Hi James,
Thanks for your thoughts and sorry for the delay replying. (For clarity I’m not expecting to go far outside “the community” because I don’t expect that the members would elect somebody who didn’t have a values fit for the Foundation and what GNOME is here to achieve.)
We’ve worked with some consultants (going back a couple of years - John Lass and Gareth Marlow) on strategy and governance questions, as well as training for the board, and it’s partly as a result of their input that we’ve established the governance committee which brought forward this proposal.
We’ve also previously had the fundraising committee formed of those who were most active in soliciting sponsorship for conferences , as well as staff with experience working on individual fundraising as well as researching grants that might be applicable to areas of interest. The experience and feedback essentially from all of those is that using our current activities as a way to fundraise for a new thing, was very hard. There is something of a co-dependency between what you’re doing and how you can raise funds for it, as you’re asking people to take a leap of faith against your “credible plan” for the future thing, filtered against your track record of doing stuff like that in the past. So the ideas have to be pretty well-developed to convince funders that you’re able to deliver against them, and indeed with grants the potential projects have to be quite specific to know whether you can even meet the criteria to apply.
Developing strategies which are both relevant/effective for the Foundation goals as well as fundable, is therefore not simply a matter of the Foundation coming up with the initiatives, and then handing it over to fundraising people to get money for. This works in certain cases - if you have a proven “winning formula” you can bring more people in to scale and replicate that - you speak about your successes and ask if more people want to help scale it / get involved / etc - but if you are engaged in a process of iterating/developing ideas for initiatives and programs, that’s a feedback process where what could be fundable helps craft the proposition of what you’re aiming to do, who it benefits, etc.
My synthesis is that we would be better placed to evolve the initiatives and strategies in parallel with how we raise funds for them, that so these things were “more baked” when they went from the board/ED to bringing in staff and volunteer resources to put wheels on them. The hope is that having better experience on the board to input their fundraising and nonprofit experience into these ideas at the formation stage is more efficient than floating ideas and having others try and answer the “can we find funding for this?” question.
We might be completely wrong, and indeed as @thibaultamartin has started discussing over at Foundation Strategy: funding decentralised/local-first applications part of the challenge is clearly defining and articulating what our current best ideas are so that we can enlist help with both refining them as well as understanding potential funding sources. So we’re working on this in parallel anyway - Neil and I are working on a more detailed summary of the best ideas at present. New directors (members or not) this summer and a new ED later in the year could well change any of that, but it makes it easier for potential funders, volunteers and staff to get their head around what the Foundation is hoping to achieve if we can write that down.
Your feedback about having some counterbalance on the number of non-member directors is well-received and not a bad idea. We did have that in an earlier version but I think it was removed on the basis it would have a relatively weak effect given that becoming a member would be relatively easy once you could say that you were on the board to qualify your membership application. That said it might act as an “inlet valve” on too many non-members being elected at one time and risking the board losing touch with the Foundation’s shared values.
Thanks,
Rob