Some questions for future board members.

[Egbert Eich]

On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 04:26:44PM +0200, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> I am quite amazed that no-one so far has bothered to ask any questions. 
> I doubt that this is because there are no questions left to ask.
> 
> Perhaps this has more to do with how irrelevant the X.org board seems to 
> have become. Peters blog entry (1) while good, was actually too little 
> and way too late, and ended up doing very little to change public 
> perception of the X.org Foundation or the X.org Foundation board.
> 
> Then there is the supposed issue of X.org running out of money soon. I 
> say supposed, as we have not seen a financial statement for years. How 
> on earth is the X.org foundation going to raise any money if it is 
> irrelevant and has such a sustained record of intransparency?

Yes, you are correct, I don't recall when there was the last financial 
statement - although the Bylaws explicitly state that there will be
one every year. 
I can rest you assured that what you call intransparency here is not 
a matter of bad intention nor is any conspiracy involved. 
The statement will ideally be prepared by the treasurer, but our 
treasurer - like the board members is just a volunteer doing this
in his spare time - has devoted his time to more pressing issues. 

Those who have been following the Board meetings on IRC will have seen 
for instance how hard we have been struggling to transfer some of the 
money for the last EVOC for example.
For someone on the outside, it may seem the board is either inactive or 
at least not very proactive - if one gets to see this from the insight,
one will notice how hard it is to stay on top of the most pressing tasks
and that a lot things are only progressing in small baby steps.

All in all, it is true, however, that the Board needs to become better
in making publicizing its activities and what it offers. I've heard
criticism of the information policy of the Board recently - I just 
wished this had been voiced earlier and more openly. 

For fund raising it is definitely necessary to better publicize 
both the projects and the scope of the Foundation: I do believe
it has provided invaluable contributions to grow, bring together
and help to educate the community around the graphics stack.

Ten years ago, the sponsors of the X.Org Foundation have been the
companies involved in the classic UNIX business. All these companies
have shifted their scope today. Some of them offer products based
on our graphics stack today, but many other stakeholders have appeared
since then - apart from the classic Linux and BSD vendors, the 
embedded market has grown strong.
The X.Org Foundation needs to come up with a compelling concept
to convince all these stakeholders that supporting the activeties
of the X.Org Foundation will grow and provide a benefit to the 
communities they rely on.

This is something the Board will hopefully have a better chance to
address in the future (see below).
 
> Is in the above light, plus given all the supposed overhead, and the few 
> results, it wise to spend time and money on EVoC? Would it not be more 
> wisely spent on things that more directly improve the X.org foundation 
> visibility and relevance to the open source projects that it is 
> supposedly there to support?

I don't believe that money spent in EVoC is badly spent - to me
EVoC is a nice supplement to GSoC. GSoC, like Outreachy btw, has very
strict rules regarding terms among other things. Some of these terms
may work less well with people from certain geographies. For these 
projects there is no way around such tight scheduling. However, EVoC
gives us the opportunity to adopt the program to the special needs of
an applicant while still applying the same strict success criteria 
on the quality and the time to complete the work as the X.Org Foundation
does for GSoC.

> The fact that wayland now got a separate GSoC project tells me that 
> there is little hope left for rescuing the X.org foundation, but i would 
> like to believe that this is not true.

The X.Org Foundation is open to all projects of the graphics stack
and has been fostering many projects of them - and this includes 
Wayland. 
Many of the base technologies inside the kernel (Linux & BSD) and 
Mesa which both Wayland and the X Window System rely on are supported 
by the Foundation.
GSoC and EVoC are only part of what the X.Org Foundation is providing,
The Foundation also oversees XDC - the X Developers Conference (this is
how it is called for historical reasons). This has seen Wayland talks as 
well.
If you look at the blog post announcing the Wayland GSoC projects it
explicitly points at X.Org's GSoC initiative. X.Org has a much greater
scope than just Wayland, therefore the Wayland GSoC projects are a great
supplement to the list of graphics stack related projects on GSoC.

> And finally, i personally seriously doubt that the move to SPI is going 
> to positively influence any of the real issues the X.org Foundation has. 
> At best, it is going to help intransparency, and probably is more a 
> gentle wind down of activities for the X.org foundation, which might be 
> what some board and even X.org members are steering towards 
> deliberately.

When the X.Org Foundation left TOG (The Open Group) many years ago,
we have been contemplating whether the Foundation should join another
umbrella. The decision was made - partly due to the experience we had
made in the past - to remain indepenedent. 

At the time and for a long time after I strongly favored this independence.
However, we have seen that X.Org is struggeling to deal with a lot of
tasks ranging from legal issues over tax filings to seemingly simple 
things - like tranferring funds to some countries. All these things
are difficult to deal with for an international org like the X.Org 
Foundation whose majority of Board Members come from countires other 
than the one it is incorporated.

If one calls for the independence of the the Foundation, this person
needs to answer the tough question how to deal with these tasks.

A sure path to irrelevance is to not deal with these things properly.

The hope is that SPI as a much greater organization provides resources
and experience which help us to handle these things. For the Board 
not having to struggle with the 'daily chores' should free up resources 
which can be spent better to prepare for the future:

This does not only include better advertising and publicizing the work
of the Foundation but also to complete tasks that have been left from 
the past: Recent events like X.Org almost losing its domain or the
not yet fully prepared loss of the x.org server are two examples here.

> So my question to the prospective board members is:
> 
> What option(s) do you see to improve the relevance of the X.org 
> foundation, and how do you plan to achieve those?


I believe most of this I has answered above already. 
To sum it up, with some common tasks - like legal, banking and accounting 
work - handed over to others who are more qualified to do these the Board 
will be free to spend its time on fixing what's been left undone and do
what the Board is really there for: look ahead and improve and find new
ways to grow and educate the community around the graphics stack.


Cheers,
	Egbert.