Foundation Board Minutes for Tuesday, April 10th 2018, 18:00 UTC
Next meeting date Tuesday, April 17th 2018, 18:00 UTC
Attending
Regrets
Missing
Agenda
- Events code of conduct (Allan)
- Hackfests approval and openness (Nuritzi)
- Travel comittee sync up feedback (Didier)
- Conference policy questions (Nuritzi)
- Private engagement list (Nuritzi)
- Role of the Executive Director and Director of Operations with regards to the Board (Allan)
Review open issues - https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues (standing agenda item)
Tentative:
- Engagement budget increase (Nuritzi)
Minutes
- Events code of conduct (Allan)
- The board wanted to have the new events code of conduct in place before publishing the call for bids for GUADEC 2019.
- The code of conduct has been presented to the board for approval. It requires a committee to be created to maintain and enforce the code.
- Didier - OK with the code.
- Nuritzi - what will the process be for making changes to the code of conduct? Will the committee be able to do that independently? Neil - that will depend on how the board defines the committee's charter.
- Cosimo - the code of conduct looks good. Likes the draft charter, where changes to the code have to be approved by the board.
- Will it be the committee's responsibility to ensure that each event has a code of conduct team?
- Allan - who will have final responsibility for serious decisions (for example, ejecting someone from the project, dealing with an event whose organisers don't commit to the code of conduct).
- Neil and Meg - events would be required to subscribe to the code of conduct from the start.
- Nuritzi - the committee ought to be able to remove someone from an event.
- Neil - the board could be the last resort for appeals. However, this role would be undermined if the board is involved in making the original decision.
- Cosimo - the committee needs to be able to act quickly as events are occurring, without needing to consult the board. The board still needs to be able to have oversight.
- Allan - oversight is tricky because of privacy and data sharing. The proposed code of conduct specifies that data about incidents won't be shared beyond the committee, unless absolutely necessary. Wants the board to back and validate the commitee rather than question its decisions.
ACTIONS: Nuritzi and Allan to finalise the committee charter (https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/36).
ACTIONS: come with a list of potential members (https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/47 - confidential).
- Hackfests approval and openness (Nuritzi)
This agenda item is a continuation of https://gitlab.gnome.org/Community/Board/issues/21
- There's a question about whether the guidelines should state that hackfests should be open to some degree.
- There's also a question about how events get validated, since the travel committee just reviews individual requests rather than whole events.
- Neil - events needn't be voted on by the board - it could be an individual ack (by a staff member or board member) based on guidelines.
- Didier/Meg/Nuritzi - a lot of board oversight doesn't seem necessary. It's extra work, and we would likely be addressing an issue that doesn't exist. We have to trust hackfest organisers.
- Nuritzi - board approval would be another step in the process that could delay the process travel sponsorship.
- Allan - hackfest organizers are often looking for reassurance that their event will be supported, which is understandable. It would also be good to support more borderline events, like joint hackfests.
- Neil - it should be the "foundation" that approves rather than the board - in order to avoid voting and allow non-board members to decide.
- Allan - perhaps contacting the foundation could be an option that's available to hackfest organisers, if they are uncertain. However, it's unclear what we would be checking for without guidelines. Also, since the board doesn't approve travel sponsorship, our OK wouldn't mean a huge amount. Would prefer that the travel committee handles this.
- Cosimo - doesn't want the board to have to approve events. However, there could be closed events which would go against our requirements, in which case the foundation would be required to grant an exception.
- Neil - suggests that we take some more time to consider this issue.
- Cosimo - if we make a point of requiring openness, we need to make sure that hackfests are announced - otherwise it won't mean much. However, someone will need to do the checking.
- ACTION: Nuritzi to come up with a proposal for the board to vote on.
- Travel comittee sync up feedback (Didier)
- Didier has met with the Travel Committee and has sent the board a mail with a summary. There are some points that are worth discussing.
- ACTION - discuss next week.
- Conference policy questions (Nuritzi)
- Nuritzi has met with the GNOME.Asia team, who are looking for clarification on some aspects of the conference policy. We ought to review these and potentially update the policy accordingly.
- ACTION: discuss next week.