Foundation board size

September 29, 2005 9:48 am Dave Neary gnome

For those of you who aren’t regular readers of foundation-list, I have started a petition to have a referendum on reducing the size of the board. If you agree that reworking how the board works is important, please add your name, or send me an e-mail expressing your support if you’re uncomfortable using the wiki, and I’ll add it for you.

Why is this issue important?

I believe that having 11 people on the board, with no established structure for decisions and delegation, is death to momentum. The board gets its head up its own ass regularly about very small issues – we end up discussing issues, deciding that we’ll explore the issue, and after exploration, deciding that maybe we’ll wait a while before we make a decision.

Or worse, someone mails the board with a question, and because there are so many of us, everyone things “someone else will answer that one”, and the issue drops through the cracks. In fact, I was told last night that asking for help on board-list was a bad idea, since “asking for a volunteer in a large group of people isn’t usually effective”. My point exactly.

For the foundation, and the board, to be effective, we have to be fast-moving, sleek, panther-like. So people don’t have time to do board stuff – OK, then they shouldn’t run, or we shouldn’t elect them.

Being on the board is (or should be) about disseminating information, and delegating authority. The board is there only to answer questions that no-one else can answer (“Yes, we will spend money on this”, or “No, this is not a reasonable use of our trademark”). So I think that reducing board size, and having a group of people who actually take responsibility for that, is a good thing.

One Response

  1. Chian Says:
    September 30th, 2005 at 12:05 am

    I think you point is very valid in that questions to the board need to be anwsered in a more systematic way. The best way to address this issue is to clarify roles and responsibilities of the board, as well as its fiduciary duties. We should appoint one or two board memebers to be the point of contact for answering questions, so that somebody will always stay on top. If s/he can’t answer a question, s/he will make sure the question is directed to the right person and get answered. S/he can also help compile and update a list of FAQs. I wouldn’t think the board size is at the core of the problem, but how the board structure is set up. Just my two cents.