[gentoo-nfp] [RFC] Improving Trustee meeting logs

[Michał Górny]

Hi,

As some of you know already, I was recently working on establishing
a table of all past Council members & Trustees [1].  During this
process, I had some real difficulties finding out who was on the Board
at the time.

Furthermore, after having to deal with a lot of Trustee meeting logs,
I can't say otherwise than that they're horribly hard to use,
and that the summaries are barely useful.

Let's take the most recent meeting as an example and look at its summary
[2].  Let's also take the most recent Council meeting log for comparison
[3].

The first thing I notice is that the 'roll call' is empty.  If you look
at the respective Council summary, you'd notice that it lists all
the Council members who attended.  Furthermore, attendees are also
listed on the list of Council meeting logs [4] while there's no such
list for the Trustees at all.

Even if we skip the historian's problem of determining the Board members
at the time of the meeting, I think it is important for us, voters, to
know who of the Trustees have been attending meetings, and who did not. 
Therefore, I would like to request Trustees to:

a. include all attendees (with their roles) in the 'roll call'
of the summary,

b. include a list of all meetings during the term including clear
indication of who attended.

The second thing I notice is that the log tells me little about what
happened.  The 'Trustees' section of 'Old Business' seems to provide
some information in parentheses.  Then there's section called 'alicef'
with a huge tree of bullet points, a lot of links and notes and no idea
what was done in regard to it on the particular meeting.  The same goes
for the remaining lot -- a lot of notes and bullet points, and barely
any current information.

The whole summary looks like a verbose version of the agenda that is not
helpful to the reader at all since in the end he has to read the whole
log to learn anything about the actual meeting.  Now let's look at the
Council meeting summary for a comparison -- every agenda item is
followed by a vote, or an explanation of who did what, or that something
is ongoing.

Therefore, as a second item I would like to request the Trustees to
provide proper summaries for their meetings that make it clear:

a. which of the agenda points were actually discussed,

b. what actions were taken (if any) or a clear indication that no action
was taken,

c. preferably, a short summary of discussions ('this and that
possiblities were discussed, X pointed out that ...') and/or rationale
of decisions ('we did X because Y and Z...').

I'm not asking about anything really hard or big.  However, I think that
if summaries are to be published, the whole point of a summary is to let
the read know the most important points of the meeting without having to
read the log and/or establish *which* log he needs to read if he wants
to find more details on something.

Let's take the first point of the list -- 'Add Foundation:Consultants
reference to https://www.gentoo.org/support'.  It reoccurs every month
since 2017-09, in unchanged form.  What should I do to learn more about
it?  Do I have to read all meeting logs in 2017/18 term in detail?

Please take consideration of your electorate.  Writing one good summary
takes no more than an hour.  Figuring out past events based on poorly
managed IRC log can take days.

[1]:https://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/articles/gentoo-management.html
[2]:https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foundation:Meetings/2018/04
[3]:https://projects.gentoo.org/council/meeting-logs/20180513-summary.txt
[4]:https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/Meeting_logs
[5]:https://projects.gentoo.org/foundation/2018/20180421.log.txt

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny