Parrot Foundation Board

Today at the weekly Parrotsketch meeting there was also a meeting of members of the Parrot Foundation, with the aim of electing board members for the coming year. All but one of the current board members chose not to run for re-election, so it was a pretty open field.

Four candidates were nominated, and today all of them were elected by simple majority: Jerry Gay (particle), Jim Keenan (kid51), Jonathan Leto (dukeleto), and myself.


Here's a brief discussion of what I want to do this year as a Parrot Foundation board member:

1. Re-read and re-reread the foundation bylaws. I've read through them a while ago back when the foundation was first forming, but don't think I've looked at them since. Plus, I've read through so many sets of bylaws for so many young organizations in my time, the details all run together in my mind.
2. Money. The foundation doesn't have a whole ton of money, of course I can't think of too many non-profits of this size which do. There are lots of things that can be done with money: grants and bounties being two that immediately come to mind, but there are plenty of other things. Finding ways to raise money and increase the PaFo coffers should probably be a pretty big priority for us.
3. Create a proper membership committee. Parroteer "smash" has been running the elections and doing a fantastic job, but some problems have been exposed in the membership process. Many people do not know whether they are members or not, and many people are confused by how a person becomes a member. Clearing up confusion in this area will help everybody.
4. Recruit new people. People are the fuel that runs an open-source project, and you can never have too many people. Parrot is by no means a small open source project, but it is far from being a big one. More developers create more/better software, which attracts more end users, which increases the prestige of the project, which attracts more developers, which.... It's a feedback loop that we should be trying much harder to feed.

These are just four things that I would like to focus on this term, however this is not a definitive list. I am hoping to get, within the next few days, some information from the current board members about what kinds of tasks they have left unfinished, or what kinds of things they would try to accomplish if given another term.  Since there is so much new blood on the committee, we need to make sure to thoroughly pick the brains of the current board so that we can get this coming year off to a running start.