Hi Andre,
On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 10:11 +0200, André Schnabel wrote:
> I'd like to make some comments on the current situation (and derive a
> modified proposal from this).
Sounds good.
> - At the moment eligibilty is to much limited to a set of formal
> terms
Agreed, it's highly sub-optimal.
> - the mentioned metrics for the voter register is very unclear (and I
> don't think, we would find a good metric that is fair for all parts of
> the community)
Well; for developers it is clear - did they contribute a significant
amount of code in the last year: it is fairly easy to build these
metrics, indeed - they already existing internally to Sun I believe.
This sort of metric is the very basis of a meritocracy.
Whatever the structure - I would strongly recommend a dedicated block
of votes, that is specific to code developers, and that has a firm
meritocratic basis. As per my outline (which apparently was sadly
somewhat mis-summarised) - given Sun's weight of developers, with a
truly fair voting mechanism, they should be guarenteed at least one
seat, and thus not require a "Sun seat" - freeing up another slot.
Other projects have membership committees, and mechanisms for human
review of a developer's contribution - those are fine too, but ensuring
that this is meritocratic, and flexible is necessary for a truly
representative council IMHO.
> - I don't like to have the voting scheme written in the charter - this
> can go to the bylaws (and therefore could be more easily adopted or
> modified)
Sounds good.
> - elections will mostly stay the same with following modifications:
> - call for candidates needs to be on a public list (discuss@ for CCR,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] for NL, dev@ for Project Leads)
Sounds good; some public discussion would perhaps be helpful.
> - CCR is elected by all Community members,
> - NLs are elected by Native Lang leads (+NL cathegory lead),
> - PLs are elected by Project Leads (accepted + incubator + resp.
> cathegory leads - native lang)
What are PLs ? and why did we just re-entrench this,
pseudo-representative, pre-stuffed body of people who just happened to
be nominated "Project Leads" by some buddy in the past ;-) a more
ossified and inflexible mis-approximation for merit it is hard to see.
For a start, there are at least a few skilled Sun developers, who by
reason of chance, happenstance, or worse - being a key member of a
larger team are not Project Leads.
This is why I would very strongly prefer a simple metric, or membership
process, tied to people's actual, concrete contribution of development
effort over the last time period.
> - make the council more like a bazar,not like a cathedral - what
> hopefully makes the Council work more interesting for each community member
Yep, sounds good.
> - grow the number of possible candidates (spread the "management" work
> across more community members and reduce workload for single members)
Sure - of course, candidacy is one thing, IMHO eligibility should be as
wide as possible; if Barak Obama wants to stand - why not let him ? ;-)
but clearly getting the electorate right is the key issue here - which
is why I'm disappointed to see the same old slate there.
Reform, IMHO is best served by getting the electorate right - after
all, the Council should reflect their wishes: no change in the
electorate means ~no change in the council I feel.
> - make the election pocess more open and transparent
Yep, great - long overdue.
> - respect merits of contributing members (project leads)
..
> The flaws of the proposal are, that there is still much power granted to
> project leads. So before electing a candidate, project leads should get
> (and respect) comments from project members.
Yes as you say - IMHO the Project Leads are an extremely poor proxy for
merit; there are lots of really obvious stupidities about using that as
a measure, and a large number of key contributors that using this
excludes.
There are other, simpler and fairer metrics to hand - to at least seed
a human-reviewed membership process.
HTH,
Michael.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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