Foundation Board Minutes for Monday 3rd June 2019, 15:00 UTC
Attending
NuritziSanchez (leaving early)
CarlosSoriano (leaving early)
Agenda
- Travel committee status
- Community pulse: stopthemingmy.app
Diversity & inclusion initiatives and Foundation events
Minutes
- Travel committee status
- Philip: Waiting to proceed until the new committee members sign the confidentiality agreement.
ACTION: Neil to check the status of the new members' confidentiality agreement.
- Philip: I lost access to RT temporarily, but Andrea Veri fixed that.
- Allan: is there a plan for onboarding the new committee members?
- Philip: The existing travel committee members may or may not have time to do an onboarding session. In the end, we may just have to give them Germán Poo-Caamaño's documentation.
- Nuritzi: Could the Foundation (a board member, or someone from the staff) organize an onboarding meeting for the new members, and have some sort of retrospective on how the travel committee has worked?
- Philip: The only people who can probably give a real onboarding experience are Germán and David King; Adelia Rahim mentioned that she didn't get a proper onboarding when joining the committee last year and would like to join one now. I would only be able to tell new members about the documentation that is available anyway.
ACTION: Philip to report back in 2–3 weeks on the status of the new travel committee members
- Nuritzi: Can we send out info about the new committee members, as well as the changes to the sponsorship policy?
- Philip: Since it'll be the responsibility of the committee to implement the policy, I'm waiting on feedback from the new members about the policy, before announcing it more widely.
- Allan: This would be something to cover in the onboarding.
- Philip: Waiting to proceed until the new committee members sign the confidentiality agreement.
- Community pulse: stopthemingmy.app
- Allan: This issue was raised to us by the advisory board. A number of individuals including GNOME Foundation / community members and app contributors have created a website to request that distributors and others stop applying third party GTK themes to their apps.
- Rob: This has an effect on the public perception of GNOME. People downstream have already seen messages, as a result of third parties incorrectly interpreting the open letter, such as "GNOME community members are targeting such-and-such company." It's useful for us to have an opinion and make a response, because it affects the public perception of the Foundation and the perception by the advisory board members. Secondly, this is not a productive way to conduct the discussion, which has now turned into a highly visible, passive-aggressive subtweeting thing. I don't know specifically what we should do, but we should do something, for example communicate with the parties involved, and figure out what to say publicly to reassure and bring parties together for a more constructive discussion.
- Neil: Additionally, we have staff with extensive media experience. In the future, it would be useful if when making major announcements, or when wanting to post something that may be controversial, to give Neil a heads up — we can help refine the message so that it has a bigger or better impact.
- [ Nuritzi leaves ]
- Federico: It might be worth dedicating resources from the Foundation to make a technical investigation of how the theming bugs happen, to see if it is something that can be fixed at the theming level or do we need an extra API. This might be a good topic to work on at GUADEC.
[ Carlos leaves ]
Diversity & inclusion initiatives and Foundation events
Actions
Neil - Check the status of the confidentiality agreements sent to the new travel committee members.
Philip - Put the status of the new travel committee members on the agenda in 2–3 weeks.