board members which of these proposals is more inherent to the bolster and improve GNOME goal we promised to our donors at first. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator, GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:39:50PM +0200, Fabiana Simões wrote: I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and accountability on the Board. How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? I believe the board should be entirely transparent about all of its activities and discussions, with two exceptions: First, if the board is discussing some legal or contractual issue that cannot be disclosed until after a certain point, then detailed records should still be kept, but those records can be kept private until the point where they can be released/discussed. And second, if the board is handling some privacy-sensitive issue for community members, such as harassment or dispute mediation, then the decision of how much to disclose there should be up to the parties involved rather than to the board. Other than exceptions like those, the board should be entirely transparent and public about its activities and records. From what I've seen in the board minutes and similar, I think the board has been quite transparent about what happens in board meetings, but I agree that the board could potentially improve transparency about followups and resolutions that happen via activity outside of board meetings. I also think that activity summaries such as those other board members have recently posted help to avoid the hidden in plain sight problem that the minutes can have. Do you have any specific examples of board-related activities you could point to where you think additional transparency would have been helpful, as an example of what to improve? I certainly plan to be entirely transparent about my *own* activities if elected to the board. - Josh Triplett ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 07:23:01PM +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: As part of the GNOME Trademark Fundraiser [1], the Foundation raised $102 608 USD. Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on that. What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? As stated in the fundraiser, If we are able to defend the mark without spending this amount, we will use the remaining funds to bolster and improve GNOME.. That applies to *all* money directly donated to GNOME, as well. If, in working with the people we worked with on the Groupon issue, we get legal advice that suggests we'd be in a stronger position to defend GNOME by registering trademarks in additional countries, or otherwise getting specific legal structures into place, I think it makes sense to use some of the funds for that purpose; however, that would be a *very* small fraction of the funds raised. I also don't think it's worth keeping all of that money aside in a war chest in anticipation of a future legal issue that may never arise. So, I would suggest that after we consider any potential follow-up legal protections we're advised to take, we place the funds into the general GNOME Foundation account as we would any donations directly to the Foundation. I don't think it makes sense to earmark these funds for any particular purpose other than legal issues, and legal issues should not take up any significant fraction of these funds. I also don't think it makes sense to plan a project that involves spending that entire sum at once, rather than putting it in the GNOME Foundation account where it can be used as needed towards purposes that improve GNOME. - Josh Triplett ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: transparency and accountability
Hi Fabiana, Great question, thanks! Response inline: I'd like to hear your thoughts on implementing transparency and accountability on the Board. How transparent the work of the Board should be to Foundation members? What should be communicated and when? I think it is appropriate the board seek a consensus from the community before adopting any new policy. I also believe it it is fair practice for the board to take steps to advertise posts, such as: secretary, treasurer and president before appointing new officers. I would seek to encourage healthy discussion between the board and the rest of the community about matters of importance arising, which would include, taking conscious steps to publish the agenda and minutes as early as possible. I would also advocate we publish advisory board minutes. More generally, I think it would be useful if we kept an up to date list of all committee names, committee members, committee meeting logs/minutes and policies, just as we already to keep our current members list up to date on the Foundation pages. Always useful to be able to see a more detailed breakdown of income and outgoings so we are clear on how much each “sponsor is actually contributing to the project in real, practical terms. The community could also benefit from being kept abreast of the specific yearly contributions of advisory board affiliates. Do you think we have been transparent enough in the last term? If not, how can we improve things and how high in your priorities would be to do so? Who knows that GNOME has been a “delinquent” charity in the eyes of so the California State Department of Justice since 2013? The board have done their best under exceptionally challenging circumstances, but of course must always strive to do better, year on year. If elected, I would be seeking feedback from members on an ongoing basis. Transparency and accessibility go hand in hand: This is a top priority for me. In terms of accountability, it's been unclear to me since joining the Foundation how much different Board members contribute to the Board's goals and tasks. Do you think the meeting notes provide enough visibility and context to the work being done? It would be useful to be able to provide access to meeting logs, but as I understand things, there are some confidentiality issues which may prevent that from being workable. I suppose I could advocate each director write a monthly or (dare I say it) maybe even a fortnightly report, that sort of thing could make it clear to members that everyone is pulling their weight” and ensure members are always clear on what tasks are actively being carried out by each member of the board. By the end of a term, how can the Foundation have a fair understanding of one's contributions to the Board? Jeff’s end of term update was a good call and I get the sense that the rest of the community really appreciated his efforts too. It would be great to see the same sort of thing from all board members and then compiled either into a pdf document or as a condensed so it can be added to the annual report and I would certainly be willing to support an initiative like this. Thanks again, for your questions! Magdalen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
Hi! On So, 2015-05-24 at 19:23 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? I don't have a particular idea for those funds (as opposed to the funds earmarked for Security and Privacy), so I am open to ideas. But we must stick to what we promised to our donors: If we are able to defend the mark without spending this amount, we will use the remaining funds to bolster and improve GNOME. Cheers, Tobi ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
Hi Liam, On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:09 AM, Liam R. E. Quin l...@holoweb.net wrote: On Sun, 2015-05-24 at 21:52 +0100, Magdalen Berns wrote: Hi Andreas, I think most of us haven't seen latest the accounts yet, but I think it's probably fair to assume that a war chest of ~$100,000 is probably a wee bit excessive. ;-) It doesn't sound like a lot of money to me. It's probably not enough to fight a single trademark case in court in the US - you'd need two or three times as much money [1, 2]. Just as well Groupon didn't catch on to that before they conceded then ;-) GNOME originally registered as a public benefit cooperation (i.e. a charity) so our income must be substantially related to GNOME's exempt purposes or it could be taxable and as you can see $100,000 would normally amount to a significant chunk of our average annual income.[1] So, I still agree with Tobias and I also agree with everything Cosimo has said, on this: There really ought to be some compelling reason for us to want to sit on that kind of money rather than invest it back into the project. I'll leave it there, so the rest of the candidates can answer. Magdalen [1] http://rct.doj.ca.gov/Verification/Web/Details.aspx?agency_id=1license_id=1043846; ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
Hi Andreas, Thanks for your question! On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 6:44 PM, Tobias Mueller mue...@cryptobitch.de wrote: Hi! On So, 2015-05-24 at 19:23 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? I don't have a particular idea for those funds (as opposed to the funds earmarked for Security and Privacy), so I am open to ideas. But we must stick to what we promised to our donors: If we are able to defend the mark without spending this amount, we will use the remaining funds to bolster and improve GNOME. I think most of us haven't seen latest the accounts yet, but I think it's probably fair to assume that a war chest of ~$100,000 is probably a wee bit excessive. ;-) so in principle, I'd echo Tobias and also advocate we take ideas from members like yourself on what we ought to spend surplus funds on in order to bolster and improve GNOME. Magdalen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates: Best use of Trademark Fundraiser money?
Hi Andreas, On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Andreas Nilsson li...@andreasn.se wrote: As part of the GNOME Trademark Fundraiser [1], the Foundation raised $102 608 USD. Since the trademark claims from the other part in the issue was withdrawn, it was never taken to court and the money was never spent on that. What, in your mind, is the best use of these funds now? Kept as a War Chest [2] or spent on something specific? It's hard to answer this question without a good understanding of the Foundation cash flow, and even then economics is not my best skill :-) Having said that, assuming the Foundation has some cash reserves outside this war chest, I don't think keeping the money in the bank is the best use of it, as it will quickly lose its value over time; I don't have a single specific idea in mind, but I would like the money to be spent on people. GNOME is in the unique position to be able to support and connect people with the same or converging interests. This can take many concrete shapes: outreach into new communities, bounties for features or fixes, conferences and many more. In other words, I would love to see that money used in a way that leaves the GNOME community enriched with more human capital, and that criteria would guide my choices on how to spend it. Cosimo ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] Nobody ever got a command to start a new GNU package, because GNU package developers are volunteers. When people are interested in starting a GNU package, they talk with me about it and we decide jointly that it is one. In the 1990s that was a very informal process. That's how GNOME was started, except that I think I discussed the need with Miguel before he started it. GNOME was conceived as a GNU package since the beginning, which is why it has the name GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment, initially). The reason why the GNU Project and the FSF help GNOME development, and encourage people to use GNOME both as end users and as application developers, is that helping GNOME is helping GNU. Miguel made important contributions to free software. GNOME was not his first. Then he changed and started neglecting freedom, and finally denigrating it. Neither one cancels the other. But recall how his name came into this discussion: citing what he said in a memoir that he wrote after rejecting the principles of free software. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 23:35 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] To cooperate formally with a Linux Foundation event would run into a problem -- they would probably want to call the GNU/Linux system Linux, and we should not accept that. I look forward to the FSF's financial contributions to GNOME conferences. The truth is not for sale. GNOME was launched by the GNU Project to be part of the GNU system. That system is still GNU, and calling it Linux is bad for GNU, including GNOME. Care to expand on that? Miguel's history of the GNOME project doesn't make a lot of mention of GNU: https://web.archive.org/web/20131106035732/http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html Namely, a discussion with you about his plans, the use of GNU licenses, and an announcement on a GNU mailing-list. What else did the GNU project and/or the FSF do for GNOME? One thing that it could do though, is update the screenshot of some ancient version of GNOME on the front page: http://www.gnu.org/ Where the stock GNOME logo used for the menu has been replaced by some sort of Celtic knot. I'd definitely want the GNOME Foundation Board to accept one of its sponsors using Linux I agree, but that is a different subject. We were talking about holding GUADEC in combination with a Linux Foundation event -- not about merely accepting sponsorship. Guess I wasn't clear enough for you, and I'll rephrase so it's clearer: I'd definitely want the GNOME Foundation Board to accept co-hosting an event with one of its sponsors that uses Linux and not GNU/Linux if it meant the durability of those GNOME conferences. They support Free Software as well. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] Care to expand on that? Miguel's history of the GNOME project doesn't make a lot of mention of GNU: Considering the history of Miguel, that is not surprising. He started a company supposedly to develop free software, then came out with proprietary products. Ultimately he more or less went to Microsoft. Namely, a discussion with you about his plans, the use of GNU licenses, and an announcement on a GNU mailing-list. What else did the GNU project and/or the FSF do for GNOME? You've got it the wrong way around. GNOME was started as a contribution to GNU -- that is what GNU packages are. The GNU Project consists of many software projects, one being GNOME. In general, each GNU package is developed separately -- but we urge GNU packages to support each other, so we urge developers of other packages to make them work with GNOME. One of the bad things that Miguel did in the first few years of GNOME development was not to pass these ideas on to the other people he brought into GNOME development. From that experience, I learned that I need to discuss these issues explicitly with the people responsible for GNU packages. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: OEMs
On 2014-05-22 15:10, Michael Catanzaro wrote: On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 14:35 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote: - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story Dell is currently shipping Ubuntu computers running Unity. Wouldn't it be desirable to see a major OEM shipping GNOME as well? If so, what steps do you believe GNOME, and the board in particular, should take to achieve this goal? As Executive Director,I had a few calls/emails with Dell, trying to get a foothold in the company (or get a donation since they're using GNOME technologies) without too much luck. I think the Foundation needs to promote GNOME as much as possible and find partners, but we need successes to point to as well to get the message across. There are a few companies that have been working on products with GNOME in the last couple of years but already at least one of those efforts have fizzled. My fingers are crossed for the products still under development (I'm looking at you, Endless Mobile, for one) which will create more of an opportunity to approach new partners. With Android having met so much success we need a compelling story - I think we have that, but it's hard to communicate when it's more theoretical. In Dell's case they believe they need to contract with a company who will stand behind the technology, and Canonical serves that function. This is not an easy problem for the GNOME Foundation itself to solve. karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates: OEMs
Quite frankly, I don't think this is a fair question to ask. We all would like that to happen of course but we don't have our own OS (at least not just yet), and there is no way Dell, or any OEM for that matter, is going to ship an OS without a well stablished commercial entity behind (from which they can reliably get the kind of support they can't get from the community), which at that point means that it won't be branded as GNOME but SUSE/RHEL... you name it. Realistically, to have OEMs shipping GNOME in a commercial product we need a set of things we don't currently have (like people employed to work on certification, training and support). 2014-05-22 21:10 GMT+02:00 Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org: On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 14:35 -0400, Jeff Fortin wrote: - Our somewhat nonexistent OEM story Dell is currently shipping Ubuntu computers running Unity. Wouldn't it be desirable to see a major OEM shipping GNOME as well? If so, what steps do you believe GNOME, and the board in particular, should take to achieve this goal? ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Cheers, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] SUSE is a company, not a product, therefore it can not contains nonfree software. The company SUSE makes a GNU/Linux distro which they call SUSE Linux; it is nonfree. Of course, the distro is not the same thing as the company, but since they are both called SUSE, promoting one is promoting the other. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On 05/21/2014 05:17 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: Now regarding foundation and these other projects. I've long thought that need to find a way to support these projects. I have a proposal in the works that will suggest that the Foundation will help pay for hackfests that does not benefit GNOME the product (e.g. the desktop) but does benefit GNOME the eco-system. The idea is that in exchange for the money, that everyone would participate in working in the lower levels of the stack and not necessarily the design. This is controversial because of using our finances, but there are questions on whether this will dilute the brand. But that is a separate discussion. This is very interesting, considering projects like Mate and Elementary OS have donation systems by themselves and I assume income from that [1] [2]. The other thing is that the foundation have limited funds as it is. I would love to hear other candidates view on this matter. It would be a deal breaker for me. 1. http://mate-desktop.org/donate/ 2. http://elementaryos.org/ (you donate when you download it) - Andreas ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
Hi. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:56:16AM -0700, Andy Tai wrote: What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? Absolutely. And, as others have said, we were and are trying to foster relations with hackfests. I think that is good and necessary. Cheers, Tobi ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 10:32 +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote: On 05/21/2014 05:17 AM, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: Now regarding foundation and these other projects. I've long thought that need to find a way to support these projects. I have a proposal in the works that will suggest that the Foundation will help pay for hackfests that does not benefit GNOME the product (e.g. the desktop) but does benefit GNOME the eco-system. The idea is that in exchange for the money, that everyone would participate in working in the lower levels of the stack and not necessarily the design. This is controversial because of using our finances, but there are questions on whether this will dilute the brand. But that is a separate discussion. This is very interesting, considering projects like Mate and Elementary OS have donation systems by themselves and I assume income from that [1] [2]. The other thing is that the foundation have limited funds as it is. I would love to hear other candidates view on this matter. It would be a deal breaker for me. In the past, we would try to sponsor GNOME folks for hackfests that are wider than GNOME itself, and in some cases, important people in the community around those building blocks. For example, the location hackfest, built around work on Geoclue2, has plenty of non-GNOME attendees: https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Location2014 I believe it also happened for the Color management hackfest: https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/ColorManagement2012 Obviously, it's better when the contributor's home organisation can pay for costs rather than GNOME. It might not always be the case however. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 17:08 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote: On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Andy Tai a...@gnu.org wrote: Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? They are (or ought to be) just as involved in the development of GTK+ as the developers of GNOME Shell are, and their opinions, wants, needs etc ought to be valued. The GNOME project is not (or at least, should not) be exclusively about GNOME Shell, but include anyone and everyone who uses GNOME technologies. The sever fracturing of the community which has taken place over the last 3-4 years is not healthy for our community, nor for theirs. Everyone who is using GTK+ ought to be included in ongoing discussions as to its development. They should be invited to GUADEC and encouraged to submit talks, and become foundation members. As long as they contribute to GNOME or its direct eco-system (eg. contributing to MATE, Elementary, etc. isn't contributing to GNOME, contributing to GTK+, NetworkManager, PulseAudio or GStreamer is). As a member of the board, I will do my best to engage with them and encourage them to do so, while also doing my best to ensure that their voices, thoughts, concerns, etc are heard, understood and thought of in any and all changes going forwards. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 01:39 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: To cooperate formally with a Linux Foundation event would run into a problem -- they would probably want to call the GNU/Linux system Linux, and we should not accept that. I look forward to the FSF's financial contributions to GNOME conferences. I'd definitely want the GNOME Foundation Board to accept one of its sponsors using Linux if it meant the durability of those GNOME conferences. They support Free Software as well. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 7:01 AM, Bastien Nocera had...@hadess.net wrote: On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 01:39 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: To cooperate formally with a Linux Foundation event would run into a problem -- they would probably want to call the GNU/Linux system Linux, and we should not accept that. I look forward to the FSF's financial contributions to GNOME conferences. I'd definitely want the GNOME Foundation Board to accept one of its sponsors using Linux if it meant the durability of those GNOME conferences. They support Free Software as well. Absolutely. We ought to happily accept the support of anyone and everyone who supports free software, even if their ideals do not line up absolutely perfectly with GNOME's. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
With regards to priorities of the GNOME Foundation, Last I heard, the case of the OPW cash flow problems was being taken care of, unlike what news sites would have you believe. It seemed like a matter of time for sponsors follow-up activities to resolve the situation, and AFAICT we're 75% there. It would be easy for me to mention it's my personal priority, but I won't - it would be a lie to say that I can immediately make a difference in an issue that is in the process of being solved as we speak. I'm not sure how urgently a replacement for the ED can be found, given that GNOME needs to be very careful about its expenditures and that the ED would need to be able to offset his/her own salary, which requires a fair amount of flair. See my candidacy application for more, but if I have to pick, among my areas of interest, the one I find the most important: fundraising and financial security, including investigating where we could diversify or where there are untapped resources. This is much easier said than done, obviously. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On 2014-05-21 13:04, Jeff Fortin wrote: Le dimanche 18 mai 2014 à 12:58 -0400, Dave Neary a écrit : So my question to all of you is: what are the main characteristics you will be looking for in the next executive director? When looking for a profile, there are a number of dials to twiddle: * Technical proficiency reputation in the community, including free software cultural alignment * Strategy experience - the ability to formulate and communicate a direction for GNOME * Administrative and organizational experience * Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem * Communication/marketing/evangelism experience * Cost Of these, which do you feel are the most important for GNOME right now I think that expecting an ED candidate to have all of those qualities/skills nailed down simultaneously would be a difficult proposition to entertain. It's basically asking for a 20-years-experienced C*O to lift mountains at non-profit compensation rates and very high risk. Let's be honest: whoever that person might be, there's a heck of a challenge in terms of fundraising; we're far from the situation we were in back in 2009 or so. Karen et al have my respect for weathering the very harsh times GNOME has gone through in recent years. The board, too, requires diversity in the skillset of its members. It's a team effort. I hope my skills and interest in biz/mkt/mngt/design/etc. will be good complements to those of other board members. So in my eyes, in our current circumstances, I would say these are what are valuable traits: business acumen/experience growing a commercial ecosystem; communication skill (I consider that to be a side-effect of the previous item), admin/org experience. Maybe cost in theory, but in practice, what I just described is kind of a biz dev/salesperson... good luck finding an experimented person to fill that role in a cost-constrained scenario! I agree that it's hard to find the right person on our budget but I think there are a lot of different ways that it can play out, as others suggest. To me, understanding the GNOME community (and thus being able to work with all of us to accomplish GNOME's goals) and being passionate about free software (to understand and be able to advocate for adoption and funding) are at a premium. I think we should not be too rigid about our expectations and see who responds to a call for applicants - there are a lot of different ways to do the job right. We need someone to keep convincing our current donors to give (when I joined as ED we'd already lost adboard members and some of our current ones were threatening to leave), to build the connections with our allies to get to the donation level and to help steer GNOME in a direction that individuals and others will want to give. I personally wished many times that I was more technical in my role so I could dive in and help on things that were in the public interest or of concern to one of our partners, rather than agitate for those fixes to be made by others (I haven't really coded in a decade). One thing- it would be great to have someone who is a good public speaker, in order to advocate for GNOME, but also to get invited to the places where people and companies are meeting. With the exception of GNOME's events, the vast majority of my travel was funded by the conferences and having keynotes meant that I could reach more people. Then again as someone else said, traveling takes away time from other things. It is indeed a balancing act :) karen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Le 21 mai 2014 07:40, Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org a écrit : [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] for downstream, there's the SUSE conference or the Fedora Flock; To cooperate formally with the SUSE conference would pose an ethical problem because SUSE contains lots of nonfree software. To have the event in proximity to the SUSE conference, without any public relationship with it, would not have such a problem. SUSE is a company, not a product, therefore it can not contains nonfree software. You seems to be incorrectly mixing a company (SUSE), an community project (openSUSE) done only with free software, community events around this project (openSUSE conference and summit) and friend projects like freedesktop meeting which was supported by SUSE which hosted the event in its Nuremberg office. (for the record, I'm a contributor to openSUSE and also working for SUSE). -- Frédéric Crozat ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Dave On 2014-05-19 16:14, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: On 05/19/2014 04:31 AM, David King wrote: Right now (taking into account the poor financial situation that the Foundation is facing), I think that a candidate for the executive director position would be someone who has experience of raising funds for not-for-profit organisations. For GNOME, the board does not exert strong control over the project, but tries to steer it in the right direction by ensuring that funding is directed appropriately, making the executive director role particularly challenging. My follow-on question, then: raising money for what? Initially, I think that much of the money raised by an executive director would go towards financially supporting the executive director role. If the Foundation's revenues continue to drop (as has been the case over the last few years), an executive director role would become untenable without increased funding from sponsors. Once the executive director role is securely funded, I think that there would be more time to spend growing the Foundation, which is the more traditional role of the executive director. If there is an abundance of funding available, the board should work with the executive director and the Foundation to use the money effectively to further the Foundation's goals, such as by funding hackfests, outreach (possibly with a particular emphasis on local outreach, as this has come up as part of other discussions) and sponsoring contributions (such as with the accessibility and privacy campaigns). I do not think that technical proficiency is an essential quality for an executive director, if by that you mean ability to code. I meant understanding of the technology, ability to explain it, and ability to be articulate about what the GNOME project needs to do to stay relevant. In that case, I think technical proficiency is of critical importance, as fundraising would be extremely difficult without an ability to explain on a technical and social level about the importance of sponsors' (and potential sponsors') support of GNOME. This is what I meant when I mentioned that an executive director would need to understand GNOME's position in the Free Software and wider communities in order to raise funds effectively, so thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Michael On 2014-05-19 18:48, Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 16:55 +0100, David King wrote: I have a follow-up question (for David and incumbents): why do you want (or not want) to hire a new executive director? What responsibilities do you think the executive director role should entail? Can the foundation afford to wait to hire a new executive director? I partially answered this in my responses to Dave Neary: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2014-May/msg00030.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2014-May/msg00069.html In short, the executive director needs to bring in enough money to fund the position, grow the revenues of the Foundation to keep its financial situation secure, and to grow the Foundation as a whole. Much of the process for this will be administrative, such as helping the administrative assistant with accounting and other necessary work. Part of the role will be evangelizing for GNOME at conferences and to existing and future sponsors. Some of the role would be acting as a figurehead, answering questions about GNOME and making sure that GNOME is presented well in the press. Stormy Peters wrote a very useful blog post about what she saw as the role of the executive director when she was in that position: http://stormyscorner.com/2009/01/what-do-i-do-as-executive-director-of-gnome.html I think that is broadly true of the executive director role, just that the proportions differ depending on the needs of the Foundation at the time. I'm asking because most of Karen's work was not highly-visible. I'm aware that she worked on recruiting new advisory board members and spoke at conferences, both of which seem important. But I'm sure there must be more to the job that I am unaware of, to justify the significant expense. I think that, in future, the Foundation cannot afford an executive director who is more costly to employ than the income gained from advisory board revenues. I think that Emily Gonyer's proposal to scale back corporate sponsorship would make it more difficult to continue to employ an executive director in the traditional role. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Emily Chen emilychen...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I would like to ask below questions to future board: 1. For GNOME big event, call for sponsor is really important, what is your plan to call for more sponsors for conference like GUADEC and GNOME.Asia ? I think it is of utmost importance that big events have numerous sponsors, both large and small. Local businesses ought to be encouraged to support events. I'm not sure what sorts of local business organizations exist in Europe and Asia but something similar to the Chambers of Commerce here in the USA likely do, and would be useful as primary contact points to reach out to for donations. 2. What is the top 3 goals for GNOME Foundation in the next year, in your opinion ? I think that it will be extremely important in the next year to reach out to related projects. Since the advent of GNOME 3 we have seen a severe fracturing in the ecosystem, which is not benefiting anyone. Reaching out to related projects (Unity, Cinnamon, Mate, ElementaryOS, XFCE, etc) and asking them to participate in GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, the Boston Summit is vitally important. GNOME is about more than just the shell and recognizing that everyone who uses GNOME technologies is, or should be welcomed into the project. 3. How to raise and increase the fund for GNOME Foundation ? I've touched on this elsewhere, so I'll be brief: We need to increase individual and small-business donations. There are many ways to do so which we have left untapped including Facebook Google Wallet donations, encouraging the use of AmazonSmile and similar programs, etc. 4. How many hours you work in GNOME Board related work each week? N/A Thanks! Emily Chen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On 19 May 2014 18:55, Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 19 May 2014, Max wrote: Hi everyone, Hey Max! My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Two OPW interns have been working for several months to provide a valid event management system for all the major GNOME events. The software is currently based on OSEM (the Open Source Event Manager [1]) and a test-bed is privately available on one of our testing machines at OSUOSL. Part of the upcoming GUADEC organizers have been granted access to the istance, if you are missing access to it please let me know. We should definitely find out what has gone wrong with it and why it has not been declared ready for production yet. I will make sure to follow-up on this as one of my goals for the next term if elected. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? While OPW has had a great success in India (thanks to english being widely spoken there) it did not have the same success on other Asia regions probably because of the language barrier. What we can probably do is localizing the content of the OPW flyer so that more women can be aware of the Outreach Program for Women and apply for it. (I will make sure to discuss about this with Marina if elected and propose the idea to the relevant localization team) That would hit another language barrier though which mainly relates to the fact none of the current mentors are Chinese speakers. Max, did you try interacting with any local university already? if yes, is there anyone (both english and chinese speaker) who might be willing to mentor a chinese-speaking student during one of the next OPW rounds? -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) How do we get these member / resource together? I'm not sure whether adding a country field on the foundation database would be enough to achieve the proposed goal given someone might just decide to not specify that information at all (for protecting the privacy for example), additionally there is no real need for the Membership Committee (and the Foundation generally) to know where a contributor is based. But that's not all the Committee is very busy lately and increasing the information to manage for each single member would not be ideal. (I'm also sure the country field would become inconsistent within a few months from it being introduced for the simple fact someone might just forget to send an update to the committee specifying he just moved to a new country) What we can probably do is populating the apply form some more including more information about how new or existing members can reach their localized communities. (by suggesting the new member to subscribe to gnome-cc-l...@gnome.org (Country Code) for example or if missing to ask the creation of a new list in case that specific community is growing in number) -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? -- Anything you plan with Asia. I've not been following very closely what the current situation for GNOME.Asia is but Dave and Kat's emails clearly state the Foundation is totally oriented on improving the current situation for the next term and they will be personally there at the upcoming event to instruct participants on the multiple ways to be engaged to the GNOME project as contributors. Max, how much the events that were organized and sponsored by the GNOME Foundation did benefit the Asia region as a whole? how many new contributors joined your ranks? what do you think could help you improve the organization of the GNOME.Asia event? There were no funding requests to the current board for organisation of events in Asia, with the exception of GNOME.Asia. There was one request for attendance to a non-GNOME conference, where a talk about GNOME was given. During the past GUADEC we discussed the creation of an additional planet to aggregate all the chinese-speaking feeds to help non-english-speaking contributors to be aware of what's going on behind the scenes of events like GNOME.Asia but generally any other initiative happening in that area (the Planet GNOME rules currently disallow localized content to be posted and while that keeps the planet polished from mixed content to be published it also restricts non-english-speakers to read it), do you think such addition would still make sense? if yes, do you have a list of feeds to aggregate there already? is a planet really needed or would a news feed on the
Re: Question for candidates
On 20 May 2014 01:55, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Max sakana...@gmail.com To: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2014 9:18:33 PM Subject: Question for candidates Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? The GNOME.Asia team is doing a fantastic job organizing the conference and it will undoubtedly boost the interest in GNOME. It would be great to have meetups of people working on GNOME and free software in Beijing throughout the year, so that more people who learned about GNOME at the conference are interested in travelling to the next year's location. Local meetups are a great idea and have proven to be popular when organised, even if only for GNOME Beers around releases. As the question is about plans for the future, how are you planning to help this happen? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) I created a new activities to track page for the board and added it there. We will find out what is going on with it and encourage development. There are many issues that the board tracks and works on, why do you think that the board should take over the tracking of this rather than let those who created it (OPW interns and mentors) and those who would benefit from it (GUADEC and GNOME.Asia organisers) keep track? Given that the board rarely interferes in development, how do you propose to encourage further work on this project? Other idea? -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? We should continue to provide materials and encouragement for past OPW and GSoC participants to run introduction to free software / GNOME / GSoC / OPW sessions and host meetups in their cities throughout the year, so that we have more applicants from Asia applying for these programs who have experience contributing to free software. There are materials available for OpenHatch Open Source Comes to Campus and GNOME Newcomers Workshop, which can be used for such events. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? Of 39 interns GNOME has this summer, 14 are from India, 1 from China, and 1 from Philippines. As I mentioned above, we need to encourage these people and other community members to promote the internship programs and help people become contributors before they apply. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) There is https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide , which we can encourage people to fill out. There are also translators, whose information you can get from Git or on https://l10n.gnome.org/teams/. Also there are localization and regional mailing lists. How do we get these member / resource together? I think you already do a lot of this by organizing GNOME.Asia! Perhaps you can have a BoF at the conference to figure out what are the resources you want to put together and what are the activities you want to see happen. -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? The GNOME Foundation sponsored Sindhu to go to FOSSASIA this year, where she ran contributing to GNOME workshop, did a talk about documentation, and participated in a panel about women in IT. We should have more people proposing talks and going to FOSSASIA next year. We should also have people proposing talks and going to LinuxCon Japan. Identifying and participating in any other free software conferences in Asia would be great. -- Anything you plan with Asia. Thanks for all the great questions! I'm excited about growing our presence in Asia and I'm sure we will succeed. Marina GNOME.Asia team member Max Huang ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Foundation budget (was: Re: Question for candidates)
On 20 May 2014 14:21, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Hi, Apologies in advance for a question that will take us away from the main thread topic... On 05/20/2014 06:15 AM, David King wrote: Initially, I think that much of the money raised by an executive director would go towards financially supporting the executive director role. If the Foundation's revenues continue to drop (as has been the case over the last few years), an executive director role would become untenable without increased funding from sponsors. I have not been paying close attention in the past 3-4 years, but when I was, we had: * Added new members to the advisory board * Increased advisory board membership to $10,000 for small companies and $20,000 for large companies The executive director was, at the time I was on the board, the only salary outgoing, but advisory board revenues should be $140,000 unless I'm mistaken from my reading of the advisory board page - which ad board members have we lost? HP, Nokia, Motorola, Oracle from the looks of it... am I missing anyone? The revenues from advisory board fees since 2006 are as follows (I do not have access to any financial information before that time): 2006: USD 69000 (USD 5000 for smaller companies, USD 1 for larger companies and some in between) 2007: USD 105000 (same as above) 2008: USD 11 (same as above) 2009: USD 132000 (same as above, although a number of companies paid more) 2010: USD 18 (the USD 1/2 pricing structure was introduced) 2011: USD 135000 2012: USD 12 2013: USD 12 2014: USD 13 All figures from 2006-2013 are what the Foundation actually received in the bank account. All of the figures are against the years in which they were incurred, not necessarily paid, so there may be differences from the annual reports. 2014 figures are what the Foundation has invoiced and is expecting to receive by the end of the year. Rosanna has been in the Foundation payroll since 2006 as an employee. The theory at the time I was on the board was that ad board revenues paid for employees with a little margin for error, and we fundraised for everything else. Has that principlegone by the wayside? Unfortunately, yes. I'm not sure whether this was a concious decision or just tended in that direction as the boards changed, but I am hoping to reverse this trend in the future. I think this is possible as any new employee can be hired on new terms. Also, at the time we had started to build up some cash reserves after a few years when we really did not have a lot of room to manoeuver - have we depleted those? I did not notice any budgets proposed that were in deficit, but I was not paying very close attention. At the moment, yes, but that is because we are still waiting on invoices to be paid. The Foundation is waiting for $38 in unpaid invoices, many of which I am expecting to see paid in the upcoming month. Around 75% of those are related to the OPW, and most of the rest to advisory board fees for 2013. Once those invoices are paid, the Foundation will have reserves of around $15. Ideally, the Foundation should hold reserves of $35 if it never pays out OPW costs before the associated sponsorship is received (which is what the board has currently voted for). Thanks, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On 20 May 2014 00:58, Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 11:18 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: one of the options that I want the board to investigate is to tie in the executive director's wage and travel budget with adboard fees in such a way that the executive director will only be compensated up to a maximum of what the Foundation receives in adboard fees. This would free up some of the donations to be spent on sponsoring the Foundation members to attend events and do outreach. I understand the value of performance-based bonuses, but this sounds like it would create the possibility that a new company joins the adboard and its fee goes entirely to the executive director. Not necessarily: for example it would be possible to assign a specified portion to a bonus, some portion to travel and possibly some portion to other spending. My point is that the total compensation for an executive director must not exceed the income from the advisory board. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Andy Tai a...@gnu.org wrote: Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? They are (or ought to be) just as involved in the development of GTK+ as the developers of GNOME Shell are, and their opinions, wants, needs etc ought to be valued. The GNOME project is not (or at least, should not) be exclusively about GNOME Shell, but include anyone and everyone who uses GNOME technologies. The sever fracturing of the community which has taken place over the last 3-4 years is not healthy for our community, nor for theirs. Everyone who is using GTK+ ought to be included in ongoing discussions as to its development. They should be invited to GUADEC and encouraged to submit talks, and become foundation members. As a member of the board, I will do my best to engage with them and encourage them to do so, while also doing my best to ensure that their voices, thoughts, concerns, etc are heard, understood and thought of in any and all changes going forwards. Emily Gonyer -- Andy Tai, a...@atai.org Year 2010 民國99年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. - Goethe Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
2014-05-18 18:58 GMT+02:00 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Hi everyone, Hey Dave! For me, the defining thing the next board will do is hire a successor to Karen Sandler as executive director of the foundation. So my question to all of you is: what are the main characteristics you will be looking for in the next executive director? when looking for a profile, there are a number of dials to twiddle: * Technical proficiency reputation in the community, including free software cultural alignment * Strategy experience - the ability to formulate and communicate a direction for GNOME * Administrative and organizational experience * Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem * Communication/marketing/evangelism experience * Cost Of these, which do you feel are the most important for GNOME right now, and why? Are there other criteria which you think are important that I didn't list? Hiring a new ED has never been so important to the GNOME Foundation than it is now for the reason that many have outlined already, it being the current financial status of the Foundation. So while the Strategy experience would be a nice to have in the new ED (but easily delegable to the Board of Directors), I feel we should aim at other skills (like Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem and Communication/marketing/evangelism experience) that might be of help to the current financial situatiation. The next ED should have great communication skills, it should help the GNOME Foundation gathering some more attention from corporate sponsors by explaining them why they should invest their money on the GNOME Project. Looking for corporate sponsors won't be easy especially during the current terribly bad economic situation. Investing your money as a company into a free software project requires you to either have strong ideals on the FOSS movement or some other sort of interest. (i.e you are developing a customized GNOME release to be of use in your company and you want to give back to the project either directly by being an Advisory Board member or indirectly by forwarding patches upstream, the latter would not be of help increasing the Foundation's finances though or you just want some publicity for your products by showing up your logo on the various organized events etc.) Another good point you introduced is related to the stipend the next ED should earn yearly. It's clear the invested resources on this matter won't be as high as they have been in the past. Said that I'm wondering how high is our percentage to find someone capable of such position (and with such responsibilities) without promising a relatively high stipend? also is it still true that higher you pay someone higher their skills and productivity should (and will) then be? What I would aim for is someone with great communication / marketing skills for attracting new advisory board members but most of all a strong passion and dedication for the free software movement, with these feelings being stronger than the desire to earn an high stipend. (at least until the Foundation finances are back on track again) -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
2014-05-20 14:37 GMT+02:00 Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com: Hi Andrea, On 19 May 2014 18:55, Andrea Veri a...@gnome.org wrote: On Mon, 19 May 2014, Max wrote: My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Two OPW interns have been working for several months to provide a valid event management system for all the major GNOME events. The software is currently based on OSEM (the Open Source Event Manager [1]) and a test-bed is privately available on one of our testing machines at OSUOSL. Part of the upcoming GUADEC organizers have been granted access to the istance, if you are missing access to it please let me know. We should definitely find out what has gone wrong with it and why it has not been declared ready for production yet. I will make sure to follow-up on this as one of my goals for the next term if elected. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? While OPW has had a great success in India (thanks to english being widely spoken there) it did not have the same success on other Asia regions probably because of the language barrier. What we can probably do is localizing the content of the OPW flyer so that more women can be aware of the Outreach Program for Women and apply for it. (I will make sure to discuss about this with Marina if elected and propose the idea to the relevant localization team) Both of the above seem to be something which can be done now and does not require you to be on the board. Why do you say that you would need to be elected to the board to do these? I'm sure anyone out there would be able to achieve a lot of what the current Board does without being part of the Board themselves. The Board of Directors is primarily a team, a team of people that take care of particular areas within the GNOME Project. When their particular action items have been fulfilled they report back their findings / results to the next meeting. Decisions are taken by the team as a whole, actions are something Board members take care of personally, thus the theoretical possibility to accomplish the majority of tasks out there without being part of the Board itself. That said the decision on whether we should keep working on a customized version of OSEM is something I'd love to discuss with the Board as a whole, last time I heard of it several people were not happy about how the software was getting along. My plan for this is to first hear all the opinions from the current / next GUADEC (and GNOME.Asia) organizers, then discuss the proposed changes with the Board and finally find someone to be able to look into the code again. (maybe another OPW intern?) What I want to avoid is building a software that organizers won't use and finding out what the current needs are is something that requires planning, time and coordination between the involved teams. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
2014-05-20 20:56 GMT+02:00 Andy Tai a...@gnu.org: Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? Indeed yes, although GNOME has its own roadmap, design and views which obviously differ from what other GNOME forks are providing to users we will never ever think about closing the door to anyone willing to contribute and provide their opinions back upstream. (with GNOME still being the upstream for those forks) One of the free software beauties is its malleability, like you can shape a metal the way you want the same can be achieved with the code licensed under a free software license. Some users and communities were not happy about the direction GNOME was taking, that's legit, someone should be free to use the DE of their choice, the DE that helps them being more productive, the DE that makes them feel at home, the DE that has all the features they need where they need them. I will be more than happy to welcome back those communities and contributors, try to engage them and hear their opinions finding a common path. -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Thanks Andrea, On 05/20/2014 05:23 PM, Andrea Veri wrote: snip What I would aim for is someone with great communication / marketing skills for attracting new advisory board members but most of all a strong passion and dedication for the free software movement, with these feelings being stronger than the desire to earn an high stipend. (at least until the Foundation finances are back on track again) So, how would you distribute your 25 pebbles? Seems like 7 each on fundraising, cheap and promotion, and 4 on philosophical alignment? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Yes, the pebbles distribution you made is what makes more sense to me at this time! thanks Dave for your question! 2014-05-21 0:36 GMT+02:00 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Thanks Andrea, On 05/20/2014 05:23 PM, Andrea Veri wrote: snip What I would aim for is someone with great communication / marketing skills for attracting new advisory board members but most of all a strong passion and dedication for the free software movement, with these feelings being stronger than the desire to earn an high stipend. (at least until the Foundation finances are back on track again) So, how would you distribute your 25 pebbles? Seems like 7 each on fundraising, cheap and promotion, and 4 on philosophical alignment? Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com -- Cheers, Andrea Debian Developer, Fedora / EPEL packager, GNOME Sysadmin, GNOME Foundation Membership Elections Committee Chairman Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
- Original Message - From: Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com To: Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com Cc: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 9:12:35 AM Subject: Re: Question for candidates On 20 May 2014 01:55, Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Max sakana...@gmail.com To: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2014 9:18:33 PM Subject: Question for candidates Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? The GNOME.Asia team is doing a fantastic job organizing the conference and it will undoubtedly boost the interest in GNOME. It would be great to have meetups of people working on GNOME and free software in Beijing throughout the year, so that more people who learned about GNOME at the conference are interested in travelling to the next year's location. Local meetups are a great idea and have proven to be popular when organised, even if only for GNOME Beers around releases. As the question is about plans for the future, how are you planning to help this happen? I would generally just like to encourage people to organize these locally. Meg Ford's blog is a great source of inspiration and ideas on what to do to foster a local community, as she and Jim Campbell started the Chicagoan Hacking on GNOME group. One of the findings she made was for a larger turn-out, it's good to have broader events that include hacking on various free software projects. http://fordmeg.blogspot.com/ For running newcomers workshops, I already recommended OpenHatch resources and GNOME Newcomers Workshop and Tutorial resources, which I created. I'd like to invite people to help out with the Newcomers Workshop at GUADEC and then replicate it locally. Myself and the board are available to answer any questions about hosting local events. Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) I created a new activities to track page for the board and added it there. We will find out what is going on with it and encourage development. There are many issues that the board tracks and works on, why do you think that the board should take over the tracking of this rather than let those who created it (OPW interns and mentors) and those who would benefit from it (GUADEC and GNOME.Asia organisers) keep track? This relates to organizing events, which is one of the key functions of the Foundation the board needs to facilitate. Given that the board rarely interferes in development, how do you propose to encourage further work on this project? This particular project is an infrastructure project, rather than GNOME technology development project. Even with GNOME technology projects, it's sometimes appropriate for the board to get involved to encourage development, such as in the areas of privacy and accessibility, for which we had fundraising campaigns. For this work, we can ask people who worked on the system about their availability to continue the work and/or ask them to make a call on Planet GNOME for new volunteers, along with the explanation of the work that has been done and that yet needs to be done. If no volunteers step up, the board can investigate allocating resources to this project. Other idea? -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? We should continue to provide materials and encouragement for past OPW and GSoC participants to run introduction to free software / GNOME / GSoC / OPW sessions and host meetups in their cities throughout the year, so that we have more applicants from Asia applying for these programs who have experience contributing to free software. There are materials available for OpenHatch Open Source Comes to Campus and GNOME Newcomers Workshop, which can be used for such events. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? Of 39 interns GNOME has this summer, 14 are from India, 1 from China, and 1 from Philippines. As I mentioned above, we need to encourage these people and other community members to promote the internship programs and help people become contributors before they apply. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) There is https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide , which we can encourage people to fill out. There are also translators, whose information you can get from Git
Re: question for candidates
Le mardi 20 mai 2014 à 11:56 -0700, Andy Tai a écrit : What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? I am unaware of the GTK+ project actively discouraging* participation, and I'm not sure that downstreams are choosing not to fix GTK+ because they specifically don't want to - rather, they're undermanned just the same, and busy enough with their own amount of bugs (just look at how long release cycles are for apps like GIMP, Inkscape, PTV...). It is not a problem easily fixed by marketing/outreach (and I say this from experience as the PTV marketing machine!). I think anyone will agree that GTK+ needs help, but whether or not that happens is a technical matter, heavily dependent on available skilled manpower. GTK+ is, as far as I know, an open meritocracy like any other respectable Free Software project and I'm pretty sure the maintainers are overjoyed when potential new contributors show up, which I suspect is a very rare occurrence. The way I see it (with my downstream/community hat on), GTK+ is a big/complex codebase, with an overloaded infrastructure (in this case, the bug tracker) leading to an unclear course of action, lagging community interaction, somewhat foggy roadmap and maintainers being in survival mode, which is perfectly understandable given the circumstances. The infrastructure (or process) side of things is something I'd like to help address (I touched upon the subject in one of my GUADEC 2013 talks), but it's really not going to happen overnight, especially as we are all volunteers. Related reading: the comments section of https://oli.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/engaging-developers/ *: I posit that it is simply a side-effect of all I've mentioned above, which makes it kind of a chicken-and-egg situation. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
- Original Message - From: Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org To: Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com Cc: emilychen...@gmail.com, foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 6:25:22 AM Subject: Re: Question for candidates [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] One possible idea would be to have joint events with KDE. One joint event could cost less, in total, than two separate events. I don't know what practical obstacles there might be, but in principle I think it is ok. Hi Richard, As other people mentioned, we've had joint events with KDE, which logistically worked out well. However, GUADEC is a 200-300 person event, and our goal for it is to have GNOME community members meet each other and have a chance to interact and work face-to-face. This becomes more difficult in a group twice the size, where not everyone is a GNOME user or contributor. This is why it was decided to host GUADEC separately and to have dedicated freedesktop hackfests that contributors involved with common technologies can attend, despite the financial attractiveness to sponsors of a joint event. As you know, GNOME.Asia is co-located with FUDCon this year, and it would be interesting to know how that works out. GNOME.Asia has been much smaller than GUADEC in the past, and having many people attend it because of the co-location is definitely a positive outcome, so our interest in co-locating it might be different from co-locating GUADEC. Hope you enjoy your trip to Beijing and thank you for speaking at this joint event! Marina -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: question for candidates
Pardon my late reply. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Andy Tai a...@gnu.org wrote: Hi, I would like to post this question to the candidates: GNOME's core toolkit, gtk+, is used by numerous projects. Currently gtk+ development seems to be driven mainly by the GNOME desktop. However, gtk+ also play critical roles in other free software projects, like MATE, XFCE, and the Cinnamon desktop, and large applications like GIMP, Inkscape, etc. I think inclusivity of these projects are very important. Embracing these other projects is an important step in making sure that GTK+ and GLib are healthy eco-systems that projects downstream can depend on. What are your views on the participation of the people of these projects, as stake holders in the direction of gtk+, in the GNOME Foundation? Should the GNOME Foundation encourage (reach out to) these people to get them involved in the GNOME Foundation so they also have a say and even contribute to gtk+ so gtk+ can continue to serve their needs well, important for the continuing successes of gtk+ in the free software world? We are already reaching out and we've made a little progress. During the West Coast Hackfest, thanks to Allan Day, we were able to invite one of the ElementaryOS designers over, and he was able to spend a couple days with us. One of the positive outcomes was that we are hopefully set to eliminate ElementaryOS's private widget set library and use GNOME's. In turn, there are several widgets that Matthias have identified that was useful for GTK+. So here is an excellent example of how diversity solves problems. I can say that both GNOME and ElementaryOS folks were quite enthusiastic afterwards from my conversations with them.[1] A couple comments on the West Coast Hackfest - the hackfest is geared to be outward facing. Most of our conferences and hackfests are quite insular and internal. You want GNOME hackers to be exposed to people who use our software or might want to use our software. In turn, we want to really highlight the benefits of using the GNOME stack. We don't do enough of this. I hope the next year, we can work on a more aggressive conference instead of a hackfest that will bring more attention to the GNOME eco-system to people who are developing either software solutions or turnkey hardware appliances like kiosks. In general, thanks to the hard work of Tiffany, Christian Hergert, and Cosimo we had successful hackfest and is a good base. Now regarding foundation and these other projects. I've long thought that need to find a way to support these projects. I have a proposal in the works that will suggest that the Foundation will help pay for hackfests that does not benefit GNOME the product (e.g. the desktop) but does benefit GNOME the eco-system. The idea is that in exchange for the money, that everyone would participate in working in the lower levels of the stack and not necessarily the design. This is controversial because of using our finances, but there are questions on whether this will dilute the brand. But that is a separate discussion. Nothing excites me more than seeing GNOME partner wtih more people and organization, being diversified will help hopefully attract more adboard members as well. We live in interesting times, we have many projects that have pick up the design the desktop as a product bug, and they have choosen GNOME as the basis of it. I think that is fantastic. sri [1] See my blog post on West Coast Hackfest, the release notes for the last GTK+ release, and Matthias's post on West Coast Hackfest -- Andy Tai, a...@atai.org Year 2010 民國99年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Max sakana...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Growth in Asia has been a bit of a puzzle for me. But let's think strategically on how we could promote and grow in asia. Now, I think there are a couple of things that we can do in terms of promotion. Let's first talk about Tizen. Tizen stack is the basis of the mobile phone stack which interestingly enough contains many pieces of GNOME technologies. So by extension people who use Tizen use GNOME technologies and there is a wealth of companies specifically in Asia that are using Tizen for IVI, Mobile, and IOT. There is probably some fundraising opportunities there and a way to get our name out. How about partnering with Asian based distros and make sure that we have a specific asian experience on GNOME? Recruiting folks who might be interesting to do this? Most of these ideas require a stable platform to do volunteer recruitiment. So while they maybe good ideas, you need to make sure that we put in an infrastrucutre in place that immediately makes them useful. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? Should there be a plan? We should take applicants who are interesterd regardless of race, creed, or color. In general, we seem to have good representation from Asia in tehse programs. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? I think the same thing applies as above. Now, if you're talking about highlighting the program in Asia, the best place to start is to put posters in universities or popular cultural events. For instance, in SXSW, we put a lot of posters out there talking about teh next round of OPW. We even had some responses of that. Having presentations from GNOME OPW students in Asia is another good way to do this. At Linuxcon, there are a number of OPW kernel who are doing BOF and presentation and they are coming as a group to talk about the work tehy are doing. We did something similar at GUADEC last year, but we should really expand that to other areas. While tech conferences and universities are a good place, don't be afraid to go to places that are unusual. Open air markets for instance might be interesting. Pay a kid to walk around handling fliers to out to people outside a store? Or maybe do it yourself. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) How do we get these member / resource together? This isn't something the board itself can solve. This is really something that you want the engagement team to be working on. The board can help fund, and provide logistical support. But ultimately, we want to get enthusiastic people recruit others. Sometimes that is really easy. For instance, I knwo at least two people we brougiht into the foundation simply because we noticed that they were doingpro-bono support on #gnome. Sending them a t-shirt and sponsoring their inclusion into GNOME Foundation is a great way to reward people like them. -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? I would love to be involved, but my opportunities to travel is quite small due to job constraints and time constraints. But I would love to help logistically if I can. In fact, I encouraged at least one person in the foundation to help GNOME Asia with the conference logistics as an event planner. Max, it's unfortunate you did not run for the board this year. I hope you or Emily Chen will consider running next year. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Full disclosure - I wrok for Intel as the Tizen SCM architect. Since I brought up Tizen, I wanted to make it known that there is a relationship. On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:35 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna s...@ramkrishna.me wrote: On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 6:18 PM, Max sakana...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? Growth in Asia has been a bit of a puzzle for me. But let's think strategically on how we could promote and grow in asia. Now, I think there are a couple of things that we can do in terms of promotion. Let's first talk about Tizen. Tizen stack is the basis of the mobile phone stack which interestingly enough contains many pieces of GNOME technologies. So by extension people who use Tizen use GNOME technologies and there is a wealth of companies specifically in Asia that are using Tizen for IVI, Mobile, and IOT. There is probably some fundraising opportunities there and a way to get our name out. How about partnering with Asian based distros and make sure that we have a specific asian experience on GNOME? Recruiting folks who might be interesting to do this? Most of these ideas require a stable platform to do volunteer recruitiment. So while they maybe good ideas, you need to make sure that we put in an infrastrucutre in place that immediately makes them useful. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? Should there be a plan? We should take applicants who are interesterd regardless of race, creed, or color. In general, we seem to have good representation from Asia in tehse programs. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? I think the same thing applies as above. Now, if you're talking about highlighting the program in Asia, the best place to start is to put posters in universities or popular cultural events. For instance, in SXSW, we put a lot of posters out there talking about teh next round of OPW. We even had some responses of that. Having presentations from GNOME OPW students in Asia is another good way to do this. At Linuxcon, there are a number of OPW kernel who are doing BOF and presentation and they are coming as a group to talk about the work tehy are doing. We did something similar at GUADEC last year, but we should really expand that to other areas. While tech conferences and universities are a good place, don't be afraid to go to places that are unusual. Open air markets for instance might be interesting. Pay a kid to walk around handling fliers to out to people outside a store? Or maybe do it yourself. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) How do we get these member / resource together? This isn't something the board itself can solve. This is really something that you want the engagement team to be working on. The board can help fund, and provide logistical support. But ultimately, we want to get enthusiastic people recruit others. Sometimes that is really easy. For instance, I knwo at least two people we brougiht into the foundation simply because we noticed that they were doingpro-bono support on #gnome. Sending them a t-shirt and sponsoring their inclusion into GNOME Foundation is a great way to reward people like them. -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? I would love to be involved, but my opportunities to travel is quite small due to job constraints and time constraints. But I would love to help logistically if I can. In fact, I encouraged at least one person in the foundation to help GNOME Asia with the conference logistics as an event planner. Max, it's unfortunate you did not run for the board this year. I hope you or Emily Chen will consider running next year. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 8:16 AM, Emily Chen emilychen...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I would like to ask below questions to future board: 1. For GNOME big event, call for sponsor is really important, what is your plan to call for more sponsors for conference like GUADEC and GNOME.Asia ? I've read some of the responses of the other candidates, and I would say that I largely agree that having diversified group both local and corporate is a good starting point. But for that we need to create relationships with these companies. Our advisory board mainly consists of tech giants like Google who support Free Software. But it would be interesting to use our existing set of regional mailing lists to brainstorm ways to talk with local companies. For instance, we have very few companies that are purely European, Latin American or Indian. Why is that? Those are good questions to ask. Who are using our stack? Did you know? If you use DBus, you're using our stack? GLib is a dependency. Start with that conversation to the companies you talk with at a local conference. Max alluded to this question a bit but he focused purely on activity in Asia. But that answer needs to be answered globally. The plan really rests on having a competent Executive Director who can make cogent arguments to propspective donors. Let me give you an example, go through all the projects on http://01.org/, how many of those projects depend on DBus? Gstreamer? How many blu-ray players depend on libxml2? Have you ever looked at the packaging of various common consumer devices like your SmartTV? Read the licenses? Identify any of the libraries? Free Software is ubquitous. Every large company has some kind of plan for Free Software/Open Source, some of them have a community manager. 2. What is the top 3 goals for GNOME Foundation in the next year, in your opinion ? I think getting our finances in order is a good start. Secondly, I really like to continue working on volunteer capture. Volunteers are the lifeblood of an open source project, and we want to be able to get diversified set of talents. Not necessarily talking about coders, but people who have background in marketing, technical writing, video editing, and so forth. If you didn't have people like Bastian Hougaard, you wouldn't have that awesome release video for GNOME 3.12. Those people don't come easily. Finally, we really do need to find a good Executive Director, one is saavy and can build the financial net to fund these important initiatives. 3. How to raise and increase the fund for GNOME Foundation ? I think I answered this above. Increasing our value to our current adboard members, by showing improvement on the stack, show how we are improving the Linux (the kernel) eco-system are examples that I think will resonate with our adboard member. Obviously, we will need to find new sources of income, and that could be micro-payment system. For instance, if a bug is fixed on bugzilla, then a donation button could be presented so that money can go back into the foundation. Continue working on getting specific fundraising like we've done for privacy. These are all good ways to get revenue. Finally, build the best damn desktop out there. Money will come if we are successful in our endeavor. 4. How many hours you work in GNOME Board related work each week? I generally work about 5-7 hours a week on GNOME Foundation. It's been fluctuating lately because Ive been putting efforts in engagement and the qa team. sri Thanks! Emily Chen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
2014-05-21 3:08 GMT+00:00 Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com: - Original Message - From: Richard Stallman r...@gnu.org To: Marina Zhurakhinskaya mari...@redhat.com Cc: emilychen...@gmail.com, foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Tuesday, May 20, 2014 6:25:22 AM Subject: Re: Question for candidates [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] One possible idea would be to have joint events with KDE. One joint event could cost less, in total, than two separate events. I don't know what practical obstacles there might be, but in principle I think it is ok. Hi Richard, As other people mentioned, we've had joint events with KDE, which logistically worked out well. However, GUADEC is a 200-300 person event, and our goal for it is to have GNOME community members meet each other and have a chance to interact and work face-to-face. This becomes more difficult in a group twice the size, where not everyone is a GNOME user or contributor. This is why it was decided to host GUADEC separately and to have dedicated freedesktop hackfests that contributors involved with common technologies can attend, despite the financial attractiveness to sponsors of a joint event. As you know, GNOME.Asia is co-located with FUDCon this year, and it would be interesting to know how that works out. GNOME.Asia has been much smaller than GUADEC in the past, and having many people attend it because of the co-location is definitely a positive outcome, so our interest in co-locating it might be different from co-locating GUADEC. I second what Marina said about GNOME.Asia. The goal of GNOME.Asia is to promote GNOME in Asian region. Most of the audience are GNOME/Linux users, FOSS community people. only 20% are core developers and leads from GNOME community. This is different from GUADEC. Then co-host with other conference like FUDCon is working very well this way, because our audience is the same, we have common speakers, local organizers are already familiar with each other. This year, in GNOME.Asia/ FUDCon 2014, we bring more speakers, attract more audience, find more local sponsors, at the same time, we reduce the cost by share with FUDCon. Hope you enjoy your trip to Beijing and thank you for speaking at this joint event! Yes, we are looking forward to RMS's speech this Sunday. -Emily Marina -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] for downstream, there's the SUSE conference or the Fedora Flock; To cooperate formally with the SUSE conference would pose an ethical problem because SUSE contains lots of nonfree software. To have the event in proximity to the SUSE conference, without any public relationship with it, would not have such a problem. for accessing the commercial side there's the Linux Foundation. To cooperate formally with a Linux Foundation event would run into a problem -- they would probably want to call the GNU/Linux system Linux, and we should not accept that. However, having the event in proximity to one of their events, without any public relationship, would not have such a problem. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Max On 2014-05-19 09:18, Max sakana...@gmail.com wrote: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) Other idea? I will be attending GNOME.Asia this year (as long as my visa is accepted, which I will find out today), and giving a training session for newcomers as well as a talk for more experienced developers. I hope to make an impression on the attendees by demonstrating the GNOME developer experience, and hope that this helps in attracting new developers. -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? I am mentoring a GSoC student from India this summer, but it is evident that there are not many GSoC applicants from students in south-east Asia. Is this because the GSoC timeline does not align well with universities in those areas, or are we simply doing a bad job at attracting those students? I do not know the answer, but I would like to hear any thoughts from Foundation members in Asia about what they see as a problem, and how the Foundation can work to solve any problems. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) How do we get these member / resource together? The only way that we have of doing this is by looking at names and email addresses of Foundation members. That gives us a rough idea of the location of members, but we could ask them directly when renewing. There are regional mailing lists hosted at gnome.org, but maybe there is a better way of contacting and organising Asian Foundation members (and potential new members). -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? -- Anything you plan with Asia. As an idea, maybe a director could have a role to communicate with Asian Foundation members to drive outreach in those areas. I know that there are representatives who report to the board about GNOME.Asia and GUADEC, but maybe regional outreach could be delegated to members in those regions, and communicated back to the board so that funding could be directed appropriately. The Foundation could direct funding for promotion at Asian events, by sponsoring the travel of Asian Foundation members, or possibly by purchasing a local events box. As I will be attending GNOME.Asia, I hope to engage with many Asian attendees, and to learn their perspectives on GNOME, as well as how we can increase membership and participation in Asia. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 15:20 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: Many of the applicants for GSoC and OPW are already from Asia and especially from India. I think that the split is largely related to English being a commonly spoken language in India, but not so prominent in other Asian countries. [This comment is not targeted to anybody specifically.] Apart from knowledge of English language I'm curious how much cultural dimensions come into play (see [1] for a short intro). For those who don't know, some examples: * Uncertainty avoidance - I need to join this IRC chat thingy and talk to a room full of strangers? That's scary! * Individualism - I'm supposed to actively apply for this competition instead of being asked by recruiters at my university, as usual? * Power distance - I expect my mentor to tell me what to do vs. I discuss and argue with mentors/devs about potential solutions. * High-level communication - telling me in public (mailing list, IRC) that my proposed solution could be improved makes me feel like being criticized and losing my face/reputation. And probably more. I believe some of our workflows and communications we are used to feel very uncomfortable to some cultures. andre [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstede%27s_cultural_dimensions_theory -- Andre Klapper | ak...@gmx.net http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Emily, On 19 May 2014 16:16, Emily Chen emilychen...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I would like to ask below questions to future board: 1. For GNOME big event, call for sponsor is really important, what is your plan to call for more sponsors for conference like GUADEC and GNOME.Asia ? Firstly, I think that reliable sponsors need to be contacted much earlier, when they set the budget rather than closer to the event. Last year, I had a chance to talk to our sponsors and advisory board members to find out when they needed to receive the sponsorship information to be able to allocate the conference budgets appropriately. I encouraged the production of the sponsorship brochures for GUADEC earlier in the cycle and asked our executive director to contact the potential sponsors at the most convenient times for them. In the upcoming year, I plan to propose that the advisory board should be recognised for their support and should be offered additional value with an exclusive discounted sponsorship package which can be paid at the start of the year, at the same time as paying the advisory board fees. I am also keen to revisit the advisory board charges structure and to assess whether we can improve that to entice smaller companies into joining. 2. What is the top 3 goals for GNOME Foundation in the next year, in your opinion ? Financial stability is by far the highest priority, which I think will involve hiring an executive director to help with fundraising. The board should also focus more on supporting outreach efforts by our community members and I have worked on making it easier to track where we have done this previously. 3. How to raise and increase the fund for GNOME Foundation ? Most of our funding comes from the advisory board fees. The Foundation needs to seek out corporate support from more users of GNOME in corporate environments, but also to make it easier for contributors to donate by offering donation methods other than what is currently available. The board has been working in this direction for the last year, with the effort being led by Tobi. 4. How many hours you work in GNOME Board related work each week? The least that I have worked has been 2 hours per week and the most has been over 60 hours per week. I think that under normal operational conditions, I would be spending up to 10 hours per week on board work, but I expect that it will continue to be closer to 25 hours per week for the next two months or so. Thanks! Emily Chen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Emily On 2014-05-19 23:16, Emily Chen emilychen...@gmail.com wrote: I would like to ask below questions to future board: 1. For GNOME big event, call for sponsor is really important, what is your plan to call for more sponsors for conference like GUADEC and GNOME.Asia ? The advisory board has seen a shrinking membership over the last few years, and it has traditionally been the source of a large proportion of sponsorship for bigger events. The board could seek to grow the advisory board membership, which provides funding for GNOME as a whole. Alternatively, the board could seek out sponsors from organisations external to the advisory board, such as local sponsors which might have a connection to a location, but less of a connection to GNOME. This would be most effective if done by the local organising team, but the board should make sure that appropriate assistance is in place, so that the local team is not overburdened. As you (and many of the GNOME.Asia team) are long-term local organiser, I would appreciate your input in acquiring and retaining sponsors. 2. What is the top 3 goals for GNOME Foundation in the next year, in your opinion ? Firstly, the board needs to return the Foundation to a state of financial security, by increasing the cash reserves to a comfortable level. Secondly, the board needs to grow the revenues of the Foundation, such as by acquiring new sponsors and examining new sources of revenue. Finally, and only once the financial situation is more clear, the board needs to find a new executive director. I anticipate that these goals, which in some ways amount to getting the Foundation back on track will be challenging to meet over the next year. 3. How to raise and increase the fund for GNOME Foundation ? I think increasing the value of being an advisory board member, with a view to getting more long-term sponsorship, would be a priority. The board may find it possible to seek out some one-off sponsorship opportunities over the next year, but I think that the biggest challenge will be retaining those sponsors over the coming year, and the advisory board is a good mechanism for that. 4. How many hours you work in GNOME Board related work each week? Given the current lack of executive director, I would expect at least 10 hours per week at the moment, dropping to 5-10 hours per week when an executive director is found to reduce the workload. -- http://amigadave.com/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi Oliver, On 05/18/2014 06:08 PM, Oliver Propst wrote: On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: when looking for a profile, there are a number of dials to twiddle: * Technical proficiency reputation in the community, including free software cultural alignment * Strategy experience - the ability to formulate and communicate a direction for GNOME * Administrative and organizational experience * Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem * Communication/marketing/evangelism experience * Cost Of these, which do you feel are the most important for GNOME right now, and why? Are there other criteria which you think are important that I didn't list? I personally believe a future executive director should have all the skills/experiences you describe and there is really no single skill that are more importent then ohter I am afraid that all of the above is not realistic. You may be able to get someone with a small base salary plus aggressive bonus plan if they have a history of boosting revenue for organizations like GNOME but that will come at a cost - a lack of focus on the direction of the project and cultural alignment with free software and open source principles, for example. You might get a great organizer who is not a very loud mouthpiece. You might get someone who does a lot of evangelism (with a resulting high travel budget) but a lot of travel will result in a lack of focus on revenue and organization. You might get someone who is great at process, getting invoices out and ensuring no future cashflow issues, but will that personality type be an effusive communicator? let me put it another way - if I give you 25 pebbles, and you can put 0-10 pebbles in each of the 6 boxes above, which ones do you want to optimise for? We might get lucky and get someone great in all areas, and also cheap. We might also have Microsoft and Apple decide that desktop software isn't really interesting and see them discontinue their products. But I think that's pretty unlikely. With that said, for me its very important that a future executive director are able to form, communicate and execute a direction for GNOME. Thanks - that's a better answer, I think. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
Hi, On 05/19/2014 04:31 AM, David King wrote: Right now (taking into account the poor financial situation that the Foundation is facing), I think that a candidate for the executive director position would be someone who has experience of raising funds for not-for-profit organisations. For GNOME, the board does not exert strong control over the project, but tries to steer it in the right direction by ensuring that funding is directed appropriately, making the executive director role particularly challenging. My follow-on question, then: raising money for what? I do not think that technical proficiency is an essential quality for an executive director, if by that you mean ability to code. I meant understanding of the technology, ability to explain it, and ability to be articulate about what the GNOME project needs to do to stay relevant. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
- Original Message - From: Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org To: Foundation-List foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2014 12:58:21 PM Subject: Question for candidates Hi everyone, For me, the defining thing the next board will do is hire a successor to Karen Sandler as executive director of the foundation. So my question to all of you is: what are the main characteristics you will be looking for in the next executive director? when looking for a profile, there are a number of dials to twiddle: * Technical proficiency reputation in the community, including free software cultural alignment * Strategy experience - the ability to formulate and communicate a direction for GNOME * Administrative and organizational experience * Business acumen and experience growing a commercial ecosystem * Communication/marketing/evangelism experience * Cost Of these, which do you feel are the most important for GNOME right now, and why? Are there other criteria which you think are important that I didn't list? Two additional desirable characteristics for an ED are the ability to fundraise and legal knowledge. The board and community members can fulfill many functions of an ED, which is something that is evident now when we don't have an ED. So I think this gives us some flexibility in what are the strengths of the person we hire. I think the two essential characteristics are free software cultural alignment and organizational abilities. It's important that the ED is able to keep track of all the activities that need to happen for the GNOME project to be stable and grow, seek input, and delegate effectively. Thanks, Marina Thanks! Dave. -- Dave Neary, Lyon, France Email: dne...@gnome.org Jabber: nea...@gmail.com ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 16:55 +0100, David King wrote: Finally, and only once the financial situation is more clear, the board needs to find a new executive director. I anticipate that these goals, which in some ways amount to getting the Foundation back on track will be challenging to meet over the next year. I have a follow-up question (for David and incumbents): why do you want (or not want) to hire a new executive director? What responsibilities do you think the executive director role should entail? Can the foundation afford to wait to hire a new executive director? I'm asking because most of Karen's work was not highly-visible. I'm aware that she worked on recruiting new advisory board members and spoke at conferences, both of which seem important. But I'm sure there must be more to the job that I am unaware of, to justify the significant expense. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 11:18 +0100, Ekaterina Gerasimova wrote: one of the options that I want the board to investigate is to tie in the executive director's wage and travel budget with adboard fees in such a way that the executive director will only be compensated up to a maximum of what the Foundation receives in adboard fees. This would free up some of the donations to be spent on sponsoring the Foundation members to attend events and do outreach. I understand the value of performance-based bonuses, but this sounds like it would create the possibility that a new company joins the adboard and its fee goes entirely to the executive director. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
- Original Message - From: Max sakana...@gmail.com To: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2014 9:18:33 PM Subject: Question for candidates Hi everyone, Thanks for run the board. This is the most busy time for GNOME.Asia summit(4 days to go). GNOME.Asia team and Beijing team are busy for the summit. My question to all of you: * What's your plan for Promote / Growth GNOME in Asia -- GNOME.Asia summit ? The GNOME.Asia team is doing a fantastic job organizing the conference and it will undoubtedly boost the interest in GNOME. It would be great to have meetups of people working on GNOME and free software in Beijing throughout the year, so that more people who learned about GNOME at the conference are interested in travelling to the next year's location. Central event management system for both GUADEC and GNOME.Asia?( I saw it last GUADEC but not start to use) I created a new activities to track page for the board and added it there. We will find out what is going on with it and encourage development. Other idea? -- Google Summer of code / Outreach Program for Women What's your plan for GsoC and OPW in Asia? We should continue to provide materials and encouragement for past OPW and GSoC participants to run introduction to free software / GNOME / GSoC / OPW sessions and host meetups in their cities throughout the year, so that we have more applicants from Asia applying for these programs who have experience contributing to free software. There are materials available for OpenHatch Open Source Comes to Campus and GNOME Newcomers Workshop, which can be used for such events. How many country get GsoC / OPW in Asia? What's your plan for promote it with more country in Asia? Of 39 interns GNOME has this summer, 14 are from India, 1 from China, and 1 from Philippines. As I mentioned above, we need to encourage these people and other community members to promote the internship programs and help people become contributors before they apply. -- GNOME Foundation member in Asia? How do we know our other member in Asia?( I suggest tobi last year, if they want to fill their country when foundation member renew or new ) There is https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeWorldWide , which we can encourage people to fill out. There are also translators, whose information you can get from Git or on https://l10n.gnome.org/teams/. Also there are localization and regional mailing lists. How do we get these member / resource together? I think you already do a lot of this by organizing GNOME.Asia! Perhaps you can have a BoF at the conference to figure out what are the resources you want to put together and what are the activities you want to see happen. -- Are you interesting to involve Asia event? and how do you involve? The GNOME Foundation sponsored Sindhu to go to FOSSASIA this year, where she ran contributing to GNOME workshop, did a talk about documentation, and participated in a panel about women in IT. We should have more people proposing talks and going to FOSSASIA next year. We should also have people proposing talks and going to LinuxCon Japan. Identifying and participating in any other free software conferences in Asia would be great. -- Anything you plan with Asia. Thanks for all the great questions! I'm excited about growing our presence in Asia and I'm sure we will succeed. Marina GNOME.Asia team member Max Huang ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question for candidates
- Original Message - From: Michael Catanzaro mcatanz...@gnome.org To: David King amigad...@amigadave.com Cc: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 7:48:54 PM Subject: Re: Question for candidates On Mon, 2014-05-19 at 16:55 +0100, David King wrote: Finally, and only once the financial situation is more clear, the board needs to find a new executive director. I anticipate that these goals, which in some ways amount to getting the Foundation back on track will be challenging to meet over the next year. I have a follow-up question (for David and incumbents): why do you want (or not want) to hire a new executive director? What responsibilities do you think the executive director role should entail? Can the foundation afford to wait to hire a new executive director? We need to hire an executive director because we need someone whose paid full-time job is to make sure that the Foundation operates well and grows. Fundraising for their own salary would still afford the executive director a lot of time for other activities. The key responsibilities for the executive director would be to track and prioritize all the things that need to happen to have the Foundation thrive and to work with the Foundation members to get those things done. The executive director personally can focus on any number of those things, depending on which match their skills best. I think we should aim to start the hiring process for an executive director as soon as all the OPW back payments and advisory board fees for this year are paid. This is when we will best be able to evaluate if having an executive director is sustainable with the current Foundation's income and how much we need to tie their salary to additional fundraising. I'm asking because most of Karen's work was not highly-visible. I'm aware that she worked on recruiting new advisory board members and spoke at conferences, both of which seem important. But I'm sure there must be more to the job that I am unaware of, to justify the significant expense. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates
On Thu, 2013-06-06 at 01:29 +0200, Tobias Mueller wrote: Hi Gil, everyone. On 26.05.2013 22:17, Gil Forcada wrote: but what about relations with companies and GNOME's ecosystem. GNOME has a large advisory board and there are lots of companies and interests around it. Do you feel comfortable and up to the task for that too? Yes I do. And I think it is necessary for us to keep current advisory board members happy and to try to find new ones. I wouldn't necessarily actively engage with them though, as I think Karen is better suited for that. But I would if it becomes necessary. Are the current advisory members happy? How do we measure that? By *we* I mean GNOME Foundation represented by you, the board of directors. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates
On 2013-05-26 16:17, Gil Forcada wrote: I saw that most of your candidacy descriptions talk about community, empowering and improving foundation tasks, but what about relations with companies and GNOME's ecosystem. GNOME has a large advisory board and there are lots of companies and interests around it. Do you feel comfortable and up to the task for that too The Adboards generous donations keep us running and allows things such as hackfests to happen. That's great! I think it's very important that we not only make sure to keep our current members, but look for opportunities to engage with new companies and organizations. - Andreas ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Question to candidates
- Original Message - From: Gil Forcada gforc...@gnome.org To: foundation-list foundation-list@gnome.org Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 4:17:42 PM Subject: Question to candidates Hi all! First of all thanks for running for being elected as a director of the foundation. I saw that most of your candidacy descriptions talk about community, empowering and improving foundation tasks, but what about relations with companies and GNOME's ecosystem. GNOME has a large advisory board and there are lots of companies and interests around it. Do you feel comfortable and up to the task for that too? Yes. I'm interested in getting a better understanding of the needs of all stakeholders and how we can develop the project and the community in ways that address them. Thanks, Marina Cheers, Gil -- Gil Forcada [ca] guifi.net - una xarxa lliure que no para de créixer [en] guifi.net - a non-stopping free network bloc: http://gil.badall.net planet: http://planet.guifi.net ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
