Requests to the board

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Sat Jan 26 07:15:10 UTC 2008


On Jan 25, 2008 5:41 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Most of the rest of the items I see the board discuss are generated by
> non-board members.  The minutes seem to imply the board finds them
> interesting, chats about them a bit, and then basically waits for the
> originator to do something more with the idea.  Which, I suppose,
> is often the best form of leadership.

I'll be the first to say that the Board does it best work when its
just a rubber stamp.
If everything that comes up for Board approval has been thought out so
well that we are essentially just making small corrective
suggestions.. then man thats a pretty smooth running ship.

I do not doubt that there will be situation when the Board has to draw
a hardline and say no to something or the board will have to make some
sort of decree concerning a change in how things get done. But we
really want those situations to be atypical and not something the
Board has to do a lot.

Beyond that as a group we are attempting to get ahead of things by
getting stakeholders in place to build consensous on a set of
activities.  The rejuvenation of a marketing plan for example.  We
spend a lot of time coming back to this topic in discussions, and are
getting the right people in place both internally and externally to
take this area to the next level.

Once the new marketing hotness is up and running, then we will most
likely make an effort to identify the next area that needs some
(re)organization.

The place I'm really hoping to drive the Board is turn it into a
resource recruitment engine.
Because well, in my experience brick and mortar Boards for volunteer
groups are basically that.  We need to get things organized inside the
project so that Board members can know which subgroup needs what in
terms of manpower and other resources and then we go out and club
people over the head and drag them back to fill those needs.

-jef




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