Board of Directors Candidacy - Robert McQueen

[Robert McQueen]

Name: Robert McQueen
E-Mail: ra...@gnome.org
Corporate affiliation: Endless
IRC, Twitter, Telegram, Signal, etc: ramcq

Dear Foundation members,

I would like to announce my intention to stand for re-election for a
second term as a director of the GNOME Foundation, not least because I
believe the Foundation will benefit from the stability of longer-
serving Board members and longer Board terms, and that my participation
over the past year has been a net positive. :)

I am currently the Chief of Engineering at Endless, and we are building
new channels and markets to bring our GNOME-based desktop OS in front
of more users, and provide accesss to technology to empower people. I
have been using and contributing to GNOME in a personal and
professional capacity for almost 15 years, most recently contributing
to Flatpak and helping to found and build the Flathub app store and
address technical barriers to attracting app developers to the free
desktop.

Professionally, I have served as a founder, company director or
executive for that entire period, building products based around GNOME
and the free desktop technology stack, and I am pleased have the
opportunity to bring this commercial experience, and familiarity with
the industry, legal and financial issues, into helping the GNOME
Foundation grow as a more effective and impactful organisation. In the
process of deciding to stand again I sought informal feedback from
fellow board members, and the general opinion was that my advice and
experience in the board meetings has been appreciated, although I
encourage you to ask them for their thoughts yourselves.

In my previous term on the Board I have served as the line manager for
the Executive Director, including setting the priorities for Neil and
his team to drive for the strategy that the Board outlined at the start
of the year. As with other board members I am trying to craft the Board
into a more regular advisory (and, barring optional additional
participation, less time-consuming!) role and have the Foundation use
its current resources and staff effectively to raise more funds and
launch more ambitious programs.

I also drafted and implemented the charter for the Compensation
Committee to independently vet the ED's salary, to improve the
tax/legal compliance of the Foundation as increased donations may
subject us to increased scrutiny. I participated in that compensation
committee (although most credit is due to Carlos and Nuritzi) and
partnered with Allan and Carlos to refine thinking around defining what
is GNOME software and how that interacts with use of trademarks and
other resources.

Given the opportunity to serve the Foundation again on the Board of
Directors, I will continue striving for GNOME to become a more
impactful, widely-used and widely-deployed desktop in order to preserve
end-user freedom, and seek to remove roadblocks to the successful
commercial adoption of the desktop and our technologies at scale.

Many Thanks,
Rob___
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Re: Minutes of the board meeting of March 13, 2019

[Benjamin Berg]

Hi,

On Thu, 2019-05-23 at 18:37 -0700, philip.chime...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 4:55 AM Benjamin Berg  
> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2019-05-15 at 18:08 -0700, philip.chime...@gmail.com wrote:
> > > On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 1:11 AM Benjamin Berg  
> > > wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 2019-05-14 at 22:30 -0700, Philip Chimento via foundation-
> > > > list
> > > > wrote:
> > > > >* Philip: Everyone please read this, we'll discuss it again in the
> > > > > next meeting. As suggested in Allan's comments, I can split the parts
> > > > > that are more of interest to Foundation members into a wiki page.
> > > > 
> > > > Is the proposed policy fully available to foundation members for review
> > > > and/or as a reference at this point in time?
> > > 
> > > It's not a policy. It's an informal guideline for the board members,
> > > suggesting what standards the minutes should meet, and a procedure
> > > for approving the minutes of the previous meeting at the start of
> > > each meeting.
> > > 
> > > […] The remaining board guideline part is honestly not going to be
> > > very interesting unless you like parliamentary procedure, but will be
> > > put on a wiki page as well when the board members agree on it.
> > 
> > And I am very much interested in reviewing those. We had longer
> > discussions in the relevant tickets and so far I had not gotten the
> > impression that the Board has addressed the issue of missing meeting
> > minutes adequately. I do have a real hope that these documents will
> > improve the situation a lot for the future, and I am very much
> > interested in doing a review. Ideally before the Board votes on them.
> 
> Sure, I have pinged people about it to get things moving again. I
> personally am going on vacation tomorrow and will check what the
> progress is when I get back next week. The goal is to put both online
> before the end of the board term.

Thanks. I am looking forward to seeing the actual document(s), as it is
much easier to talk about this once everyone has the full information.

> But just to be clear, it's not a policy, and I don't believe the
> board is planning to vote on it. The wiki page is an explanatory wiki
> page which we will be happy to answer questions about, but is not
> going to represent any change from the status quo. The other document
> is basically a guideline for the board saying "approve the previous
> meeting's minutes at the start of each meeting, define a procedure by
> which corrections are to be made, and make sure to delegate the
> publishing of the minutes to someome else if the secretary hasn't
> been able to do it by then." As a fairly minor procedural change to
> the board meetings, it's not something we'd seek review or input on.

To be honest, the above explanation makes the situation more confusing
to me. I simply can't make much sense of it, partially because I cannot
map it to my experiences[1] and partly because it does not answer the
questions that I have about this topic.

Benjamin

[1] I have been involved with various bodies primarily in the
university and student council context. I have also worked on different
bylaws and rules of procedures over the years (and reviewed state law
in Germany). I believe I did learn quite a bit about good practices
during that time even if it will not directly map to an anglo-saxon
system.

To be specific as to why I am struggling. My expectation would be that
approving minutes is a mandatory procedure for the Board. And
introducing such a procedure requires a vote. In contrast you seem to
be handling it purely as a non-binding guideline which seems odd to me.


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Board of Directors Elections 2019 - Candidacy - Carlos Soriano

[Carlos Soriano]

Name: Carlos Soriano
Email: csori...@gnome.org
Corporate affiliation: Red Hat

Hello all,

I would like to announce my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation board of
directors for the third term.

I've been contributing to GNOME since 2014 as GSoC student for two years in
GNOME Shell. Then joined Red Hat as upstream and downstream maintainer of
Nautilus, until recently that I moved to a planning & release manager
position in the kernel graphics team.

In the last board term I focused on supporting the foundation grow in a
healthy way, and with the transition from a more executive to a more
strategic board. As part of that, I have been working on the newly
created compensation
committee , doing the
research on legal, tax forms and general charity guidance in order to make
a proper process for setting the ED compensation.

Another initiative I've been working on since last year is the creation of
a better definition of GNOME software and its components, and together with
that the creation of an inclusive process for GNOME related apps and
libraries to empower a wider community of contributors.

Lastly, I kept being one of the points of contact with GitLab, Matrix and
KDE. I represented GNOME at the panel discussion at DrupalCon with GitLab
and Drupal, keeping in touch with their representatives for future
collaborations. Also, I discussed with KDE directors several initiatives
such as GitLab and Matrix.

If reelected, I will continue focusing on the growth of the foundation. In
particular, I would like to keep working on the other half of work left for
the compensation committee, the compensation policy. This work will ensure
we have a process for appraisals and evaluation of the execution of
foundation plans.

Together with the previous point, I'll like to work further in the
foundation goals, KPIs, etc. so we evaluate how well the foundation is
doing in its growth, with the experience I gained from the last year.

While my focus will be the foundation growth, if reelected I would like to
keep working on improving our infrastructure, specially around
communication tooling. In this regard, I would like to help with new
partnerships with companies and support the coordination of the initiatives.

Thanks,
Carlos Soriano
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Re: Minutes of the board meeting of April 29, 2019

[Benjamin Berg]

Hi Carlos,

On Wed, 2019-05-22 at 14:18 +0200, Carlos Soriano wrote:
> Just as an addition to what Rob said. As an example, I have been
> working on some critical work for the foundation, for over a year
> now. This work required extensive reading of legal, tax forms,
> research, etc. and is yet to be finished. It's quite complex, and at
> the same time it cannot wait if we want the foundation and project to
> keep growing and being healthy. It's unlikely this work can continue
> without someone with the expertise gained over the last year, and
> it's unlikely any effective hand off can be done with a clean cut.

I can think of at least three separate ways of dealing with such an
issue in principle:
   1. The new Board asks you to continue your work without your mandate as
  a Director.
   2. The Board forms a committee which can provides long term continuity
  between Board terms.
   3. The Board asks one of their own employees or works together with
  another non-profit to curate this knowledge.

That doesn't mean that changing the Board term could improve certain
situations, but I don't seem obvious to me that this is necessary or
even helpful in the long term. After all it is good to be resilient
against specific Directors becoming unavailable for some reason.

Benjamin

> On Wed, 22 May 2019 at 12:43, Robert McQueen  wrote:
> > On Wed, 2019-05-22 at 11:35 +0200, Tobias Mueller wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > 
> > Hi Tobi,
> > 
> > > I guess these plans are news to most members.
> > 
> > They were mentioned previously in the blog posts we wrote after the
> > hackfest last year - see 
> > http://ramcq.net/2018/10/19/gnome-foundation-h
> > ackfest-2018/ - although not moved much further since then as you
> > see
> > from these minutes,
> > 
> > > I think that the proposed change is a strict subset of what is
> > > possible
> > > today and that the cost associated with that change do not
> > outweigh
> > > the
> > > benefits.
> > 
> > We've received several large grants over the past year or so, and a
> > spokesperson for the anonymous donor spent a while with the board
> > talking about a number of factors, including the requirements
> > around
> > setting the compensation of the Executive Director (hence our new
> > compensation committee) and more generally, how to attract and
> > retain
> > good staff, and be able to demonstrate impact for donors.
> > 
> > They support a number of philanthropic initiatives and they
> > impressed
> > on us the importance of a growing Foundation that the strategy is
> > maintained over longer periods of time, so that the resources that
> > are
> > given (ie donations, large or small) can be put to work on longer-
> > term
> > / more impactful projects, and that the staff are able to make
> > plans to
> > deliver such projects and impact.
> > 
> > They said a normal time period for a directors term in most non-
> > profits 
> > would be 3 years, but after discussion amongst the board it was
> > felt
> > that anything longer than a 2 year term might be a disincentive for
> > people to stand for election. (Although as part of growing the
> > Foundation budget and staff, we are aiming that the directors can
> > reduce their time commitment to the usual oversight role of a
> > board,
> > allowing them to separately decide the extent to which they are
> > able
> > and willing to volunteer for other initiatives.) Most governments
> > or
> > other public bodies tend to have 3-4 year terms as well; for the
> > same
> > reasons. It's really hard to get *anything* non-trivial done in a
> > year.
> > 
> > A significant change of the board all at once, particularly if the
> > incoming directors have less experience and might be less confident
> > or
> > decisive, is a significant fear of the staff of any non-profit. It
> > threatens the ability of the (now 6-7) staff of the foundation
> > being
> > able to make effective plans, start longer-running programs and see
> > them through, etc. If our decision making cadence, visibility and
> > horizon is a year (or less) it's very hard to see past that for
> > longer
> > periods of time.
> > 
> > In a business context the typical HR advice is that it takes 12-18
> > months for a change in team structure, strategy, etc to really bear
> > fruit in terms of everyone getting back "in the groove" and being
> > productive, confident about what they are doing, etc. The
> > Foundation
> > staff is small but I don't think we should under-estimate the
> > impact of
> > potentially having your manager, strategy and goals changed on an
> > annual basis.
> > 
> > > Currently, a candidate can simply run for a consecutive term.
> > They
> > > can
> > > even make it part of their platform that they intend to serve for
> > > more
> > > than one term or that they have served a term already. The
> > electorate
> > > can then decide whether they like it or whether they'd rather see
> > > change
> > > (maybe to overcome perceived bad habits or discontinuing