Meeting Minutes Sept 13 2009 Topic: GOVERNANCE
GOALS
David explained that the goal of the meeting was to go over his governance Proposal, seeking agreement on the Proposal in general, as well asking for specific improvements.
Furthermore we would determine:
- Who should be staff
- Who should be board
- Who should be super-volunteers
For each we want to determine their roles, duties, and responsibilities. We also want to define the requirements for membership in each group.
STRUCTURE
David explained the governance structure, consisting of two entities:
- Board/Staff? -- (5 yr terms, 1 veto/term, decide by consensus)
- Community Council -- (anyone can attend but only those meeting criteria can vote, 1 veto/term, decide by consensus, advises the Board)
Staff would be split off from the Board if at some point in the future we hired employees. (For now it's one and the same.)
DISCUSSION
We went around the room so each person could comment.
There was consensus on the Proposal as a whole. (Not one person spoke against the Proposal in its entirety or its basic approach).
These points were advanced by attendees as possible improvements (and appeared to have general support):
- Meetings for both groups should be held right after the Sunday build sessions in our space
- Most felt that 5 year terms were too long
- Some felt that the membership requirements for the Board and the Community Council were too high
- Several good ideas were advanced that were deferred as more appropriate to discussion by either the Board or the Community Council, when they meet
Further discussion led to general agreement that the 5 year terms were not "terms" or "commitments" but rather just "limits" as to how long someone could serve without being re-approved. Thus the service limit would maximally be two 5 year periods. (There could be gaps within these service periods). With agreement on this idea the discussion on this topic appeared to have been resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
DUTIES
It was agreed that the duties for the three groups are:
- Board -- non day-to-day responsibilities like Financial/Budget?, Legal, Promotional, Strategic direction
- Community Council -- day-to-day operational responsibilities like running the build sessions, teardown, introducing new people to FGC, handling sales, etc. The "CC" also makes recommendations to the Board.
- Staff -- if we take on paid staff they would function as helpmates and implementors to the other two groups. This is the only group that might have some degree of technical knowledge as a requirement.
Operational responsibilities during Build Days include these 5 areas: teardown, build, OS install, testing, and donations/sales. The last category ("donations/sales") was split off from "OS Install" and added as a separate category after some discussion.
The meeting was adjourned after 1.5 hours at 6:30pm.
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