Good points, but I think they're all moot in this particular election. All of the nominees I'm aware of are great candidates to be on the community-side of the core team, and all of them would do a superb job of representing the community's interests. So the question *not* will the elected community members represent the community's interests, but who from the community will it be?
I have no heartburn with AOL members voting, but if the rest of you don't want that, I'm ok with that too. /s. -----Original Message----- From: AOLserver Discussion [mailto:AOLSERVER@;LISTSERV.AOL.COM] On Behalf Of Peter M. Jansson Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 3:53 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [AOLSERVER] How I'll vote for core team members (long) On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 04:27 PM, Scott S. Goodwin wrote: > Should the AOL dev team members have a vote? Absolutely. They are > involved with AOLserver as individuals, they run the largest sites > that use AOLserver. I've been lucky enough to get some contracting gigs with AOL over the years, and have known many of the folks, who are among the nicest and smartest I've met. My question about voting was not intended to reflect any feelings toward AOL whatsoever. I was concerned it might have been taken that way, but when I tried to write a little about it, I thought it was too confusing, so I just let the question stand. Here's the thing: what is the purpose of the open-source community segment of the core team? The AOL part is clear -- they make sure that AOLserver continues to serve AOL's needs. There could be a lot of reasons for the core team, so I just stuck a stake in the ground around the one: the community members of the core team _represent_ the open source community. Maybe I'm wrong. But if I'm right, then there's a question of fairness, and since AOL employees already have representation, and since the open source community has _no_ choice over the composition of the AOL team, is it really fair for AOL employees to try to influence the representation of the other folks? What if they nominate a bunch of other AOL employees, and vote them in, leaving the open source community with no real representation. Well, for that matter, there are a bunch of other parliamentary questions, like how do we guarantee that everybody who votes gets a single vote, and how to we guarantee that the ballot box doesn't get stuffed with votes from folks who have no interest in AOLserver, and... I think the community is small enough that we can all trust each other on this first vote (in the future, some procedures should be put in place, but that's a job for core team 1.0), so I didn't really think it was worth bringing up the parliamentary issues. Except for the fairness one, because that's a bit different, in my view. That's not a question of cheating, so much as a question of fairness, and getting to the "will of the people" (to which, as an American, I have a little sensitivity). I just had the passing thought that votes for open source community members, given by AOL employees, were diluting the representation somehow. Assuming the job of the community members of the core team is representation -- and I'm not sure I'm right about that. It was just a simple question, although I think the answer is far from straightforward, but I don't think either of the answers is really wrong. I do think the answers help clarify the role of the core team. But I didn't really mean to bend anyone out of shape over this. It was just a question, and I didn't know if it had occurred to anyone else.
