Hi, the first Governing Board (GB) call happened Wednesday, April 16, from 7:30 PM to 9 PM. All of the members of the GB were on the call - @Bodhish_Thomas ,@Bowrna_Prabhakaran ,@Nemo ,@Swastik_Baranwal and @Shree_Kumar - joined by @rahulporuri and @fossdot. The key points of discussion are recorded in this post here.
Note: If you have any questions or comments for the Governing Board, please send an email to governing-board@fossunited.org
Would be great if actionable items would be summarised in this post as well.
Hello, a little late to the party, but here are the notes from the second Governing Board call which took place on May 30, from 8:00 pm to 9:30 PM. All members of the GB were on the call - @Bodhish_Thomas @Bowrna_Prabhakaran @Nemo @Swastik_Baranwal and @Shree_Kumar, joined by @ashlesh.
The notes are summarised here, and as usual, in case you have any questions or comments for the GB, please write to them at governing-board@fossunited.org
As a member / donor, I am unable to see what is the purpose of these governance meetings? Are there any “decisions” or “action items”? What about the broad ideas that power the community? What is the vision for FOSS United the GB is bringing? What about governance, accountability, etc? Are we addressing any of these? Did we pass a budget? Discuss expenses? Review staff contributions?
As one of the elected GB members, I am trying to take baby steps to understand the context and what powers should a board member can or cannot have, before wanting to start discussing about all this.
This is what I found. Seems quite generic (AI?) but the powers seem sweeping.
Broadly you folks have the responsibility of taking the energy of this movement forward. No one in India is doing anything close. You can’t take this casually.
My suggestion would be:
Agreed with the above. To be very honest, it always looked to me that the governance board is doing what all the city chapter volunteers are doing (like volunteering for IndiaFOSS, helping with events and etc). There are now also chairs and co-chairs for IndiaFOSS and they are one of the governance board members (also, does a conference really need to have these roles?).
to all the above suggestions.
Would be great if actionable items would be summarised in this post as well.
Are there any “decisions” or “action items”?
hey @rushabh, the staff present in the meeting usually takes notes in these meetings. I took for the second call and also summarised it in the blogpost, there are small actionable items listed in the post but are scattered. As the GB activities pick up going forward, we’ll restructure the post to have a dedicated summed up action items list. Thank you for the feedback.
To be very honest, it always looked to me that the governance board is doing what all the city chapter volunteers are doing (like volunteering for IndiaFOSS, helping with events and etc).
hey @mangesh, long time 
why is this bit suprising? the GB members, most of them have been longtime community members and volunteers, and that naturally makes them great fits for the GB(which is also a form of volunteering), precisely why the community voted to have them on the board. And I am sure we’ll see them continue doing these things, bigger and better!
Why “Governance Board” then ? It could’ve just been normal volunteering if so. The purpose of governance board was a whole different agenda and context if I remember correctly.
They are separate roles.
Volunteering for IndiaFOSS as a co-chair for instance (personal example), is a significantly larger amount of volunteering time, compared to the governance board. For completeness, I’ll also mention that I took this up in Jan, whereas the elections etc happened much later.
Other volunteering that GB members may take up happens just because they happen to be active volunteers - a notable example being Nemo taking the lead on the maintainers summit.
Ultimately I think we need more volunteers - so we actively seek out new ways to get new volunteers. That’s one reason why I was so excited about devrooms at IndiaFOSS - it’s as much an attempt to get more of the community volunteers involved in doing things.
Review of staff contributions isn’t in the scope of the GB, IMO. That’s pretty much an executive job. My understanding is that GB’s role is generally to provide oversight.
I’d say the GB is slowly getting a feel of things. We’re taking steps to do some of these, but our approach is somewhat different. We’re trying to move things (initiatives and activities of FOSS United) from being “undocumented” to “documented”. Helping create documented procedures, policies and guidelines is what we see as the path. As an example, we’ll soon put out some guidelines we discussed for “invited talks”. This will then be open for community consultation. We’ll fold in any comments, vote on it and then ask everyone to follow to them.
In fact, one of the points I raised in the first GB meeting was about an annual report. We discussed this in today’s GB meeting as well, and hopefully we’ll have an annual report in September (including budget) - hopefully just in time for IndiaFOSS. We can then look at annual goals too.
There is much to be done here, and this will happen slowly but steadily. In a year we should see a significant change, but next month? Perhaps a bit - I’d be happy if we can put out the minimum governing board charter. The way we’re going about things is setting up a pipeline of stuff. There will be visible latency for a while. Hopefully we’ll compensate in throughput !
The third Governing Board call took place on June 27, from 7:30 PM to 9:00 PM. In attendance were @Bowrna_Prabhakaran @Nemo @Swastik_Baranwal and @Shree_Kumar, joined by @rahulporuri and @ashlesh.
The notes are summarised here, in case you have any questions or comments for the GB, please write to them at governing-board@fossunited.org