“On Elephants,” from fellow GNOME Foundation Director (and long-time, valued contributor) Allan Day

https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2025/04/25/on-elephants

As noted by Allan, the post is his personal view and not an official position of the GNOME Foundation board. That said, I personally feel like it includes important context and is well worth a read.

great post, and i get almost everything, but to be honest, i don't think anyone is concerned about foundation performance, losing an Executive Director will always be very hard and i think people should be understanding about it, but it doesn't address the things that i'm most worried about, why can someone be part of the code of conduct committee and also part of the board of directors? why can someone who is being voted to be removed vote to not be removed?, why can the CoC do very long bans unilaterally?, that works as a way to circumvent the requirement of board of directors votes (the solution is not to delete the requirement on permanent bans but to also require it on long bans), etc etc, i hope all of this discussion can bring some improvements to the foundation transparency u.u

my understanding (from recently rereading the bylaws¹):

The Code of Conduct Committee, like all committees, is a delegation of the board’s existing authority. As a nonprofit and according to the bylaws, the Board of Directors may create or disband committees, and committees often contain one or more directors. It’s a way for the board to explicitly give trust and decision making over a domain to a group without requiring a board meeting and vote on every item.

¹https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/foundation-web/blob/master/foundation.gnome.org/about/bylaws.rst#committees

so to address your specific questions:

• Why can someone be part of the Code of Conduct committee and also part of the board of directors?

The board created the CoCC, and I guess doesn’t have a rule stating that it cannot contain board members—possibly because otherwise, it would be difficult to fill the positions. I guess you could think of it like any subcommittee in government where it is made up of a subset of the elected officials, plus outside appointees.