april 22 board meeting results

Attendees and agenda

The full board was present, including André Arko, Coraline Ada Ehmke, Valerie Woolard Srinivasen, Allison Sheren McMillan, Courteney Ervin, and Adarsh Pandit. Topics included increasing communication with the community, increasing transparency about how projects are funded, and the board’s position on funded project governance.

Decisions

To increase communication and transparency about board conversations and decisions, we have created a GitHub repository for the Ruby Together Board of Directors. The repo will include planned agendas for future board meetings, summaries of meetings after they happen, and instructions on how to provide feedback to the board. The same information will also be published via Slack, Twitter, email, and any other Ruby Together communication channels.

To provide clearer and more detailed information about how Ruby Together’s finances work, we will create a guide to understanding Ruby Together budget reports. As a board, we recognize that there has been confusion about how the budget is allocated and spent. To resolve this, we plan to provide additional detail about where money is spent and why it is spent on those things, supplementing the public monthly progress and budget reports.

In a thoughtful discussion, we re-examined our existing requirements for funded project governance. Ultimately, we decided to retain the requirement that funded projects adopt and enforce a code of conduct. We also decided to actively avoid any other governance requirements. Funded projects are free to organize themselves and make decisions in any way the project contributors and maintainers work out amongst themselves.

Future plans

We recognize that there are improvements that can be made, and we plan to continue to work on additional topics in the near future. The topics we plan to investigate in the future include (but are not limited to) finalizing our mission and values statement, improving the project funding process, exploring additional funding options, evaluating compensation rates for paid work, and adding a mentorship component to work for Ruby Together. We also plan to spend time on contingency and succession planning, setting up Ruby Together to have a long and stable life ahead of it. We don’t yet know what the results of those investigations will be, but we plan to keep you posted about future decisions and actions.

We understand and acknowledge the concerns that people have around conflicts of interest and will use this feedback to guide the board’s future direction. As a new board, we ask for the community’s patience as we execute on these initiatives. We want the community to know what we’re planning, and what actions we plan to take to work with the Ruby community and make Ruby Together a better, strong organization.

Feedback

Thank you everyone for your thoughts and feedback and, as always, the board is willing to have additional conversations. You can reach out to us in the Ruby Together members Slack, on GitHub at rubytogether/board, or by email at feedback@rubytogether.org.