Hi Gianluca, On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 15:50 +0100, Gianluca Turconi wrote: > This is to say: both BoD and ESC with a fixed number of members should > be elected from "members" and "members-developers"
That might work; its not a terrible idea. Then again - I am not aware of any other project where the maintainers are elected ;-) > So corporations and governments would have a direct role in both the > political and technical bodies without a predominance of anybody. I -really- think that an informal approach, where large contributors are invited to join the ESC (don't like the name frankly), and we have a healthy mix of volunteers works best. Clearly the elected representatives can replace the ESC if it goes bad - a useful check on their influence. > Let's say corporation X and government Y gain enough members to control > the ESC. Economically speaking, they can form a cartel and exclude any Lol ;-) > No enlargement of the ESC would prevent such situation, because no > enlargement would be permitted at all by the dominant members. .. > Just like Oracle with OOo. It is possible in theory. Of course, elections are not without their potential problems too: creating division, disgruntled loosers, and campaigning over political points in the (often fragile) volunteer developer community > However, the ESC isn't simply a technical meeting place. In a software > project, devs do *the* work, so they have the real power. Sure - so we need to make the ESC reflect those doing the actual work, but this is non-controversial IMHO. Even Oracle managed to do this reasonably well: we had IBM, Novell, RedHat, Canonical etc. there - the problem there was not a lack of representation. > And ESC, IMO, with its unknown number of members and cooptation, is > more likely open to external and uncontrolled bid for power. As/when the ESC turns bad; it should be easy to see. Then we can get it kicked out and re-formed by the board. This is how GNOME works; thus far the 'release team' has not gone bad, and plenty of people have come and gone through the team. > Good suggestions, though I'd like a fixed number of ESC members too. On the contrary; I would like it flexible; so if RedFlag joins, or IBM joins, we can immediately offer them permanant representation (eg.) rather than having to pick who to kick off ;-) or waiting for another election cycle. Meritocracy is great, but a quiet, relational process works rather well too IMHO, and having a small group of people who can actually decide things and work together effectively is really useful. ATB, Michael. -- michael.me...@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- E-mail to steering-discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/steering-discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted