GNOME Foundation board of directors election results [LWN.net]

The GNOME Foundation is governed by a seven-member board of directors who are elected annually. The just-completed vote had eleven people vying for those seats. Unless there is a challenge to the voting process, the new board members are: Sriram Ramkrishna, Ekaterina Gerasimova, Karen Sandler, Andrea Veri, Jeff Fortin, Tobias Mueller, and Marina Zhurakhinskaya. We looked at the question of corporate involvement in GNOME as one of the election issues being discussed in last week's edition.

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GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 9, 2014 22:35 UTC (Mon) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (12 responses)

It would be great to see corporate affiliation next to the names of the board members. It could be argued whether corporate involvement needs to be limited, but it's hard to argue against transparency.

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 9, 2014 23:24 UTC (Mon) by fmuellner (subscriber, #70150) [Link] (2 responses)

Affiliation was part of the candidacy, so while not listed explicitly again with the results, the information is still available: https://vote.gnome.org/2014/candidates.html

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 10, 2014 17:02 UTC (Tue) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link] (1 responses)

Also worth noting on the same page, is the answer to the parent's question:

> Note, that according to the Bylaws Article VIII Section 2d there is a 2-person maximum on the number of people affiliated with any one company that can be on the board: if more than 2 persons from one company get elected, only the top 2 vote getters will get on.

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 11, 2014 0:24 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

And this rule has in fact been triggered at least a few times to keep someone off the board who otherwise would have been voted on.

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 9, 2014 23:29 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Nothing a few quick searches can't yield. Let me help with that:

Sriram Ramkrishna (Intel)
Ekaterina Gerasimova (Volunteer, Seaside Aquatics Ltd)
Karen Sandler (Software Freedom Conservancy)
Andrea Veri (Volunteer, Student, Law at the University of Udine)
Jeff Fortin (Freelancer)
Tobias Mueller (Volunteer?)
Marina Zhurakhinskaya ( Red Hat)

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 10, 2014 13:19 UTC (Tue) by andreasn1 (guest, #88420) [Link] (1 responses)

Tobias works at SAP

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 10, 2014 18:24 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Is he being paid by SAP to work on Fedora?

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 10, 2014 3:30 UTC (Tue) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (5 responses)

I think the board of directors and their affiliations to the company doesn't matter much. For Eg. if gnome-shell developer wants to remove some features from his package, I seriously doubt the board of directors can do anything about it. The last batch of Board of directors were not able to stop any feature removal from natuilus,gnome-terminal etc.

Since most of the devs on the Gnome project are from red hat or suse they are going to go their way(corporate) of doing it.

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 10, 2014 9:33 UTC (Tue) by moggers87 (guest, #86573) [Link] (4 responses)

Unable or unwilling?

I.e. did they take any action to try and stop said feature removal?

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 10, 2014 15:08 UTC (Tue) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]

None of them is an active developer, designer or anything close to actual development. They are mostly doing administrative things.

So I wouldn't expect any actual involvement from any foundation member in the way the code evolves unless it was brought to their attention by others.

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 10, 2014 15:22 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

I believe the GNOME Foundation board is unable. It is meant to manage the money not the people. I believe it was set up in a similar to the Debian Project in that the "real" power is in the hands of the developers not the administrators.

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 11, 2014 0:26 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (1 responses)

That is correct. To the extent the board has any actual technical power, that is entirely delegated to the release team anyway.

GNOME Foundation board of directors election results

Posted Jun 11, 2014 19:34 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

Yes, that is correct. The board only manages the release team and that is pretty much the extent of the board's involvement in technical matters. (in reality, the board doesn't really interfere with the release team for the most part)