Board Meeting Attendance Policy

Plone Foundation board members are expected to attend most regularly scheduled meetings.

Rationale

The Plone Foundation board of directors does much of its work and nearly all of its decision making via teleconference.  Meetings are typically held biweekly, with additional meetings scheduled during periods of high workloads.

Missed meetings seriously diminish the effectiveness of the entire board, and thus of the Foundation.  The Plone Foundation board of directors therefore developed this written policy in order to set a clear shared expectation for meeting attendance that we will hold ourselves accountable to (and ask the Plone Foundation membership to hold us accountable to as well!)

Policy

• Plone Foundation board members are expected to attend at least 75% of all regularly scheduled meetings.  Board members are expected to defend regular meeting times in their personal calendars, and to avoid scheduling other meetings during that time.

• Board members occasionally miss meetings due to circumstances beyond their control such as illness, travel schedules, jury duty, or holidays.  These will generally be considered "excused" absences.  In all cases, board members are expected to notify the board of meetings they know they will miss.  "Silent failure" (i.e. missing a meeting without notification) is unacceptable.

• In order to make the board more accountable internally and to the Plone community, we will institute the following "transparency" measures:
  

• All minutes (with attendance, and excused/unexcused absences) will be sent via email to membership by the Secretary.
  
• Repeatedly absent board members will be noted in the meeting minutes
• Board attendance percentage will be reported when board members stand for re-election (e.g. Jon attended 95% of scheduled meetings this year)
  
• We will maintain a public, year-to-date summary of board member attendance on the Foundation website so that Foundation members can check in on our attendance.
  

Adopted November 20, 2008.

This is a policy resolution that has been adopted by the Plone Foundation Board of Directors. It's meant to provide direction to the current and future boards.