Pre-GUADEC 2016

This year again, I will be attending the GUADEC conference. I wouldn’t have been able to attend without the sponsorship from the GNOME Foundation.

This time it is happening in the neighbouring city of Karlsruhe, less than 100km away from home, which means that it took me a bit under two hours from door to door. I came two days before the actual start of the conference to attend board and advisory board meetings.

I have been on the board of directors for nine months now, first appointed as a replacement to Christian Hergert when he resigned, more recently elected by the membership for a new term. I have attended our weekly phone meetings, but this was my first in person meeting and I was looking forward to it, as it allows for more high bandwidth discussion and the remote ones usually feel a little bit rushed —it’s rather tough to squeeze all the topics we have to cover in a one hour phone call.

GNOME Board 2016-2017 at GUADEC 2016 by Nuritzi Sanchez, CC BY SA.

It was also time for the handover from the previous board to the newly elected board, even if the new directors have already been running the meetings and voting for about a month. That mostly consists in filling in the new members on ongoing tasks, and electing the new officers. We also get a fresh start by reviewing the old list of tasks, deciding whether or not they are still worth pursuing, and reassigning them if needed.

But before all that, we did a few team building exercices following an excellent suggestion from Nuritzi. Those were not something I had ever done and even if they felt silly at first, they clearly helped setting us on the right track for the work we had to do. I’ll have to investigate and I may run some similar exercices next time I am in a similar situation of a group of people new to each other having to work together.

GUADEC starts tomorrow, and I’ll be there! I hope to see you around.