On the spring 2024 I presented my candidature, and eventually got elected for the Board of Directors at the GNOME Foundation. Directors are elected democratically by the GNOME Foundation members, and positions are usually up for election every 2 years. However, when I started my term there was one position open for a single year (due to some changes in composition of the Board). And I volunteered for it, thus my term expired more or less a month ago. When directors get elected, the information that voters have to decide on their vote is:
- Their personal connection to the candidates
- The candidatures themselves
- And further questions the voters might ask about specific topics
For the shake of transparency and accountability, I am going to discuss my own personal candidature against the work that I contributed to the Board for the last year. Although pretty basic and a self-assessment, I believe this is important for any organization. Without retrospectives, feedback, and public discussion it is very hard to learn lesson, make improvements, and ensure knowledge transfer. Not to mention that public scrutiny and discussion are crucial for any kind of functional democratic governance. Though there are reasons to sometimes not discuss things in public, most of my work for the last year can indeed be discussed in public.
Candidature goals
I joined the Board to contribute mostly from the economic perspective. I wanted to become part of the Finance Committee to contribute to improve:
- The communication about economic and funds-related topics. My goal was to ensure that funds were handled more transparently, and build trust by making sure the information reported was detailed and correct. Avoiding issues like those of which I spoke in a previous blog post.
- The way funds were assigned, to make sure those were spent on fulfilling the goals we set to the Foundation.
Unfortunately, when I joined the Board there were some considerable governance issues still unresolved that we got handed over from the previous year. Given my status as a developer and recent community member based in Europe, I had not had time to build relationships with many people in the community. As such, I also set it as one of my goals to represent those people that I knew, which had been under-represented in the previous board.
Goals into actions
Let it be said that being part of a governance body for a non-profit in a foreign country with a different history and legal background can be challenging. A non-trivial amount of my time was dedicated to understanding and getting used to such a body: its internal rules, ways of working, and expectations. I wish the governance was closer to home (has anybody in the American continent worked in organizations with a General Assembly?), but that would be a discussion for another time. Now I will stick to discussing actions related to the goals above.
Becoming part of the Finance Committee
I presented my candidature to become the Treasurer. The Board did a vote, and instead decided to appoint me as Vice-treasurer. As such, I had no powers, more than the right to attend the Finance Committee meetings, which was enough for me to work on my other self-stated goals. Unfortunately, despite multiple requests from different Board members, and assurances in different meetings, I was never called to a Finance Committee meeting. With the resignation of Michael Downey as a directory during the change of the year, I was then offered the Treasurer position. I declined the offer, since at that point I was not willing to volunteer more of my time for the Foundation.
Economic-related communication and funds
During the first months of my term I got heavily involved in this aspect. In addition to taking part in discussions and decision-making, I was one of the the main authors of a general economic update and one focused specifically on the budget. It of course took input and effort from multiple directors, but I am confident that my contribution was considerable. Happily, those updates did have an impact on how people saw the Foundation and the project, with some hints that such work could help regain good will and trust from further people in the membership and the wider FOSS community. Those two were concentrated in the first half of my term, and although there are usually more economic news around budget planning, I did not contribute further work on this for the second half of my term.
Regarding the usage of funds, I was quite involved in the drafting and approval of the budget for 2024/2025. Even if Richard (then Interim Executive Director) took the lion’s share of the work. Such budget managed to retain spending essential for the fulfilling of the goals (conferences, infra), while at the same time making sure available restricted funds were put to use (parental controls and well-being). Unfortunately, some of the fears I expressed in my candidature were right, and expenses had to be cut considerably, leading to us not being able to support all the previous staffers. In general, those executive decisions were not made by me, but by the Executive Director. However, I am happy my input was taken into consideration, and we managed to have a budget that brought us to 2025.
Governance and community engagement
Although the governance issues were carried over from a previous board, I tried to apply the best of my judgement in every situation. I did communicate, when the situation allowed, with the community, and sit in countless meetings to both mediate and express my opinion. At some point, when I was not sure I was doing a good job, presented my resignation a considerable amount of people I knew had voted for me, and all considered it would be best for me to stay.
Evaluation
I put a lot of effort and time moving forward those things I promised in the first half of my term. Unfortunately, I was unable to continue with such engagement through the second half. Part of that had to be with bad management of my time and energy, where I surely burned too much too early. Another part had to be with the realization that many of the problems that I was hoping to tackle at the Foundation are symptoms of deeper structural issues at the project level. For example, no team or committee has official and effective communication channels. So why would the people running the project change their behavior just because being part of the Board? I believe I do not have the leverage, skills, or experience to tackle those issues at their core, which strongly reduced my motivation. I am happy, though, that senior members in the community are really trying.
I am specially sorry I did not take the Treasurer position when I was offered it. This was less than I expected from myself. I offered my resignation to community members that I knew had voted me, but nobody took it. I also presented my resignation to another Board member which took most of the burden for my decision of not taking the role. It was also politely declined. In hindsight I maybe should have resigned anyway.
On the positive side, I learned a lot of lessons just by being on the Board, specially related to governance. I take most of those lessons with me to postmarketOS, and I hope they serve as an useful inter-FOSS lesson sharing experiment. They have surely already helped!
Overall, I am a bit disappointed with myself, as I would have expected to keep doing a lot of the things I did at the beginning for the whole of my term. At the same time, considering the complete year, I think my overall level of work and engagement was probably on average compared to the rest of the Board. In general, the whole experience was considerably draining, specially emotionally, as we were going through uncommon circumstances, e.g: governance issues, staff reduction, etc.
Moving forward
I do not plan to come back to do governance for the GNOME project for a while. I am very happy with what we are building in postmarketOS: the community and the full-stack and upstreaming commitment we bring with us. I hope the GNOME project and Foundation can transition to more open and structured models of governance, where tracking decisions, communicating regularly, and taking responsibility over good and bad decisions becomes the norm. I hope this posts motivates other directors to write their own retrospectives and hold themselves accountable in public in the future.
It is also encouraging to see that we have a new Executive Director, Steven, which rapidly understood many of the issues and needs of the project and organization in a similar way than I do. I wish him the best of successes, and thank him for taking over such an endeavor.
Thanks also to every Board member: Cassidy, Erik, Federico, Julian, Karen, Michael, Philip, Robert, as well as the staff I interacted Rosanna, Kristi, Bart, and Richard. I’ve seen the passion and effort, and it is truly remarkable. With this, I also want to give a special mention to Allan Day. He’s worked non-stop during months to decisively contribute to the Foundation staying afloat. Thank you very much for your work, it is unmatched.
If you have any feedback you want to share, thoughts about my term, improvements to suggest, or just some thanks, feel free to comment or email me. I am always happy to hear other people’s thoughts, and there’s no improvement without feedback!
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