Re: Minutes of the board meeting of March 13, 2019

Benjamin Berg <[email protected]> Fri, 24 May 2019 19:51:32 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi,

On Thu, 2019-05-23 at 18:37 -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 4:55 AM Benjamin Berg <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2019-05-15 at 18:08 -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> > > On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 1:11 AM Benjamin Berg <[email protected]> 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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