On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 2:13 PM tavmjong@free.fr wrote:
I believe the board should play a more active roll in facilitating Inkscape's development (both code and community).
I do not think this is unreasonable. But as awkward as it is, it sounds like we're going to need to: 1) Have a meeting to discuss what we think the scope and duties of the committee should be. 2) Hold a vote on the mailing list based on said meeting to ask for a community vote to approve the changes (or if we have a copy of the video call that is publicly published we can probably get away with our vote to get a community vote in the call). 3) Granted we agree on changes in authority, responsibilities, etc... ask the community if we should change the scope of the committee to fit that (and possibly modify the charter if needed) to actually empower us to do this. As bureaucratic as that sounds, I won't agree to us unilaterally giving ourselves more authority without community backing. If there was a decision for the committee to become an actual authority without the community approving first, I'd have to resign.
That was my hope when I pushed for monthly board meetings. To be blunt, the fact we are sitting on such a large chunk of unused donations shows a complete failure of the current board (me included). While it's not the boards role to direct development, it is the board's roll to enable the community to use the donations to further Inkscape. One step would be to let the community know exactly what is needed to fund projects.
I don't know that "complete failure" is appropriate phrasing. I'm not offended if that's what people think. However, it was never our role to decide on behalf of the project to come up with ways to spend money. Our role was simply to ensure we're not spending the organization's funds in irresponsible ways. We've DEFINITELY dipped our toes into various pools of coming up with ways to spend money over the years (chats, mailing lists, in person conversation), but it's never been in our mandate to make those things happen. The thing to note, we generally reach a consensus on what we think are right approaches, but nobody ever runs the ball into the endzone. Ideas are a dime a dozen. We all have come up with and shared great ideas over the years. The fact that nobody (at least to my recollection) has ever followed through with a detailed enough proposal of how to achieve them, run with one as a proof of concept via faith/sweat equity that they'd retroactively get compensated, or otherwise made them come to fruition just to prove a point should give people pause.
I think that a video conference with SFC is a good idea. It may or may not prove to be useful but we need to start trying to find ways to improve the way we work.
Yeah, I think we need a meeting before a meeting with SFC. They're stretched incredibly thin and the reality of our situation is we don't have any solid questions/ideas to put forth and it's honestly not their job nor worth their time to help us wade through at this stage.
Cheers, Josh