Regular meeting of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, 12 January 2023, 15:00 UTC

Attending

• RobertMcQueen

• MartinAbenteLahaye

• JeremyAllison

• SammyFung

• ThibaultMartin

• RosannaYuen

• ReginaNkemchorAdejo

Regrets

• PhilipChimento

Consent Agenda

• Approve the minutes of the December board meeting

Approved. No committee meetings occurred due to vacations.

Discussion Agenda

• Executive Committee updates (10 min)
• Acknowledgement by all members that they have booked a slot in their schedules for an in-person board working session and advisory board meeting at FOSDEM (2nd and 3rd February in Brussels)
  • Jeremy is going.
  • Melissa is handling travel and hotel bookings for Martin and Regina.
  • Sammy is going, waiting for confirmation. Rosanna requested for exact dates.
  • Philip will only be attending virtually.
• Reminder to book a slot in your schedule in Riga (Latvia) for GUADEC (July 26th to 31st 2023) - contact Melissa for travel and block hotel booking
• Review of the slides for the advisory board meeting
  • Thib: I'm not sure what should go in it.
  • Rob: We could include summaries per committee.
  • Jeremy: Let's start with the state of the project, then include particular events, including reports from teams.
  • Rosanna: The structure is rigid, it hasn't changed. Should be easy to put together. Take the last presentation and retool it, with the last 6 months updates.
  • Rob: Disagrees, we should try to make the content a little more compelling and share an update on what the Foundation is doing.
  • Rosanna: It's limited what we do without an ED. The executive committee can work on it.
• Updates on ED situation
  • Rob: ED search committee met and reviewed written responses. All but one candidate was rejected, and the committee asked if a board member could screen them - action still pending on Rob.
  • Rob: Should we consider an interim ED, without the FLOSS non-desktop background.
  • Jeremy: Wants to put this to vote.
  • Rob: Not yet.
  • Jeremy: Let's move this forward.
  • Rosanna: Points out that the bylaws allows the President (Rob) to intervene(?)
  • (On initiatives)
    • Rob: We haven't had capacity to move some of those forward.
    • Rosanna: Asks if help is needed for the Flathub initiative.
    • Rob: Yes, something the interim could help with. Something we could discuss at FOSDEM.
    • Jeremy: Insists we need the interim ED.
  • Motion: Instruct the executive committee to consider an interim ED.
    • Sammy: +1 but let's define the requirements first.
    • Martin: +1
    • Rob: +1
    • Jeremy: +1
    • Regina and Thibault left the meeting by this point.
    • Motion passed.
  • Rob: Widen the search net by contacting an recruiter agency.
  • Martin: What do we need to execute this plan?
  • Rob: Money for agencies' fees.
• Approval of Delhi region GNOME User Group
  • We received a request to approve the creation of a new GNOME User Group.
  • Rosanna: We need to look at the wiki archives for the user groups guidelines.
  • Sammy: We should contact all listed user groups to check whether they are active. We need to update the list of GNOME User Groups as well.
  • Rob: can Caroline or Kristi help with this?
  • Sammy: I can volunteer to check the status of listed user groups.