A second question from me: how do you think we’re doing on the Foundation’s five-year plan? Are there bits of it you think need more (or less!) efforts put into at the moment?
This isn’t meant to be a leading question – I haven’t evaluated the plan and I don’t have bits of it in mind to focus on – but given that the plan is 20% of the way through, it would be interesting to see how new Board members feel they’ll fit into progressing it.
Note also that I don’t intend this to become a discussion about changing the plan; it’s been ratified and the whole point of a long-term plan is that you stick to it unless something radically changes.
I think it won’t surprise anyone when I say that at least parts of the plan are very unrealistic to achieve in the time left. Already goals for 2024 couldn’t be met.
While I think many ideas and strategic directions in the plan are not bad, there is a fundamental problem:
The plan was designed without almost any involvement of the community. Because of that it feels extremely disconnected from it and the day-to-day reality of the project.
The initiatives outlined in the plan cannot be run just by the foundation. This needs the community. But because of the disconnection I haven’t really seen anyone in the community so far working on it. I don’t think anyone really cares about it.
The mostly completely missing measurable progress on any of the initiatives so far doesn’t improve the situation.
The only solution that I see for this is to refactor this plan, this time with community involvement from the start.
I believe the GNOME community needs to run these initiatives, with the foundation only providing support.
For this of course we really need more community engagement in such initiatives, in committees, and in local communities, that are important to scale the initiatives up and adapt them to local environments.
Apologies for taking so long in answering this but I wanted to give it some thought.
One of the principal issues of the plan is that we hadn’t had a permanent ED to lead this plan until a month ago. I very much appreciate the time that Holly put on this and Richard’s time as ED but this is the reality.
Even though we have run out of time for the first year of the plan I think it is still worth following it. In the short time that our new ED has been active, I have seen him very active for goals 1 (People) and 3 ( Capacity and Infrastructure).
When the Plan was published I saw it as the baseline of our goals to achieve in these 5 years. Unfortunately, to reach this baseline in many of the points we need our finances to be strong and stable.
However, I still think it is a worthy plan to follow and to aim for the goals that were set, even if we do not reach them within the established 5 years. It also does not mean that once we reach a goal we cannot go further than that.
From an operational point of view, after digging through the minutes, my understanding is that this plan was put forth in a draft state to collect community feedback, but we did not get to that point.
From a high-level, the strategic goals broadly make sense, though I would probably take them in reverse priority order. I do think we will want to work with the current ED to reprioritise, and potentially rework the strategy in a way that makes sense for us today.