Wiki location: https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20200330
= Meeting of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, 30 March 2020, 14:30
UTC =
== Attending ==
* AllanDay
* BrittYazel
* CarlosSoriano
* NeilMcGovern
* PhilipChimento
* FedericoMenaQuintero (arriving later)
== Regrets ==
* RobertMcQueen
* RosannaYuen
== Missing ==
* TristanVanBerkom
== Agenda ==
* Approve minutes of 16 March
* Fiscal year 2019–20 budget
* Meeting schedule
* Foundation mission/vision
* Pass responsibility for conferences to staff
== Minutes ==
* Approve minutes of 16 March
* No amendments were proposed.
* Minutes are approved.
* Fiscal year 2019–20 budget
* The budget was voted on in the meeting of 16 March, subject to the
treasurer's approval. Carlos has approved the budget in the meantime, so it
is official.
* Meeting schedule
* Allan: As you all know, we are trying to be more strategic, which
means concentrating on high-importance but low-urgency matters. This means
that we should be able to have meetings less often, even if we make them
longer. My proposal is to have monthly meetings going forward, which are
two hours long. Each meeting will rotate between strategy, policy, and
finance, and include a report from Neil.
* Britt: Agreed.
* Carlos: Agreed.
* Philip: I agree but I'm concerned about our ability to keep our finger
on the pulse of the community. We should think about another way to
safeguard that.
* Allan: One complication is that we are sometimes going to be asked to
deal with things on fairly short notice. We may have to have extra, short,
meetings to deal with these things. Working groups will also need to meet
more often.
* Neil: Even if the focus of a particular meeting is, e.g. finance, it's
still possible to raise a strategy point there, so not everything would
have to wait three months to be discussed.
* Allan: Another complication is finding a time that works for
everyone's time zone. If necessary we can send around a date tracker for
each meeting.
* Carlos: Is it possible to vote over email?
* Neil: Yes, but an email vote only passes if it is unanimous.
* Foundation mission/vision
* Allan: I would like to get an idea of the direction of travel for
this, and a working group will work on it. The main question is what we
think is most important: user share of GNOME desktops? Or our influence as
a project, impact on the software industry and wider world?
* Philip: Are there people currently in the board who favour one over
the other? Or is this question more that we could go in either direction
and we need to pick one? In the Cambridge hackfest we had weighted both as
equally important.
* Carlos: Are there any strong arguments against either?
* Neil: The practical application of this will be in marketing and
outreach, even down to what tweets we write. The question with everything
we do, would be on the one hand 'will this bring us more users', versus on
the other hand 'will this advance our influence on free software
development'.
* Carlos: I tend towards the practical side, placing user base first and
letting influence follow from that.
* Britt: I'm in favour of the influence side, as it's a truer
representation of what the GNOME community today is. We don't contribute to
GNOME because we want user share, we do it because we want to make the best
software possible. However, correctly or incorrectly, a common perception
of GNOME is that we force our ideas onto users. We should either embrace
that or avoid it altogether, but not in between. Currently it seems like we
walk a line where we don't say it but we do do it. I think either the
mission statement should be neutral, or embrace this perception.
* Allan: In my mind we are talking about influence, not telling other
free software projects or people what to do. We would be demonstrating what
it looks like to build a successful free software product and community,
leading by example.
* Britt: I like that, and it separates us dogmatically from GNU, which
seems to place technicalities above the quality of the software.
* Carlos: You can have strong morals and still be a good thought
leader, so I don't think those are in collision with each other.
* [ Federico arrives ]
* Philip: I am leaning towards the influence side, but I have my doubts
about what the effect of either of these will be if they are used to inform
every decision at every level of the organization. If we fully maximize
either one, then that might not result in the GNOME that we want. I would
like to consider how to word them that they can be used as a guide for
everyone within the organization, without being exaggerated. For example,
we could say it like the Agile manifesto: 'we value both X and Y, but we
value X a bit more than Y.'
* Neil: This would be used, for example, to determine the approach to
writing a hypothetical new GNOME website. Would it be aimed at attracting
people to use GNOME, or at showcasing our technology?
* Carlos: My interpretation of the influence vision is that we would try
to maximize software freedom, is that how other people are interpreting it?
* Philip: That's not how I'm interpreting it.
* Federico: I think we should focus on the first approach (increasing
adoption), since the second one (influencing the software industry) is more
or less already the status quo. Users' freedoms are being eroded all the
time through proprietary and/or privacy-violating software. We need to give
them an obvious choice. It is easier for people to switch individual apps
to free software gradually (GIMP/Inkscape/whatever on Windows) than to make
the big jump to Linux systems. And yet we make very little effort to make
our apps available on those systems. They are available by default on
Linux, or with relatively little work, but making them available on
Windows/Mac is always dodgy.
* Pass responsibility for conferences to staff
* Deferred until next meeting.
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