GNOME Foundation hackfest in Berlin

Last weekend we held a GNOME Foundation hackfest in Berlin, as planned in August. That means not just a hackfest organised by the foundation, but to improve the foundation itself. Many of the topics we had to cover are interconnected and it’s a challenge to untangle it all and sort it out. Being in the same room, with a projector and a whiteboard, helped a lot. Many thanks to Kinvolk who let us use their 🏢 meeting area for three days.

We are great at setting work for ourselves, less so at getting that work done. This doesn’t mean that we are not doing anything, rather that we have a hard time getting things done quickly enough that the list doesn’t keep growing. A goal was thus to remedy that situation.

To achieve that, one of the main areas we focused on was putting policies in place so that some things work themselves out and the board gets more time to work on other tasks. Indeed many questions required board intervention until now when it wasn’t actually necessary. As an example, our Director of Operations would have needed us to vote for her to be able to buy enveloppes to send letters as part of her day to day work. That was kind of silly and the newly approved policies will put an end to that. They will be propagated to the appropriate places (wiki pages, mailing lists…) in the coming weeks.

Our Executive Director was instrumental in making this happen. His feedback and proposals enabled us to have something concrete and clear that we could discuss, adjust, and agree on.

We reviewed the status of our ongoing action items and managed to do quite some clean up, as you’ll be able to tell if you read the minutes of the next meeting we’ll have. Although I’m disappointed that we didn’t get to spend more time on that part, we also managed to actually work on some action items and cross them off.

This event allowed us to make great progress. I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a clean slate, but it’s pretty close. I’m looking forward to the next time we meet in person and I’m happy that we plan on doing it more often than the traditional yearly Board meeting at GUADEC.