Regular Meeting of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, 12 October 2023, 17:00 UTC
Attending
Regrets
Missing
- None
Consent Agenda
- Acknowledge receipt of:
- (Executive Committee Minutes)
Finance Committee Minutes
- (Governance Committee Minutes)
- Approve the minutes of the September meeting
Reporting
- Foundation update from staff work
- Status of action items (see section below)
Minutes
VOTE: Consent Agenda PASSED with unanimous approval.
Finance committee met and reviewed QuickBooks reporting. Will work on budget in time for November board meeting now Holly has started.
- Draft minutes of governance committee and executive committee are in the git, no objections, approved.
- Staff report
- Happy fiscal new year! FY2024 - neatening up the 2023 books.
- Running without a budget, and planned to draft over the next few weeks.
- New ED!!! Announcements to start next week, statements from President and ED committee.Official announcement next Monday
- Updated Employee handbooks
- GNOME 45 release! Usual fanfare - videos, announcements, etc supported by staff team
- Gnome Asia planning is on track, speakers selected
- Travel committee working on requests; should be able to cover speakers travel
- Travel committee needs more help
- GUADEC 2024 planning on track to handle schedule
- GUADEC 2023 videos being worked on together with community, about half uploaded, coordinated by the staffs
- Thinking about how to share GUADEC 2023 photos (Nextcloud might be possible)
- See Board Discourse with report/info for sponsors, and report on OSCAL attendance
- Kristi attended Debconf and met with community conference organisers and potential Gnome Asia sponsors
- LAS committee reviewing 3 bids, reviewing next week so we can expect announcements there
- Engagement Team meeting earlier this month, announced in usual places but attended only by staff
- Planning next annual report
- Ongoing tasks; TWIG posts, FOG messaging/newsletters
- Welcome to Holly as new ED and brief outlook of future collaboration
- Here since Tuesday! Learning with an open mind, about GNOME, the systems.
Very happy for a warm welcome from the Staff & Board
- Looking forward to meeting the community
- not forming opinion before, have already 14 logins
- Priorities: Budget - will work on it with Zana and the finance committee, and bring it back to the board next time
- 2nd priority: fundraising, looking what already is and what can be done. having first contacts with existing donors
- looking for personal contact with everyone and scheduling that, with board and with staff
- Thanks to Rosanna for the all the onboarding
- Setting up 1:1 meetings with all the staff
- Discuss and approve STF fiscal sponsorship #327
- Happy to bring this through with the Gnome Foundation and to pay development as there are myths Gnome does not pay developers
- great community success
- have to authorize Sonny to sign the contract
- STF is to develop the "infrastructure", so not about UX or other areas
- list of high level deliverables
- we have to use a lot of contractors to get this done
- Board needs to approve a list of contractors and give Holly the authority to hire new contractors that are not yet listed
- Sonny presented a list of contractors to the board along with a summary of their skills to support the successful delivery of the project.
- Sonny was not board member when the whole process of STF started, but is now.
- Sonny recuses himself from the meeting due to a conflict of interest in the following decisions.
- Sonny and Tobias will work at the same hourly rate as the other team, 20hrs / week each to project manage the delivery
VOTE: The Board unanimously PASSED a motion to authorize Sonny to sign the STF contract on behalf of the GNOME Foundation, to accept the contract award from STF and start the project.
VOTE: The Board unanimously PASSED a motion to approve the initial slate of contractors to deliver the project and authorize Holly to put individual contractor agreements in place for these, and future contractors, as advised by Sonny & Tobias.
- Sonny rejoins the meeting.
- Potential restructuring of Engagement team #322
- Key volunteers have had very variable engagement recently
- The staff are not experienced in volunteer engagement/facilitation
- Two separate problems: of finding the volunteers, and knowing what to do with them if they do arrive
- Huge backlog of tasks, people are leaving frustrated
- Scope and responsibilities of the Engagement team are very unclear with other teams and staff
- GSOC, web, social, etc
- Proposal to replace the Engagement team with smaller / better scoped committees, eg: Social Media, Outreach, Internships, etc
- Proposal #1: Close the Engagement team, relieve the community and staff of the unclear responsibilities.
- Proposal #2: Create a specific Internships team to solicit volunteers to administrate GSOC and Outreachy.
- Historically the successful periods of the Engagement Team were led by the ED or the President, and very tied in to what the Foundation was doing.
- Engagement Team has been the initial point of contact for new volunteers - their first experience to volunteer for the community and run events or something before moving on to other types of contribution.
- Not only coding but activities like doing videos or running events.
- Effective in the past as a "Marketing Team", but many of the team have moved on and we did not succeed in getting new volunteers running the team.
- Sonny: Not splitting the Engagement team into many groups but close the Engagement team and creating one team about interns now because we need it heavily and let the community to create the rest
- Regina: Many newcomers come to Engagement team looking for their first way to support/contribute - if we close the channel those contributors don't have any other path to get involved
- Sonny: Closing the current structure which doesn't work is not the end of the journey, it's the start of designing a new structure together with the community, to take care of the newcomers and historic activities
- Regina: Contribution flows, eg requiring membership to collaborate on Nextcloud -
- Sonny: Historic members of the Engagement Team (eg Sri) is in favor of restructuring and creating new teams instead of keeping the current engagement team.
- Sammy: I think it's not a right time to close it. We should spend some times to re-define and reform the engagement team.
- Holly: I am happy to work with the community, and in a sense it's a good thing that the Foundation has evolved and is handling some of these things.
- Jeremy: Something needs to change as what we're doing doesn't work.
- Rob: Closing is a no-op if the team has no activity?
- Sonny: The official act of closing it should motivate people to enter the space and discussion about how to facilitate the community in the right areas.
- Holly: three things, 1) internship committee, 2) reducing the scope to take out the "staff stuff", 3) work with the community to facilitate a pathway for newcomers
- Holly: maybe better to take a time and discuss the issue aside from the actual board meeting and find a common path until the next meeting
- Split out the 1/2/3 items and bring them back to the next board meeting once they are a bit better baked.
- Sonny: it is very dis-encouraging to move the decision to the next meeting because it is in the git since a while to be discussed
- Rob: The charter is already written! Let's go.
- Discussion about needs to divide some responsibilities between staff and volunteers, particularly for social media.
ACTION: Holly to investigate scope of committee with staff and report back.
- Form a internship committee according to the draft charter in #239
- Initial membership: Felipe Borges, Allan Day, Matthias Clasen, Sri Ramkrishnan, Sonny Piers (board liaison)
VOTE: The Board unanimously PASSED a motion to proceed to form the committee with the charter and membership.
Backlog
- Encourage Communities to share updates on This Week in GNOME. #316
- Travel committee
- Discussing new partnerships where companies sponsor GNOME accessibility (a11y) as it is falling apart #323
- Decide on where to move the Foundation Board wiki pages #325
- Global Inclusive Initiative. #304
- Common retrospective on the Board Source Training in #311
Editorial Note
- The Board Secretary was absent from this meeting due to a prior commitment and extends his thanks to the Board President and others who assisted with capturing minutes of this meeting.