Re: Minutes of the Board Meeting of January, 23th, 2015

[Jeff Fortin Tam <nekohayo gmail com>]

Hi Alberto, thanks for bringing this up and keeping us in check.

I guess I, for one, can take some blame for the way I've been setting meeting agendas lately.

Part of the problem is that we keep having to react to a ton of *time-critical* or sensitive situations (I don't know if it's always like that—2014 has been... quite a year, let's say). But you already know that.

Of course, to streamline our interactions (and make our meetings more efficient and meaningful) I try hard to steer the board to solve most topics through the normal mailing list process (including complex ones) as much as possible. Yet, a portion inevitably ends falling through the cracks if we don't bring them up in a meeting (and actually, there is another portion that I purposely let sit in the cracks "until it has reached a certain discussion threshold on the mailing list", otherwise the meeting agendas would see no end). Naturally, this means we end up with a pretty loaded agenda each time, with the knowledge that we can't process it all but will try to crunch through as much as possible in our limited time together. Hence, generally speaking, at the end of meetings a lot of items gets deferred, sometimes repeatedly, and that's arguably normal (but it certainly looks bad in minutes :)

"Arguably normal!?"

ED Search is a very big item (both in terms of discussion and in terms of actions to be taken) and the course of action has been unclear as the groundwork has been delayed by other Big Items (some are still ongoing, including two of which I cannot talk about here yet). Thus, bringing ED Search as the "first item" in a meeting can be tricky, as that basically means the other quick-but-numerous items get pushed over to the roadside in favor of a big fuzzy one. For one thing I cannot realistically imagine delaying time-critical items (related to events, reimbursements or deadlines to reach out to partners), in the name of the big complex ED Search item, as we would grind everything to a halt. On other more amenable occasions however, I sometimes brought the ED search topic back up, but the status had not changed at that point in time.

So essentially, my decision heuristic has been "time/operation-critical first, search second, and the rest third". That has been my appraisal of the situation and resulting judgment call so far, but hey, maybe my I made a bad judgment call.

If the majority of the people on the list here tell me "Seriously, drop *everything* else, freeze everything until you get the ED", then I can consider that course of action. We are your elected officials after all.


Of course, as you can see, this whole catch-22 annoys me as much as it annoys you. You may also have noticed that my usually chatty blog has grown very quiet and my direct source contributions (devving, testing, design, and so on) have been completely on hold in the past few months. As it is now, my life is being consumed by daytime business on one hand and the board on the other, so everything else is unfortunately secondary. I feel an immense responsibility for the Foundation and I'm regularly guilt-tripping myself for not being able to do more and get the board out of this situation quicker. I spent most of my xmas holidays thinking about the ED situation and GNOME's partners.

Part of what keeps me going is my continued amazement at the fact that the board still manages to plow through so much (including over two thousand board/foundation-related mails in recent months, which sounds like a significant amount to me, but maybe I'm a lazy bastard), frequently dealing with mind-boggling situations, lengthy and sometimes heated debates in meetings... All that in addition to their daily obligations, without going into a collective burnout. I think that's impressive. Dear boardees, you are awesome, please keep going, and let's get the ED topic going again soon!

I'm afraid my message here does not give an immediate satisfactory solution, but at least it gives some context that may be hard to see from the outside, and gives me the opportunity to publicly thank this crazy team :)

All the best,
Jean-François