At the meeting today, Martin raised a point about improving the diversity of the board. Since we did not have full attendance I took the action to start a thread on the mailing list, so we can all discuss it prior to making any tangible proposals.
Hopefully a recording of today's meeting is captured and available somewhere for Josh and Ted to review.
The two points that would need worked out is first identifying a plan for recruiting for the diversity we wish to gain, and second making room on the board for new members. Let's hear everyone's thoughts and opinions on both matters.
Bryce
Thanks Bryce,
There are a lot of ways to slice diversity, the one that is the most problematic for the board is that it's 100% male. This makes me uneasy and I think we should consider how we might try and change it.
Bryce has said we can expand the number of board members.
I mentioned in the hackfest that I'd also be willing to step down from the board to free up a slot to improve the diversity.
Of course this depends on having people who we can recruit, we might consider for example opening up a number of board positions that are reserved for women, if in the event we can't find anyone who could stand for election right now this would give us future options to host an election more quickly to fill them as people became available.
I'd love to heard more people's thoughts on this.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Sat, 2020-07-11 at 19:18 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
At the meeting today, Martin raised a point about improving the diversity of the board. Since we did not have full attendance I took the action to start a thread on the mailing list, so we can all discuss it prior to making any tangible proposals.
Hopefully a recording of today's meeting is captured and available somewhere for Josh and Ted to review.
The two points that would need worked out is first identifying a plan for recruiting for the diversity we wish to gain, and second making room on the board for new members. Let's hear everyone's thoughts and opinions on both matters.
Bryce
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org
I think more slots would better. Also, I'd sooner step down myself than see doc removed from the board.
This also relies on finding women willing to run for board positions. Have we had any?
-C
On Sun, 12 Jul 2020, 06:23 , doctormo@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks Bryce,
There are a lot of ways to slice diversity, the one that is the most problematic for the board is that it's 100% male. This makes me uneasy and I think we should consider how we might try and change it.
Bryce has said we can expand the number of board members.
I mentioned in the hackfest that I'd also be willing to step down from the board to free up a slot to improve the diversity.
Of course this depends on having people who we can recruit, we might consider for example opening up a number of board positions that are reserved for women, if in the event we can't find anyone who could stand for election right now this would give us future options to host an election more quickly to fill them as people became available.
I'd love to heard more people's thoughts on this.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Sat, 2020-07-11 at 19:18 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
At the meeting today, Martin raised a point about improving the diversity of the board. Since we did not have full attendance I took the action to start a thread on the mailing list, so we can all discuss it prior to making any tangible proposals.
Hopefully a recording of today's meeting is captured and available somewhere for Josh and Ted to review.
The two points that would need worked out is first identifying a plan for recruiting for the diversity we wish to gain, and second making room on the board for new members. Let's hear everyone's thoughts and opinions on both matters.
Bryce
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org
I also think we should avoid public announcement of "positions for women" on the board. Maybe just recruit a couple of our current very good and abundantly qualified female contributors into those slots. Then maybe we will get more women participants in future board elections.
There is huge blowback against diversity quotas currently. It invites trolling, and I don't want our new board members to be harassed or feel as if they are here just because they are female.
On Sun, 12 Jul 2020, 06:23 , doctormo@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks Bryce,
There are a lot of ways to slice diversity, the one that is the most problematic for the board is that it's 100% male. This makes me uneasy and I think we should consider how we might try and change it.
Bryce has said we can expand the number of board members.
I mentioned in the hackfest that I'd also be willing to step down from the board to free up a slot to improve the diversity.
Of course this depends on having people who we can recruit, we might consider for example opening up a number of board positions that are reserved for women, if in the event we can't find anyone who could stand for election right now this would give us future options to host an election more quickly to fill them as people became available.
I'd love to heard more people's thoughts on this.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Sat, 2020-07-11 at 19:18 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
At the meeting today, Martin raised a point about improving the diversity of the board. Since we did not have full attendance I took the action to start a thread on the mailing list, so we can all discuss it prior to making any tangible proposals.
Hopefully a recording of today's meeting is captured and available somewhere for Josh and Ted to review.
The two points that would need worked out is first identifying a plan for recruiting for the diversity we wish to gain, and second making room on the board for new members. Let's hear everyone's thoughts and opinions on both matters.
Bryce
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org
Sorry for the late follow-up.
I think that diversity on the board is important, and I'm excited that we're at the point as a community that we have enough diversity that we can imagine that on the board. I don't think we were there, say five years ago. That's awesome. I think that our issue moving forward is that we need to make the board representative of the community of people working on Inkscape. Diversity can mean lot of things, gender, race and well as geography (Nathan always felt that we needed some from Australia or Asia on the board). The reason that the board is not representative of these changes in our community is that it is relatively static. I think we've gone that route mostly to avoid overhead, but as we're growing, and especially if we add an employee, we need to rethink that. So what I would propose is that we add board terms as part of this adjustment, and a yearly election. So something like 7 year terms and 7 members. That way there'd be one slot open each year. After the election the board could elect a president for that year, and then assign the other positions on the board. What I'd hope that this would create is a yearly discussion on whether the board is representative of our community. And a means to adjust it if correction is needed. A potential issue I see here is that we still haven't figured out a way to give "voting rights" to non-developers. I'm not sure on how to do that. Ted On Jul 12 2020, at 4:02 am, C R cajhne@gmail.com wrote:
I also think we should avoid public announcement of "positions for women" on the board. Maybe just recruit a couple of our current very good and abundantly qualified female contributors into those slots. Then maybe we will get more women participants in future board elections.
There is huge blowback against diversity quotas currently. It invites trolling, and I don't want our new board members to be harassed or feel as if they are here just because they are female. On Sun, 12 Jul 2020, 06:23 , <doctormo@gmail.com (mailto:doctormo@gmail.com)> wrote:
Thanks Bryce,
There are a lot of ways to slice diversity, the one that is the most problematic for the board is that it's 100% male. This makes me uneasy and I think we should consider how we might try and change it.
Bryce has said we can expand the number of board members. I mentioned in the hackfest that I'd also be willing to step down from the board to free up a slot to improve the diversity.
Of course this depends on having people who we can recruit, we might consider for example opening up a number of board positions that are reserved for women, if in the event we can't find anyone who could stand for election right now this would give us future options to host an election more quickly to fill them as people became available.
I'd love to heard more people's thoughts on this. Best Regards, Martin Owens On Sat, 2020-07-11 at 19:18 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
At the meeting today, Martin raised a point about improving the diversity of the board. Since we did not have full attendance I took the action to start a thread on the mailing list, so we can all discuss it prior to making any tangible proposals.
Hopefully a recording of today's meeting is captured and available somewhere for Josh and Ted to review.
The two points that would need worked out is first identifying a plan for recruiting for the diversity we wish to gain, and second making room on the board for new members. Let's hear everyone's thoughts and opinions on both matters.
Bryce
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org) To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org)
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org) To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org)
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So, I said that I'd turn this into a resolution and I have learned two things from trying to do that:
We've not maintained our charter. We've adapted it but not made a "compiled copy" that includes all the changes. Which makes proposing additional changes at least error prone, if not impossible. To change anything with voting we need a 3/4 vote of everyone with voting rights. And sign-off from the conservancy. Which, makes sense, but it means it is going to be a little trickier to get done than I originally thought.
My next steps here are to fix up our documents repo so that it is a bit more useful. Then I can make a clean proposal (and others could too in the future).
Ted On Jul 24 2020, at 11:03 am, Ted Gould ted@gould.cx wrote:
Sorry for the late follow-up.
I think that diversity on the board is important, and I'm excited that we're at the point as a community that we have enough diversity that we can imagine that on the board. I don't think we were there, say five years ago. That's awesome. I think that our issue moving forward is that we need to make the board representative of the community of people working on Inkscape. Diversity can mean lot of things, gender, race and well as geography (Nathan always felt that we needed some from Australia or Asia on the board). The reason that the board is not representative of these changes in our community is that it is relatively static. I think we've gone that route mostly to avoid overhead, but as we're growing, and especially if we add an employee, we need to rethink that. So what I would propose is that we add board terms as part of this adjustment, and a yearly election. So something like 7 year terms and 7 members. That way there'd be one slot open each year. After the election the board could elect a president for that year, and then assign the other positions on the board. What I'd hope that this would create is a yearly discussion on whether the board is representative of our community. And a means to adjust it if correction is needed. A potential issue I see here is that we still haven't figured out a way to give "voting rights" to non-developers. I'm not sure on how to do that. Ted
On Jul 12 2020, at 4:02 am, C R cajhne@gmail.com wrote:
I also think we should avoid public announcement of "positions for women" on the board. Maybe just recruit a couple of our current very good and abundantly qualified female contributors into those slots. Then maybe we will get more women participants in future board elections.
There is huge blowback against diversity quotas currently. It invites trolling, and I don't want our new board members to be harassed or feel as if they are here just because they are female. On Sun, 12 Jul 2020, 06:23 , <doctormo@gmail.com (mailto:doctormo@gmail.com)> wrote:
Thanks Bryce,
There are a lot of ways to slice diversity, the one that is the most problematic for the board is that it's 100% male. This makes me uneasy and I think we should consider how we might try and change it.
Bryce has said we can expand the number of board members. I mentioned in the hackfest that I'd also be willing to step down from the board to free up a slot to improve the diversity.
Of course this depends on having people who we can recruit, we might consider for example opening up a number of board positions that are reserved for women, if in the event we can't find anyone who could stand for election right now this would give us future options to host an election more quickly to fill them as people became available.
I'd love to heard more people's thoughts on this. Best Regards, Martin Owens On Sat, 2020-07-11 at 19:18 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
At the meeting today, Martin raised a point about improving the diversity of the board. Since we did not have full attendance I took the action to start a thread on the mailing list, so we can all discuss it prior to making any tangible proposals.
Hopefully a recording of today's meeting is captured and available somewhere for Josh and Ted to review.
The two points that would need worked out is first identifying a plan for recruiting for the diversity we wish to gain, and second making room on the board for new members. Let's hear everyone's thoughts and opinions on both matters.
Bryce
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org) To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org)
Inkscape Board of Directors mailing list -- inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board@lists.inkscape.org) To unsubscribe send an email to inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org (mailto:inkscape-board-leave@lists.inkscape.org)
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participants (4)
-
Bryce Harrington -
C R -
doctormo＠gmail.com -
Ted Gould