Meeting of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, 13 January 2020, 15:30 UTC

Attending

Regrets

Agenda

  • Approve minutes of 9 December
  • Linux App Summit 2020
  • Splitting the directors into two classes

Minutes

  • Approve minutes of 9 December
    • No amendments proposed.
    • Minutes are approved.
  • Linux App Summit 2020
    • Allan: The LAS organizing committee is waiting for some form of go-ahead from the Foundation to launch their call for proposals. The organizers are keen to have the event again in 2020 in order to keep the momentum and not let the Linux app ecosystem languish for attention. However, that may pose a problem for our capacity to support it.
    • Neil: Normally GUADEC is in July, then people generally want to go on holiday, then comes GNOME.Asia, and by that time we have only one month until November. I've talked to Aleix Pol and suggested that March would be a better time to get support from the GNOME Foundation.
    • Allan: One possibility is to do a lighter event in 2020 by co-locating with another conference. However, I don't think they have any specific ideas about what to co-locate with.
    • Neil: Two that spring to mind are SeaGL and CCC.
    • Federico: Would it be a problem to tack LAS onto GUADEC?
      • Britt: That would make it by nature very GNOME-branded.
    • Allan: That seems like something to work out between Neil and the LAS organizers. However, that brings us to the second part of the question, how important do we consider it to continue supporting LAS?
      • Federico: I think it's important to have this conference to emphasize why it's important to have software that runs on your own computer. It's also an important tie between GNOME and KDE.
      • Britt: Agreed. It's also attracting more parties and it seems counterproductive to back out.
      • Philip: Agreed that it is important; we also need to test it against the goals of the Foundation and balance it with the other goals.
      • Neil: It would seem to fit within the goal of having a thriving app ecosystem, although for example GNOME.Asia fits within another goal of outreach. The event seemed to go well and has opened up good lines of discussion.
      • Tristan: Agreed, would like to continue supporting it. I believe the main concern last time we discussed was taxes. Has that been resolved?
      • Rosanna: Tax issues tend to show up a year later, if there are issues.
      • Allan: I think we should continue to support it, with the caveat that there seems to be some ambiguity about the audience of LAS. In a certain way the conference is still finding its audience. It would be useful to try to push the organizers to figure that out, and possibly use the conference as a way to come to an answer to some of these thorny platform questions.
    • Allan: At this point we don't have a specific proposal to approve. We can give our general positive assent to continuing to support LAS.
      • Neil: It sounds like the board members are all in favour.
    • Tristan: Is the call for locations blocking on us because of attaching the GNOME name to it?
      • Allan: Although we don't have to commit a specific amount at this time, they are also waiting for us to say in principle that we will back LAS financially.
  • Splitting the directors into two classes
    • Neil: When we adopted our bylaws changes, we split the directors into two classes of three and four directors, to stagger the terms. That means the board needs to decide this split. One proposal is to make the three directors with the most amount of votes in the previous election up for reelection in 2021, and the remaining four in 2020. That would seem to be the most democratic option and might go some way towards easing the concerns of people who had reservations about this change.
    • Allan: Another idea is to make the shortest-sitting directors up for reelection in 2021, and the longer-sitting ones in 2020.
    • (Philip leaves)
    • Britt: we could just see how many volunteers there are to sit for another year, and base the decision on that.
    • Some discussion about the lack of women on the board.
    • Neil: If we were publicly listed in California, we would be legally required to have female directors.
    • Allan: If we were to have a rule about having a percentage of women in the board, would that have to go in the bylaws?
      • Neil: Yes.
    • Tristan: I would like to see how many people run in the upcoming election of a half board, as I don't know if enough people would run to make up for that percentage.
    • (Carlos arrives)
    • Various discussion about who is willing to sit for another year. The board agrees to keep this discussion going, with a view to agreeing on the classes in the next few months.

* Announcements

  • Allan: Next week is a working session; there are some pending issues - please look at them.
  • Britt: events.gnome.org is up and running! We can use that to coordinate the Board hackfest.

FoundationBoard/Minutes/20200113 (last edited 2020-02-09 00:50:07 by PhilipChimento)