Dear HF Working Group
The HF Interim Board met on Wednesday. Here are the (draft) notes of that meeting.
You’ll see that we discussed a new idea: that of having a group of “Members” (better name needed) for the Foundation. The idea is laid out here. We’d love to have the WG’s feedback on it.
We can talk about all this at the WG meeting later today.
Best wishes
Simon
Personally, I find the idea of members a bit confusing. In my opinion, there are already enough different moving parts between interim board, board, working group, and task-specific working groups, plus the general “community”, that I’d recommend holding off on yet another entity until a real need is demonstrated. Just my $0.02.
While I’m worried about the proliferation of committees/groups, I’m sympathetic to the idea of Trustees (the bottom of the WG minutes, now posted at Working Group minutes, suggests this terminology instead of Members). In particular, I’m convinced by Simon’s
It is an exception-handling mechanism for the (hopefully unlikely) case in which the Board becomes dysfunctional, or somehow captured by some sub-group. This may be unlikely, but if it does happen it can be self-perpetuating and hard to recover from. In that case the Members can act together to reconstitute the Board.
It is easy for me to see the possibility of this capture, even if I think the probability is low. Having Trustees also makes a nice forcing function for the Board+ED to make (at least) annual presentations on the State of the Foundation.
I don’t feel strongly on this, but I do think it would be awkward to create this function later – and it would be too late if we create it only “when needed”, almost by definition.