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

Benjamin Berg <[email protected]> Fri, 21 Jun 2019 08:25:26 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Mon, 2019-06-03 at 20:17 -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> I will try to explain my understanding. I think it's accurate to say
> that so far, minutes are approved by unanimous consent, since the
> directors all have access to the draft minutes before they are
> published and have the opportunity to comment on them. In the case
> where something is written incorrectly, the other directors do
> propose corrections to me. However, in my previous experience on
> boards of volunteer organizations, just like you I have only
> encountered organizations where the board formally approved the
> previous minutes as the first item on the agenda in each meeting. I
> believe it is good practice for the board to approve the minutes more
> formally.

We are in agreement here.

> It's not my intention to compel all future GNOME Foundation boards to
> follow this particular guideline that I am currently proposing. For
> one thing, I expect that we may try out some of the things in this
> guideline, and find that they don't work in practice, and I'm sure
> when we discuss it in an upcoming meeting not all of those things can
> be predicted. I believe that minor procedural changes such as these
> don't require a vote, as it is up to each year's board to find the
> system that's most efficient for them, so long as it complies with
> all applicable laws and regulations. However, I do hope that by
> documenting best practices and the reasoning behind them, future
> boards will find it logical to continue them.

I disagree. What I was expecting is simply a formal vote to make these
Guidelines mandatory. Doing so does not prevent any future changes at
all. After all, both the initial vote and any changes to the document
are just a tiny overhead on top of the discussions that will happen
anyway. But an overhead that makes the Boards work and thoughts on
matters of more transparency visible to the Membership.

Having these Guidlines both publicly available and mandatory is a great
way to show that the Board is serious about the issue. It sets well
defined expectations for Directors that the Membership can actually
rely on, and should it ever come to that, even hold them accountable
to. While I seriously hope that we will not need this, it is well known
that the publishing of minutes has not always been a smooth process in
the Foundation.

I do believe that these benefits by far outweigh the slight overhead
that a formal vote incurs.

Benjamin

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