Non-Profit Foundation Boards: An Investigation into Best Practices using Fayetteville Public Library Foundation as a Test Case

Effective governance is critical for the success of non-profit organizations, with foundation boards playing a central role in ensuring accountability, strategic direction, and resource allocation for the organization. This thesis investigates best practices for non-profit foundation boards, using the Fayetteville Public Library Foundation as a case study to evaluate the efficiency of its governance practices. The research aims to identify whether the Foundation board operates efficiently and adheres to established best practices for non-profit boards. To address this, a two-phase methodology was employed. The first phase involved an extensive review of scholarly journals, industry guidelines, and other resources to define criteria for best practices in non-profit board governance. These findings informed the development of interview questions designed to assess the efficiency of a non-profit board, specifically the Fayetteville Public Library Foundation board in this case. In the second phase, interviews were conducted with board members and library executives, providing qualitative insights into their operational strategies, decision-making processes, and adherence to the identified best practices. The research is expected to support the hypothesis that the Fayetteville Public Library Foundation board operates efficiently and incorporates several recognized best practices, including transparent decision-making, strategic alignment with the organization’s mission, and active engagement of board members. These results will contribute to the broader understanding of non-profit governance by highlighting how established best practices can be implemented and tailored within a specific organizational context to improve overall board effectiveness. By combining theoretical research with practical application, this study will offer valuable insights for non-profit boards seeking to improve their governance practices and better fulfill their organizational missions.https://scholarworks.uark.edu/hnrcsturpc25/1001/thumbnail.jp

Non-Profit Foundation Boards: An Investigation into Best Practices using Fayetteville Public Library Foundation Board as a Test Case

Effective governance is critical for the success of non-profit organizations, with foundation boards playing a central role in ensuring accountability, strategic direction, and resource allocation for the organization. This thesis investigates best practices for non-profit foundation boards, using the Fayetteville Public Library Foundation Board as a case study to evaluate the efficiency of its governance practices. The research aims to identify whether the foundation board operates efficiently and adheres to established best practices for non-profit governance boards. To address this, a two-phase methodology was employed. The first phase involved an extensive review of scholarly journals, industry guidelines, and other resources to define criteria for best practices in non-profit board governance. In the second phase, interviews were conducted with board members and library executives with questions informed by the findings from the first phase designed to assess the efficiency of a non-profit board. The research supports the hypothesis that the Fayetteville Public Library Foundation Board operates efficiently and incorporates several recognized best practices, including strategic alignment with the organization’s mission and active engagement of board members. These results can contribute to the broader understanding of non-profit governance by highlighting how established best practices can be implemented and tailored within a specific organizational context to improve overall board effectiveness. By combining theoretical research with practical application, this study offers valuable insights for non-profit boards seeking to improve their governance practices and better fulfill their organizational missions

Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives

Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrospective activities, based on mining the software repositories of individual teams, to complement existing approaches with more objective, data-informed process views.Comment: In IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (ICSEW'20