The Board election has been run! The results still need to be ratified at our next meeting on Thursday, but if nothing else, we now know who has been elected to the next board.
In the mean time, over the weekend, before we knew who won, I wrote a letter to the next Board. I did not edit it because I suddenly had a million things to do; as Blaise Pascal said, “I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” So, without further ado, here it is:
To the incoming Board of Directors –
I decided to write this letter to you before I knew who would be on the next Board, because I wanted my commentary to be as unbiased as I could make it. It has been quite the honor to serve Rebble for the past many (many!) years. I’ll still be here, and I don’t plan to go anywhere far, though it will certainly be nice to get to observe for a bit, rather than directly having responsibility myself! (And I look forward to getting to focus my Rebble time a little on more aspirational things, rather than the day-to-day of moving our goals forward at any given instant.)
I wanted to provide some thoughts around the role of the Board, and around some short-term actions I think you all should take, and also some longer-term things to think about.
First off, what I wrote in my original post soliciting nominations is still my belief about the role of the Board. Your job is to dream big – and then to do manageable things. You should set aside time to think ambitiously about what Rebble could be, and then set time to think about that together. Then, you should meet regularly, and figure out what you think you can do in the next year – and the next quarter, and the next month, and the next week – and do those things.
My experience is that serving the Rebble community adequately seems to involve between two and five hours a week of work. Obviously things happen in life, and there will be weeks where you have more time and weeks where you have less! (And, of course, you are the next Board, so you all get to decide the scope of what you do, not me.) But serving on the Board takes work, and so you should try to commit that time in general, and hold each other accountable for this. The good news is that that commitment, I have found, is extremely rewarding. We have built something great over the past years.
Now, on to the mechanics of my suggestions. (But then again: you’re the new Board – you don’t have to do any of these, and no matter how strongly I may word them, they are just suggestions and I’m not the boss of you!)
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On a more immediate note, you need to elect roles. By the Bylaws, you need to have at least a President, a Secretary, and a Treasurer. (I don’t think it is mandatory that the Treasurer be a current Board member; because this task requires at least some specialized knowledge, I would be happy to continue to serve as Treasurer for at least the next year if the Board requests, though in that capacity, I would not make executive decisions.) The President should be responsible for calling Board meetings, putting together an agenda in advance, etcetera; the Secretary should take notes; the Treasurer has a unique capacity of being able to make decisions about the Foundation’s finances. Probably it is good to rotate through these roles, but that is up to you all!
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You should decide what you plan to do about former Board members, and what access they should have. You definitely should remove former Board members from the Google Workspace administrator list. You also need to remove former Board members from any Board internal channels on Discord. It’s up to you whether, and which, former Board members should have access to GCP, should have debit cards, should have admin access on GitHub, etcetera. (And, for that matter, you need to give new Board members access to everything!)
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Set a cadence to meet. Probably in your first meeting, it would be a good time to start thinking about setting a plan for the year, and a plan for the quarter. Set important dates on the calendar – when do terms expire, and when do you need to start spinning up elections? Are there goals you want to check in by a specific time? Most of what the Board does not require secrecy, so you might consider posting early and posting often in the forum (or other media of your choice).
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Speaking of figuring out what you’re doing in the future – feel free to question the past! Dave Akin said in his 16th Law of Spacecraft Design, “The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours.” The Board in the past did not have any direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages, either. We may have made errors in judgement, or errors in implementation, or you may simply disagree with a decision we made. Your responsibility is to Rebble’s mission – not to the Board of the past. I trust that whatever you choose to do is because you think it is right.
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And speaking of your responsibility, it’s easy to get caught up in the short term push and pull of what needs to happen this instant, or what you think needs to happen this instant, or what somebody else says needs to happen this instant, or……
Rebble has been around for quite some time, in part by planning to be around for a long time. This does not mean that there should be no urgency in your work, but it’s ok to think about how you are going to do things sustainably. Obviously you need to do what you need to do to react to this or that or the other thing, but it can be healthier to try to apply a low pass filter to what you’re doing, and keep marching steadily in one direction rather than being too too jumpy.
It has been both challenging (especially this past year!) and extremely rewarding to be a part of Rebble, and to be a part of shaping Rebble. The community that has come together – by the way we have given a safe space for it to happen, and holding that space open – is probably one of the things I am most proud of that I have done. I hold both the challenge and the reward at the same time, and I hope you will too. I look forward to seeing what you’ll do as the next Board.
With all my love,
joshua