Before I was on the board, I also used to wonder what was being
discussed behind closed doors. Spoiler alert: it's far less exciting
than you might expect. As Tim Peters once put it: "Exciting as
watching rocks sleep? Yup, but essential - the glory of serving on the
Board isn't for everyone ;-)".
Having now served on the board, I can confirm that the meeting minutes
published every few weeks pretty accurately reflect our actionable
discussions. These twice monthly meetings are an hour long which
doesn't leave much time for real discussion. For the most part, these
meetings are just used to cast votes on the resolutions you see listed
in the meeting minutes. Most of the actual discussion happens prior to
the meetings on the PSF board mailing list.
https://www.python.org/psf/records/board/minutes/
https://www.python.org/psf/records/board/resolutions/
Even so, the vast majority of email on the PSF board mailing list just
revolves around grant requests for regional conferences, workshops,
etc. The new Grants Working Group is starting to take on more and more
of those requests which will hopefully free up the board for more
strategic work. That said, I suspect people think the PSF board is
more hands-on than it actually is. For the most part, the Python
community sits on the shoulders of individual volunteers with no
official PSF titles (and the PSF staff, of course). The PSF board has
very little to do with PyCon US or PyPI, for example.
Baby just woke up, so quickly now (and please excuse any typos). In an
effort to address some of the past concerns around transparency &
communication, the PSF:
- promptly publishes meeting minutes & resolutions online
- retired the old private psf-members mailing list and created this
new public mailing list
- opened up pretty much all of the historically private PSF wiki content
- sends twice monthly emails to this list with grant summaries,
meeting minute links, etc
- has two bloggers broadcast community success stories, PSF news, etc
I hope that helps clarify the kinds of discussions the PSF board has
during the meetings and on the board mailing list, as well as the
current efforts around transparency. There's always room for
improvement, so do let the board know if you have any fresh ideas on
this front. Bonus points for having the time to help implement them.
Cheers,
--diana
On Sat, May 28, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Carl Karsten <c...@personnelware.com> wrote:
> All of the people nominated for the PSF board are good people who will do
> good things. If things were running smooth, I wouldn't really care who gets
> elected.
>
> But once again, we see people asking questions due to lack of transparency.
>
> So once again, I ask: What will you do about it?
>
> --
> Carl K
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> PSF-Community mailing list
> PSF-Community@python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/psf-community
>
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