Elections, Accountability, and Education

[inode0]

2009/3/17 Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>:
> On Tue, 2009-03-17 at 13:40 -0500, inode0 wrote:
>>
>> FESCo seems to manage to do most of its business and I believe all of
>> its voting in public. So I'm not getting the sense that adding some
>> inefficiency and inconvenience to the board in the conduct of some
>> part of its business is so insurmountable an obstacle.
>>
>> How strongly do we believe in transparent governance? Opting out when
>> there is a legal or sensitive issue is one thing, opting out because
>> being transparent is more inconvenient than the alternative is
>> another.
>
> There is a difference here.  The board constantly deals with things of a
> nature that can't be made public at the time of the board meeting.
> FESCo /never/ has that, as whenever it runs into a legal issue, it gets
> bounced up to the board (or just fedora legal directly).

Right, I understand that legal matters get bumped up to the board.
FESCo also deals privately with non-legal matters that in their
judgment are too sensitive for whatever reason to discuss in public so
they also need to juggle some.

I'm curious and I suspect most of us non-board members don't really
understand to what extent the board deals with legal matters. Could
you give us a rough estimate of the percentage of time that the board
spends in meetings dealing with legal matters? I know it would likely
vary greatly, but something of a "typical" meeting.

> We are going to make a concerted effort to provide more visibility into
> the non-sensitive matters that are discussed at board meetings, but
> we'll continue to do the meetings in a phone manner due to the high
> bandwidth and better feel for what is being said.

Thanks, I appreciate your consideration and efforts in this regard very much.

John