candidacy statement

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

Luis Villa
Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School

It should be noted that I maintain some organizational ties to Fedora
and SUSE (neither paid), and am an Ubuntu user, so maybe I should
count 1/3rd for affiliations for each of those ;)

Why I want to be on the board:

Because I think the board is broken, and after three terms, I think I
finally have some ideas on how to fix it. :)

What I think the board should look like in a year:

The board should be a group of people whose main role is oversight,
inquiry, and delegation, not doing. In the past, candidacy statements
have been of the form of 'I will get the board to do X', which I'm now
pretty convinced is the wrong tack. The board should be in the
business of encouraging other people to do X, giving advice on X when
asked, and overseeing things to make sure X is generally accomplished
in a manner which serves the needs and desires of the foundation
membership.

The board should not generally be in the business of acting itself. I
think that the belief that the board should act itself has in the past
skewed expectations of the board, prevented good people from running,
and perhaps most damagingly, generally reduced the amount of new
people brought on board and gotten involved with the running of the
Foundation.

The release team is the model here- the board doesn't do releases
itself, it delegates that task to others. This relationship might need
to be re-formalized- there is no longer a formal board representative
on the release team, and the release team no longer regularly reports
to the board, as it used to, so arguably the board is failing in the
oversight role (though obviously the release team has been doing a
great job, so practically speaking this is not a problem.) But in
general the model the board followed here ages ago was the right
thing- identify a problem, recruit good people to solve the problem,
and let it go. The elections committee is in the same mold.

GUADEC is potentially also a model here, sort of, but also points out
how we can go wrong. The board has basically delegated that task
(good), and has given advice when asked. The board has, however,
failed to exercise oversight- there has been no formal feedback
mechanism between board and GUADEC team, and so (arguably) GUADEC has
strayed from its intended mission, with no process in place to check
that drift, or even to provide feedback to let the GUADEC organizers
know that perhaps there are problems.

Things that are definitely not models, and which must be fixed: our
oversight of finances and employees has been poor. We're getting there
with both- Tim's feedback to the board is much more regular now, and
financials are posted now. Neither is perfect, IMHO, and we should
continue to push each. [Employee management is one probably exception
to the rule to delegate, delegate, delegate.]

As far as problems the foundation faces, I'd like to see a formal
marketing team, and potentially a fundraising team as well, charged
with organizing and improving GNOME's performance in each of those
areas, and reporting back to the board regularly. Likely each of those
teams would have board members on them (I'm certainly not saying board
*members* should stop doing things :) but they would be partcipants
and representatives who should lead or not lead independent of their
status as board members.

I'll try to post a summary comparing my goals for last year and my
achievements tonight or tomorrow, but hopefully this will do for now
:)

Luis