Gentoo Foundation - 2009 Elections - Manifesto of robbat2
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As a seasoned Gentoo developer, past council member, and
present infrastructure team lead, I gather a lot of past and
former developers are wondering why I seem to be interested
in the 'political' side of Gentoo suddenly.

I'll be quite frank. Like the majority of open source
developers, I have an itch to scratch. Right now that itch
happens to be what I perceive as a major shortcoming with
the management of Foundation.

What is this shortcoming you ask? 
=================================
Lack of transparency in progress and of specific note in the
progress of the financial matters of the Foundation.

I reported several independent numerical errors in the
financial reports shortly after their release in November
2008, directly to the trustees. I've yet to see them fixed,
or even an acknowledgement email that my concerns were being
examined. I didn't raise the errors publicly as I felt the
Trustees had the right to fix their own stuff first.

Maybe progress is being made in financial matters, it's
hinted at in the meetings logs (the most recent of which
aren't uploaded or emailed to the -nfp mailing list), but
there's nothing beyond that. 

Either nothing is happening, or there is insufficient
transparency in really exposing the progress made by the
Trustees. I'm a fairly trusting person, so I'd like to
believe the latter.

What do I plan to do about it?
==============================
1. The obvious: Prompt updates of the minutes page, with
summaries added once they are written. tanderson is doing a
wonderful job of summaries for the council. He might be too
busy to take this up for the Foundation, but I'd certainly
like to find somebody to do this for the Foundation
meetings.

2. I'd like to institute better recording of the actions
undertaken by trustees on official business. The details
themselves may contain confidential information, but a
summary of those actions is certainly an option.
[Footnote #1]

3. Progress in terms of the financial state of the
Foundation - as much as possible, I'd like to free up the
position of the Foundation to be able to access the funds
[Footnote #2].

Footnotes:
==========
1. Of related interest is one of the manners in with the
Debian Project Leader role is run: 
- There is a private readonly mail archive, available to
  each DPL, that includes every mail received (and most
  sent) from past DPLs.
This has relevance to Gentoo as follows:
- The recruiters and elections aliases already have this
  recording, and I'd like to formally have this included for
  the trustees. 
- After this is implemented, interactions with external
  bodies, such as the CPA, Paypal, or the IRS should be
  explicitly logged for future reference - Paypal historical
  logs would be one useful item captured in such an archive.

2. My position in the Infrastructure team may be perceived
as a potential conflict of interest, as noted in the
objectives of the Foundation: "The primary use of the funds
are to support Gentoo's infrastructure as it is the backbone
of the project." Rather than a problem, I see this an
opportunity to pro-actively represent Infrastructure within
the Trustees: we want to spend the money, and we need to
answer for what we do with it.

Updated: 2009/09/06 - basic editing.