[Osmf-talk] Board Cohesion/Confidentiality

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 10/05/2012 12:18 PM, Kate Chapman wrote:
> I wanted to bring up the recent discussion between Frederik(1) and
> Oliver(2) on their perspective blogs. Honestly I find this method of
> communication to be a bit silly.

I didn't perceive this to be a discussion between myself and Oliver. 
(And technically it cannot be because I had written my posting days 
before I even knew Oliver's.)

> That said, I think we should be having a discussion as to what the
> role is of the board. Personally I'm on the side of having a certain
> level of confidentiality.

Yeah, I think it must be possible for $BIG_GUY to email OSMF board and 
ask them something without having his email on the list immediately.

As soon as $BIG_GUY then wants to discuss something in more depth, 
there's a strong case for board updating the membership on that in some 
way (after having informed $BIG_GUY of course). I think that most people 
we deal with can be made to understand that they cannot expect to have 
secret dealings with a community project.

> I would like to see better communication from the board in terms of
> minutes and other updates though.

As the secretary, the minutes are now my responsibility and I am 
planning to make them more interesting. If you or anyone else would like 
to make suggestions I'm happy to hear them.

Personally, I will try to (a) not only record the result of a decision, 
but also at least outline what was considered in the preceding 
discussion, (b) if there are votes on something, then record who voted 
for what. However, the more you write, the greater the danger of 
misrepresenting something, which will then delay the process of 
publishing the minutes.

However the minutes are just a small piece in all this; from the minutes 
alone you won't know what the board is doing. I think that we should 
also publish the agenda for any board meeting in advance, and because 
board meetings are rather infrequent, we'll need some form of updating 
the community in between board meetings. Like a "board blog" or 
whatever. Maybe a weekly "report from the mailing list" or something. Of 
course this only works if board members actually *want* it.

> The thought process should be
> initially towards open at all times and an exception would be when
> things aren't publicly shared, versus a blanket confidentiality rule.
> The first step of this would be for me not to discover issues from
> @FakeSteveC.

I couldn't agree more.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"