[PSF-Community] board candidates: tell me about transparency

[Carol Willing]

On 28 May 2016, at 7:15, Carl Karsten wrote:

> All of the people nominated for the PSF board are good people who will 
> do
> good things.  If things were running smooth, I wouldn't really care 
> who
> gets elected.
>
> But once again, we see people asking questions due to lack of 
> transparency.
>
> So once again, I ask:  What will you do about it?
>

I think others raise good points and Diana has very accurately reflected 
the current PSF board operations and communications.

Personally, I would advocate for actions that continue to increase the 
level of transparency:

- publishing an annual calendar of board meetings at the beginning of 
each term
- releasing board meeting agendas to the community prior to the board 
meetings by posting the meeting agenda on the website ideally 72 hours 
before a scheduled meeting
- drafting a meeting agenda that defaults to information being public 
but also allows for an executive session portion of the agenda for items 
where confidentiality is important i.e. anonymity requested by a donor, 
personnel discussions, etc.
- listening and responding to community questions in a timely, 
thoughtful, and respectful manner

We could consider new ways to gain feedback from the community about 
specific areas that the community would like to see greater 
transparency. Perhaps offering a mid-term survey of community 
satisfaction on a number of topics including transparency to get a 
representative sense of “How are we doing as a board?”. A link could 
be posted at the bottom of agendas where community members can easily 
email the entire board thoughts about agenda items.

Warmly,

Carol


Carol Willing
Research Software Engineer, Project Jupyter @ Cal Poly
Director, Python Software Foundation