Nominations Open for Plone Foundation Board of Directors

Please consider nominating yourself to serve on the Plone Foundation's Board of Directors.

If you have an interest in helping the governance of Plone, and particularly the energy and time to pitch in, please consider nominating yourself to serve on the Plone Foundation board of directors for 2015-2016.

Nomination Process

  1. Log in on plone.org and go here:
    http://plone.org/foundation/meetings/membership/2015-membership-meeting/nominations
  2. Add a page there with your name in the title.
  3. For the body, discuss:
    -- Who you are
    -- Why you're interested
    -- What you think you can add to the Plone Foundation
    -- Most importantly    , the name(s) of one or more Plone Foundation members that "second" your nomination
  4. Once ready, click "submit" in the workflow drop-down menu to get a reviewer to look at your nomination.
  5. Nominations will be accepted until October 13 2015, 23.59, UTC. The election will be conducted in conjunction with the annual meeting, which will take place in Bucharest at the Plone Conference 2015. All active members of the Plone Foundation will be eligible to vote.

About Board Membership

The Plone Foundation is a not-for-profit, public-benefit corporation with the mission to "promote and protect Plone". That has meant that the board is involved in:

  • protecting the trademark, copyrights and other intellectual property, including considering licensing and usage issues;
  • hiring the release manager;
  • working with various committees, including marketing and membership;
  • handling "other stuff in the community" as needed. For example, helping craft policy on plone.org about commercial listings, etc
  • but not: directing Plone development. The board facilitates, but does not direct, the development of Plone itself.

While there's lots of work that happens online, much of the critical business of the board is conducted during phone meetings every two weeks — typically, board meetings last about an hour to 90 minutes though occasionally they can run over to handle time-critical issues.  Please consider whether this fits your schedule, since missing more than an occasional meeting severely limits the ability of the board to reach quorum and conduct business.

Historically, board meetings have been organized to occur during daytime hours in America and evening hours in Europe, in the last couple of years at Thursday nights, 20.00 UTC in northern hemisphere summer and 21.00 UTC in northern hemisphere winter. That can always change with new board members, although timezones are hard to plan with.

In addition, there is a board mailing list (private), where we discuss things in addition to the meetings.

This is a working board. Be ready to regularly take on and complete responsibilities for board business.

The board writes no code and makes no development decisions. It is much more concerned with marketing, budgets, fund-raising, community process and intellectual property considerations.

You do not need to be a foundation member to serve on the board (in fact, board leadership is an excellent way to become a foundation member). All you need is to get an active foundation member to second your nomination.

The Plone Foundation is interested in broadening the diversity of our leadership, with regards to gender, ethnicity, and geography.

If you have questions about the nominations process, contact the board: board@plone.org