Prioritizing ways for community and non-profit Board of Directors to communicate

Community Leadership
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Hi everyone, So on the leadership call today there were 4 ideas of how the community and the Board could interact more often and I think it’d be good to prioritize them before communicating back to the Board. I will be emailing the Board about this once we have the priorities set and will get back to the leadership team within a couple of weeks.

Here are the four ideas, in no particular order, could you send them back to me (or the group) in the order you think is best.

  • A Q&A section or open interaction at the end of every other Board calls
  • Identify spokesperson on an issue and then have them give a 5 min presentation to the BOD on the issue
  • Have a specific call with 1-2 board members and the community
  • Provide listen only access to some or all of the leadership team for Board meetings
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Probably all of these are valuable to increase communication and understanding between the community and the leadership team. I don’t think that this is either/ or per se.

i would recommend the following;

  1. listen only access for most of the call with a closed session option each call
  2. ensure that a spokesperson is designated for items that require presentations and/ or information shared with the Board
  3. q and a-- this seems reasonable and could be x frequency ( i assume that this is with the leadership team)
  4. specific open call with the community ; should be at least annually (and is in addition to 1-3, since it is for the community)

terry

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+1 to Terry’s comment that this needn’t be either/or, and also to her specific suggestions of how to do it.

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I’m in favor of total transparency. Nothing should be done in secret unless there is a reason for it to be secret. We’re an Open Source project and everything should be open :slight_smile:

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@jblaya Joaquin, can you let us know the next steps here?

sien none of these ideas internally conflict, perhaps you can present them to the BOD and we can move ahead with all of them? let us know what you need from us. Thanks. Terry

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I’ll write an email to the BOD and get their email feedback in the next couple of weeks and share that with you.

Joaquín

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I think the LT has an action item to come up with a list of specific needs from he BOD so we will work on that as well.

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we address this in the upcoming quarterly report to the BOD. coming soon!

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Hi everyone, Below is the output from the Board Meeting in regards to this, we agreed that 3 of the 4 suggestions where great, and the first one (hear-only access to the BOD) should be modified to the first point below.

  1. Have a second session for the community with the same presentation as the original Board Meeting. This is the current model that Mozilla uses and it’s worked. In Mozilla, the presentation is done by the Executive Director/CEO, but in our case due to the restrictions of Paul’s availability, it could be done by Terry, the operational lead who will start attending the Board meeting per Paul’s request.

  2. When the leadership team or community needs it, they can request a spokesperson be designated to talk to the BOD during a meeting for items that require presentations and/or information shared with the Board

  3. Q and A sessions. This could be 1 or 2 board members (probably should include the community elected member) and it would probably be with the leadership team and a few others. The frequency would need to be determined.

  4. Community wide call. This would probably be annually and the idea is more of a town hall meeting where anyone from the community can attend, and hopefully all of the BOD can be present.

Joaquín

Joaquín

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