It is my belief that the openstack board and organization as a whole should be as open and transparent as possible yet the document you reference is compromised by the following statement in section 2:

"Notwithstanding a general policy favoring disclosure and transparency, certainsensitive information must remain confidential. “Confidential Information” means (a) information disclosed during the executive session of Board meetings including, without limitation, personnel matters, discussions around Gold Member applications and information collected, prepared or discussed relating to or in anticipation of litigation"

First, the opening statement about "a general policy favoring disclosure and transparency" is useless and self serving.

Second, The discussion of gold member status has zero reason to be confidential in an "Open" organization, it only serves to obscure and confuse the community. If a member of the board has something to say as a representative of the board and more specifically a representative of their parent organization, it can be said publicly.

Third, Litigation is another subject that can be more openly discussed with compromising the outcome of the litigation. If you want a good reference look at the California state University board meetings. https://www.calstate.edu/bot/agendas/mar12/Whole.pdf.

"(b) financial information (excluding financial information included in the annual summary provided by the Chairman of the Board) (c) disciplinary actions taken against Platinum Members, Gold Members or Individual Members "

Why? A community focused organization should be transparent and at a minimum be more transparent than government organizations. The Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act, http://oag.ca.gov/open-meetings, (which does not apply to openstack) requires more openness than the openstack board transparency statement.

The openstack board should have pride in their position of running such a large organization. Any limitations of disclosure that are not backed by law (such as personal privacy), should be removed.

On Feb 23, 2015 6:01 PM, "sean roberts" <seanroberts66@gmail.com> wrote:

As one of the new transparancy committee members, it is one of my responsibilities to report on the board transparency.

The transparancy policy as adopted by the board and posted here http://www.openstack.org/legal/transparency-policy/ generally states that information not falling under the heading confidential information, will be made public through the foundation mailing list. This is not explicit however. The selection of the board meeting locations does not seem to be confidential. I am open to discussing how it could be considered so.

In the spirit of being a community that works together in the open, I would like to see the future discussions around selecting board meeting locations be made in the open like most everything else we do. I think an agreement to do this on the ML would be enough to move forward and past this specific issue.

If this is a problem that cannot be solved here and needs formal resolution, I would recommend that the process to file a complaint with Jonathan outlined in section 5 of the transparency policy be followed.

On Monday, February 23, 2015, Steve Noble <snoble@sonn.com> wrote:

On Feb 23, 2015 4:16 PM, "Jesse Proudman" <jproudman@blueboxcloud.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:58 PM, Dave Neary <dneary@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> This general pattern of public proposal and debate, followed by a
>> private executive decision which takes that debate into consideration,
>> has proven effective at building consensus and maintaining a level of
>> participation of the membership in the workings of the foundation.
>
>
> I absolutely agree that public discussion and public recording of board decisions is important. The intent of my email was to comment on Tristan's concerns in the aggregate.
>

It has been clear to me that since the OpenStack board started having private, non recorded, non accessible meetings along with private voting, that the OpenStack board is going in a direction that does not benefit the community.

Comments about travel costs for the board shows a very shallow view of what running an open source community entails. OpenStack is a _very_ well funded organization and most of the board members come from corporations that pay significantly for their spot. The cost of travel for the corporate delegates is minor compared to the other expenses.

The people who run for the board know what the job entails. I believe that every one of them ran for their role to do good in the community. If a board member is unable or unwilling to support the common good, why are they are on the board at all?

Transparency in a organization that uses open in the name is IMHO obligatory.

--
~sean