Plone Foundation Board Nominations Open (Updated)
The Plone Foundations Board of directors is member-elected. Anyone can nominate themselves for Board membership, and the Foundation members vote on the Board.
It's that time of year again: a new Board for the Plone Foundation.
As such, we are now accepting nominations for the board. If you have an interest in helping the governance of Plone, and particularly the energy and time to pitch in, the Plone Foundation could use the help! If you think, "Nahh, I'm not part of the core development team" then please think again: the PF board meetings don't involve writing software. :^)
Here's the process:
1) Log in on plone.org and go here:
http://plone.org/foundation/meetings/membership/2006/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 PF 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.
We plan to have the nomination process open until Friday, Oct 20, or until we receive enough nominations for a viable election.
Here's an excerpt from a mail that Joel Burton sent to the membership list:
Several people have written to me, asking "do I have time to do this?" or
"what does a board member have to do?"
The Foundation's mission is to "promote and protect Plone". Realistically,
that has meant:
- protecting the trademark, and having a process to apply to use it
- protecting the IP, and "dealing with the lawyers" :)
- hiring the release manager and guiding the expectations about Plone releases
- writing and releases press releases on new versions of Plone
- handling "other stuff in the community" as needed. For example, helping
craft policy on plone.org about commercial listings, etc.
The board hasn't had a very set meeting schedule; sometimes, it seems like
there's a lot of the agenda, other times, things have been quiet. We probably
meet about 15 times a year, on the phone, about 1-2h per call. In addition,
there is a relatively low-traffic board mailing list (private), where we
discuss things in addition to the meetings.
Board members are expected to play a role in the leadership of the project
(help work with developers, documenters, marketers, etc.), to attend as many
phone meetings as possible (realistically, most of us, myself included, we
manage to make about 2/3rds of the meetings).
The qualifications are to have a useful, thoughtful viewpoint on Plone and
it's audience, a desire to help lead the project, and the ability to make the
above time committments.
Often, people tell me "I'd love to help more, but I'm not a developer." We, of
course, always can use more programmers in the Plone world, but we also
really need other talents, too, especially on the Board. If you're the kind
of person who sells Plone, builds Plone sites, skins Plone, or just has a
business that uses or revolves around Plone, you'll have real talents we can
use.
I encourage everyone to consider whether you have interest in Board
leadership. 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 existing foundation member to second your
nomination.
We're especially interested in broadening the diversity of our leadership,
with regards to gender, ethnicity, and geography.
If you are interested, please see Paul's message about how to nominate
yourself. If you have questions, please feel free to ask me, or any of the
other existing board members: Munwar Sharif, Alex Limi, Ben Saller, Jodok
Batlogg, Jackie Arasi, or Geoff Davis.