A cash crunch at the Gnome Foundation
lwn.net
lwn.net
https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/CurrentBudgetFAQ
Reading this, I don't understand:
* Why was "The Outreach Program for Women" allowed to so significantly impact Gnome's primary mission?
* Why is the Gnome Foundation is funding and administering this program to begin with? It falls far outside their foundation's purview, and is undeniably gender exclusionary: "The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software."
If an organization dedicated to "cis, trans, and genderqueer" members wishes to manage and fund an outreach program, that's their prerogative, and Gnome should be welcoming, but it makes little sense to manage it under the Gnome Foundation, and it absolutely should not financially impact Gnome's ability to ship Gnome.
Given that the outreach program was started in response to the lack of women candidates for Google's Summer of Code, this program could (and given fiduciary responsibilities, should) have focused solely on non-exclusionary outreach to women Summer of Code candidates.
The push for biased inclusion has lost the forest for the trees.
>You mention an estimate of $400k as annual turnover for the OPW, which (according to the most-recently available annual report that I can find, the 2012 one at https://www.gnome.org/foundation/reports/) is very close to the turnover of the Foundation as a whole ($418k income and $409k expenditure). Those 2012 numbers include $106k of Women's Outreach expenses, so the turnover of non-OPW Foundation tasks seemed to be somewhere in the region of $300k.
So apparently it caused turnover by being a huge source of growth.
[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.general/...
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.foundation.general...
I'd entirely support them running an outreach program aimed at welcoming women into the GNOME community, though teacup50 might disagree. It's obvious that they should have said no to running one for everyone else though - but who wants to be seen to oppose outreach to women, other than sexists?
I'd argue that they should modify the program to target all underrepresented individuals, regardless of gender, but I otherwise agree that a program targeted solely at Gnome is within their purview.
One of the Gnome Foundations primary missions is "Fund Receipt and Disbursement": "The foundation will be in charge of disbursing these funds to the benefit of GNOME and, to the extent possible, in accordance with the wishes of the benefactor" (https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/Charter).
The funding of the OPW sounds like it's completely appropriate here. Several benefactors and organizations have wanted to fund this activity, and the Gnome Foundation provides the means for them to do so.
> Why is the Gnome Foundation is funding and administering this program to begin with?
It is a multi-organizational program, between several different projects. It looks like rather than setting up a whole new organization just for this one program, they decided to have one group do the organization and running of the program, while the other groups contribute money to that one. It can be expensive and inefficient to set up too many new organizations; there is a lot of overhead to a new organization.
It looks like the problem is that because the OPW funds internships, the Gnome Foundation winds up having to pay them at a steady rate, while it may get payments from the other organizations in lump sums. It sounds like the Gnome Foundation has not been keeping up with invoicing the other organizations, so while they'll be in the black once everyone settles up, right now they've run short of cash on hand due to all of the outstanding balances.
> it absolutely should not financially impact Gnome's ability to ship Gnome.
Is shipping Gnome the job of the Gnome foundation? As far as I can tell, the foundation is there to organize conferences, run the server infrastructure, and run programs like the OPW. Actual development is mostly done by member companies, like Red Had and SUSE.
> Given that the outreach program was started in response to the lack of women candidates for Google's Summer of Code, this program could (and given fiduciary responsibilities, should) have focused solely on non-exclusionary outreach to women Summer of Code candidates.
That's not necessarily the best way to address the problem. It may be that certain aspects of how Google's Summer of Code works inherently biased towards men; or at least, people who are already fairly comfortable in the community and with open source software, which given the current substantial gender imbalance in the community, can mean that it's not really a suitable way to encourage more women to get involved.
Running the internships separately from the Google Summer of Code is perfectly fine; they just need to do a better job of managing the finances.
This provides its own rebuttal. Running out of funds necessary to pay for core commitments is not "to the benefit of GNOME", and certainly not in-line with their charter.
To quote the same charter -- specifically the mission statement:
The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the
GNOME project: ___to create a computing platform for use by the general
public that is completely free software.___ (emphasis mine)
To achieve this goal, the Foundation will coordinate releases of GNOME
and determine which projects are part of GNOME. The Foundation will act
as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of
communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial
organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may produce
educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about
GNOME software. In addition, it may sponsor GNOME-related technical
conferences, and represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by
others, help create technical standards for the project and promote
the use and development of GNOME software.
[edit]
I think this admission provides sufficient evidence of charter overreach:
The changes were not tracked effectively from the
point when other organizations joined the OPW. This
impacted not only our ability to manage the OPW
administration, but also to keep up with the core
financial tasks of the Foundation -- tasks which
already needed the full attention of the
Foundation's employees and the board.
A recall referendum, as defined by the charter, seems warranted.
This provides its own rebuttal. Running out of funds
necessary to pay for core commitments is not "to the
benefit of GNOME", and certainly not in-line with their
charter.
I think you need to separate your distaste for the program in the first place, from the immediate problem that they ran into a cashflow problem running it.
to create a computing platform for use by the general
public that is completely free software...
promote the use and development of GNOME software.
Remember, this money is being used directly for the development of Gnome; these internships are for development of Gnome and other components of the free software stack, like the Linux Kernel, Firefox, and so on.
This appears to be no small matter of malfeasance by
virtue of clear overreach beyond their charter.
The foundation has been running this program for several years, and the membership has never objected to it. It's pretty clear that the membership does not believe this program to be at odds with the mission of the foundation.
Now, obviously the financial mismanagement part is a problem, which the board of directors should be working on fixing. But that doesn't mean that you need to throw the whole program out, just be more careful about working on cashflow.
Is there a mechanism by which the board can be recalled?
It does not seem at all unwarranted.
If I understand what happened here correctly, yes. The OPW program was questionable within the charter, but this went beyond administering OPW for Gnome itself.
The board seemingly elected to administer the program for external organizations, to the direct detriment of their ability to manage the Gnome Foundation's responsibilities.
This outcome was obviously unintentional, but the choices that led to it were not.
Seriously, Hacker News can be so misogynistic at times it's not even funny.
The fact that the budget FAQ largely describes invoicing failures during the operation of an internship program makes it confusing that you spend your whole post railing against an entirely imaginary evil plot where the GNOME Foundation's money is drained away by a supposedly exclusionary program that recruits and pays qualified interns.
If you feel so unfairly discriminated against, maybe you should prove your inherent superiority by outperforming all these supposedly unqualified interns as a programmer and contributor.
GSoC outreach alone would not necessarily address defects in the administration of GSoC. It is possible Google's administration of that program has systemic issues that result in the exclusion of qualified women (and men, for that matter!) Having multiple groups running internship programs and sponsorships is good because it means they can compete to find the best way to run things.
Your closing statement demonstrates your flawed thinking: Of course a push for inclusion is biased, because it focuses on the people that are excluded in order to include them. The program doesn't care about you because you don't need any help from the program! Focusing your efforts on the people that benefit the most is not 'exclusionary', especially if you are attempting to include people who are already excluded.
It was not remotely within the purview of the Gnome Foundation's charter to administer the OPW program for external organizations, and it's is unclear whether the Gnome subset of the OPW program itself was within their charter to begin with.
This is especially true given their apparent prioritization of OPW payments over all other foundation obligations to the extent that they actually spent down their cash reserves to near zero.
> If the contributor base was 98% female and you were getting a paid internship, you would not be bitching in a HN post right now.
If the board had so severely damaged their ability to fulfill their chartered objectives through any other out-of-charter overreach, nothing would be different here.
> Your closing statement demonstrates your flawed thinking: Of course a push for inclusion is biased, because it focuses on the people that are excluded in order to include them. The program doesn't care about you because you don't need any help from the program!
How are you so certain that I, and other individuals, don't need any help from the program purely on the basis of my gender? A number of very bright ("white", male, not that it should matter) South American developers have a lot of trouble participating in open source due to travel laws, visa difficulty, language barriers, and budgetary and technology access limitations. This has very much limited their career and personal growth, is something that warrants active intervention, and is still outside the purview of the Gnome Foundation.
There is an almost infinite axis of diversity, none of which are within the purview of the foundation's charter. The mission statement is quite clear.
Requiring a single program to reach out to every single individual in need of any sort of assistance is utterly absurd because it accomplishes nothing. You pick groups that need assistance (SPECIFIC groups) and figure out ways to best serve their needs. Picking groups makes it possible to identify approaches to solving problems because you can group people up that have common problems.
Travel laws, visa difficulty, language barriers, and access limitations are all thoroughly distinct problems that require different solutions. Why the hell should an internship program for women have anything to do with that? Furthermore, why do you think women aren't affected by those problems?
You're still claiming that it is gender-exclusionary when all your attempts to argue this merely demonstrate that you don't understand the concept of exclusion or the concept of charitable intervention whatsoever. I don't blame you for not being informed, but you should really make an effort to understand what actually goes on in running an organization like OPW.
Since you used the axis terminology, let me try to communicate this to you in similar terms: If you try to group up everyone who is disadvantaged, you end up with a bunch of points distributed randomly across a huge number of axes - many dozens of them, effectively filling an enormous possibility space. You can't address anything efficiently because every single person becomes a unique case, and you're unable to make any generalizations or come up with strategies that affect more than one person. It's quite obvious that this is inefficient (if not entirely ineffective). If you focus specifically on the 'most common' problems in a group that is largely male, you will end up focusing on male-specific problems and exclude women.
Individual outreach custom-tailored for individual problems is best done by individuals. Go get out there and help the individuals you know about that need help, or figure out a common problem they have and start a group to solve it. Maybe the GNOME foundation will fund it if you do a good job.
Yes, that's the problem with discrimination.
EDIT: To be illustrative, here are some examples of actual destructive discrimination that exist, unlike the OPW 'discrimination' you're upset about:
Predominantly white male politicians in (mostly southern) US states revising voting regulations in ways that conveniently exclude minorities from being able to vote while conveniently not making it much harder for their white male voter base
Uneven enforcement of laws and sentencing guidelines for people of color and other minorities versus the prosecution and sentences handed out to white males
Practices like 'stop and frisk' where law enforcement explicitly targets people based on their appearance and treats them as criminals regardless of whether there are any actual indications that they were involved in a crime
Those are examples of real discrimination, and much of it affects men, not just women. That's the kind of discrimination you should be upset about, not that the OPW happens to be using money in a way you disagree with. Get out there and fix the world.
No substantial discussion of invoicing issues, no discussion of how governance could be changed to address these issues, no discussion of how contributors and users could get involved to fix things, no discussion of what the Gnome Foundation has accomplished and whether it could be more efficient about it.
No, just a bunch of uninformed ranting about things entirely unrelated to the OP. I guess on the bright side HN's utterly ineffective 'flamewar detector' will drop this off the front page shortly and send people back to the MensRights subreddit.
P.S. 'u mad, kg?' You bet I'm mad. The quality of discourse on HN keeps going down. I was genuinely curious about the GNOME foundation, so I click through and find out that most people didn't even read the article, as if this is friggin' Slashdot.
Props to the people who read the article and responded to comments with actual information; fight the good fight.
I thought I was pretty clear on this point; the Gnome Foundation board appears to have operated far outside the foundation charter and if so, should be censured and ideally recalled.
Assuming that this assessment is accurate:
To address continuity of the OPW specifically, board members that wish to continue administering the OPW program can resolve governance and accountability issues, while ensuring OPW's continuity, by resigning and founding a distinct organization that has within its charter the administration of OPW.
Any remaining board members should be recalled, reaffirming the board's fiduciary mandate to operate within the Gnome Foundation charter.
This is far more deserving: Project Gooseberry and the Blender Foundation.
Debian wheezy's Gnome Classic is just barely capable for my elderly parents; I'm now reasonably happy with Xfce.