Regular meeting of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, 13 July 2020, 15:00 UTC
Attending
Regrets
Missing
Consent agenda (5 minutes)
To be approved as a block, by consent (no vote required).
- Approve minutes of 29th June
- Code of conduct amendments - #171 (Federico)
- The board approves the code of conduct amendments, as presented by the Code of Conduct Committee in issue #171
Discussion agenda
- Introduction (5 minutes)
- The goal for this session is to start the strategic review process: agree a strategic plan, discuss the format of strategic reports
- Introduce the role of the strategy
- Main discussion (1 hour):
- Review the 18 month strategic plan - #151
- Are the priorities correct? Is this the best path forward? Is it achievable? Should we be bolder? Is there anything missing?
- Break (5 minutes)
- Executive Director's report (5 minutes)
- Board-only discussion (30 minutes)
Minutes
- Consent agenda: approve minutes of 29th June
- No amendments were proposed.
- Minutes are approved.
- Code of conduct amendments - #171 (Federico)
- Philip: some of the new text feels more educational than prescriptive, it could be presented as part of an additional document.
- Federico: the explanatory text can live in another document, the "reverse-ism" should be reviewed by the Code of Conduct committee.
- Strategy discussion - #151 (Allan)
- Allan: the goal of the strategy is to help guide Neil in the direction that he should be taking
- Neil: strategy should set where the organisation is going but also what the organisation is not doing
- Allan: the currently proposed document has not gone through a review to verify that the resources are in place to achieve those goals
- Neil: we need to consider the frequency of review - currently planned for every quarter
- Regina: the current document does not address how we plan to grow the Foundation membership
- Allan: this fits with the project metrics which could be reported to the board periodically
- Federico: Tying metrics and membership to new contribution levels, we need to create value for and attract new developers with a Flatpak app store. The developer documentation is outdated, it would be good to have someone working on it full time to modernise it. Additionally, we should consider a full time UX person whose focus would include reevaluating the process for external contributions to GNOME.
- Felipe: There are concerns about someone who is hired by the Foundation setting a technical direction - we either need to go all in or not. We also need to think about how we want to reward backend contributors whose work allows the apps to exist. We should leverage Google Summer of Docs to improve our developer documentation.
- Philip: Is our strategy scope becoming too wide? Also we are not coming to a point where we may need to react to proprietary desktops which collect user data to improve user experience.
- Rob: The current strategy is focused more on what needs to be planned rather than implement. Does this strategy align with the Foundation's mission? We need a stronger correlation. We are also missing some running goals such as keeping our infrastructure running.
- Allan: next step is to review and develop the strategy document.
- Rob: It is ok for the Foundation to set the technical direction of the project.
- Executive Director's report (Neil)
GUADEC preparation is progressing well. meet.gnome.org is up. Call for BoFs and workshops is open. Looking into how to organise social events
- Fair amount of updates from the sysadmin point of view. Need to review where our servers are as Fedora moved data centres. Resolving map issues for Maps.
- Community engagement challenge: initial submission phase is finished, received at least 119 applications. Initial round of judging is starting.
- Operations: looking at our end of year taxes (form 990). Form will be ready for approval by next meeting.
- GTK+: big chunk of accessibility work is done. GTK 4 release is a focus now.
- Fundraising: Sponsors for GUADEC and GNOME.Asia secured. Have applied for a number of grants.
Notices
Next meeting will be 10 August 2020, 15:00 - 17:00 UTC. We will have a quarterly finance meeting, including a finance report.