Comment by teacup50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teacup50 | Hacker News Reader

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> One of the Gnome Foundations primary missions is "Fund Receipt and Disbursement": "The foundation will be in charge of disbursing these funds to the benefit of GNOME and, to the extent possible, in accordance with the wishes of the benefactor"

This provides its own rebuttal. Running out of funds necessary to pay for core commitments is not "to the benefit of GNOME", and certainly not in-line with their charter.

To quote the same charter -- specifically the mission statement:

    The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the
    GNOME project: ___to create a computing platform for use by the general
    public that is completely free software.___ (emphasis mine)

    To achieve this goal, the Foundation will coordinate releases of GNOME
    and determine which projects are part of GNOME. The Foundation will act
    as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of
    communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial
    organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may produce
    educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about
    GNOME software. In addition, it may sponsor GNOME-related technical
    conferences, and represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by
    others, help create technical standards for the project and promote
    the use and development of GNOME software.

Gender-exclusionary social programs only very loosely fall under this mission statement, and only given an exceedingly broad interpretation of the mission.

[edit]

I think this admission provides sufficient evidence of charter overreach:

    The changes were not tracked effectively from the
    point when other organizations joined the OPW. This
    impacted not only our ability to manage the OPW 
    administration, but also to keep up with the core 
    financial tasks of the Foundation -- tasks which
    already needed the full attention of the 
    Foundation's employees and the board.

This appears to be no small matter of malfeasance by virtue of clear overreach beyond their charter. I can't help but wonder if there has been some form of social cause "regulatory capture" within the foundation that drove this surprising decision.

A recall referendum, as defined by the charter, seems warranted.

  This provides its own rebuttal. Running out of funds 
  necessary to pay for core commitments is not "to the 
  benefit of GNOME", and certainly not in-line with their 
  charter.

Of course running out of funds is not to the benefit of GNOME. The running out of funds part was an accident; no one wanted to do that. If there were any other program that had similar characteristics; something where the foundation were paying out a lot of money with the expectation of being reimbursed, but were not reimbursed as fast as they had expected, it would have had the same effect.

I think you need to separate your distaste for the program in the first place, from the immediate problem that they ran into a cashflow problem running it.

  to create a computing platform for use by the general 
  public that is completely free software...
  promote the use and development of GNOME software.

An internship program tailored towards a demographic that is traditionally heavily under-represented in both the users and developers of the free software eco-system sounds like exactly what the Gnome Foundation should be doing. Note the "general public" part; in order to reach the general public, and not just a fairly small niche market of existing free software enthusiasts, they need to broaden their appeal to demographics which don't traditionally use or work on the project.

Remember, this money is being used directly for the development of Gnome; these internships are for development of Gnome and other components of the free software stack, like the Linux Kernel, Firefox, and so on.

  This appears to be no small matter of malfeasance by 
  virtue of clear overreach beyond their charter.

Whoa, whoa. That's a rather strong accusation; you are accusing them of willfully harming the foundation against its charter?

The foundation has been running this program for several years, and the membership has never objected to it. It's pretty clear that the membership does not believe this program to be at odds with the mission of the foundation.

Now, obviously the financial mismanagement part is a problem, which the board of directors should be working on fixing. But that doesn't mean that you need to throw the whole program out, just be more careful about working on cashflow.

  Is there a mechanism by which the board can be recalled? 
  It does not seem at all unwarranted.

Are you a member of the Gnome Foundation? If not, why do you care so much about how it operates, and sets its priorities; or if you care so much, why don't you become a member and get involved?

> Whoa, whoa. That's a rather strong accusation; you are accusing them of willfully harming the foundation against its charter?

If I understand what happened here correctly, yes. The OPW program was questionable within the charter, but this went beyond administering OPW for Gnome itself.

The board seemingly elected to administer the program for external organizations, to the direct detriment of their ability to manage the Gnome Foundation's responsibilities.

This outcome was obviously unintentional, but the choices that led to it were not.

Doesn't teacup50 have a fair point? I would say that at least Mediawiki, Openstack, and some robotics foundation (all participating in OPW by taking interns) are well out of scope. All GNOME gains from being in charge of it all is a chance to make mistakes.

Wow, a wall of text. But all I can read is a seriously problematic and classic case of mansplaining.

Seriously, Hacker News can be so misogynistic at times it's not even funny.

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