Board of Directors#

The GNOME Foundation is governed by its Board of Directors. Additional information about the board’s role can be found in the governance section.

Current directors#

  • Erik Albers

  • Cassidy Blaede

  • Philip Chimento

  • Pablo Correa Gomez

  • Allan Day

  • Federico Mena Quintero

  • Robert McQueen

  • Karen Sandler

  • Julian Sparber

Officers#

The board appoints officers who have specific roles and responsibilities in the organization. Officer positions can be held by either directors or non-directors. The officers page details the current officer positions and who holds them.

Director responsibilities#

Practical requirements for directors include:

  • Attending regular board meetings (currently a two-hour meeting every every month).

  • Participating in board committees.

  • Attending in-person meetings prior to or around GUADEC.

  • Where possible, taking on officer positions.

  • Where possible, taking on board tasks. These are typically small and often require you to liaise with other individuals or organizations. However, sometimes they are larger in scope.

In addition, members of the Board of Directors are expected to fulfill the legal and ethical responsibilities of a corporate director. These responsibilities are set out in the following policies, which all directors are required to sign:

Meetings and minutes#

The secretary of the board (understood to include either the secretary, vice-secretary, or their deputy) is responsible for recording the minutes during board meetings.

During each meeting, it is customary for the board to review and finalize the minutes of its last meeting. Given the frequency of Foundation Board meetings (once every month), Foundation members should therefore expect to see minutes posted approximately one month after the meeting to which they correspond.

The archive of public board minutes can be found in the Board’s GitLab project.

Confidential topics#

In many nonprofit organizations, it is common practice for the minutes of the board meetings to be confidential. Given the mission of the GNOME Foundation, the board should aspire to more openness than this common practice, and historically the GNOME Foundation has published its board meeting minutes publicly by default, except for topics where the board saw a need for confidentiality.

Sometimes a topic discussed in the board meeting should not be included in the published minutes. This is at the discretion of the board, and can be for reasons of individual or organizational privacy, or it can be due to a need to speak candidly or critically of a person, situation, or organization. Example confidential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Discussions of personal conflicts between Foundation members.

  • Discussions of the personal finances of Foundation members, such as individual travel sponsorship applications.

  • Discussions about the hiring, compensation, or job performance of Foundation staff.

  • Discussions of relationships between the GNOME Foundation and other organizations.

  • Discussions about recruiting individual Foundation members to volunteer positions.

  • Discussions of ongoing legal proceedings involving the GNOME Foundation or its members or staff.

Finally, another guiding principle is that when someone speaks with the expectation that they are speaking in confidence, a record of the conversation must not be published retroactively in the future.

If applicable, published meeting minutes may contain a summary of confidential topics, that omits any confidential details.

There are no “temporarily confidential” topics. It happens often that a topic contains no confidential information, but should not be published until some action item is completed: e.g. an announcement is made, or correspondence is answered. In that case, if the action is not completed when it is time to publish the minutes, the foundation-announce list should be notified.

Who to contact when#

See Foundation contact.