Attached please find the minutes of the Governing Board's meeting
on 2011/5/19. They're also available on the web:
http://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/minutes/2011-05-19
Respectfully submitted,
- Mark
OpenJDK Governing Board Minutes: 2011/5/19
==========================================
The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 19 May
2011 at 15:00 UTC with the following agenda:
1. Status update on Oracle legal work
2. Ratification vote
3. Summary of upcoming process work
All Board members were present: Jason Gartner, Doug Lea, Adam Messinger,
Mike Milinkovich, and Mark Reinhold.
One Observer was present at the start: John Duimovich. Andrew Haley
joined the call about ten minutes late.
The intent of these minutes is to capture the conversational flow of the
Board's discussion and also to record decisions. If you are interested
only in the latter then search for the word "AGREED" throughout the text.
1. Status update on Oracle legal work
-------------------------------------
Adam reported that he had secured all the necessary Oracle-internal
approvals needed for draft 9 of the Bylaws, and a related FAQ document,
to be published. John Duimovich reported that IBM had also cleared them.
Mark said that he would post the documents as soon as possible, most
likely later the same day.
Mike reminded the Board that, as [agreed previously][4/21], the posting
of these documents clears the way for the JDK 8 Project to be proposed
using the existing [interim governance rules][igr]. Mark committed to
submit the JDK 8 Project proposal as soon as practical.
2. Ratification vote
--------------------
Mark outlined the timeline for finishing up the Bylaws: A two-week public
review period, some indeterminate time needed make any revisions required
in response to that review, and then a two-week ratification vote.
Mark then stated that a key question for the ratification vote is, who
gets to vote?
The draft Bylaws require that revisions to the Bylaws be voted upon by
OpenJDK Members, so it's reasonable to say that OpenJDK Members should be
the ones to vote upon ratification. The existing interim governance
rules don't define that role but the initial set of OpenJDK Members will,
according to the [draft Bylaws][tr], be those Contributors previously
voted into Group Membership. That set of individuals could, therefore,
be considered the electorate to vote upon ratifying the new Bylaws.
The trouble with this approach is that it would exclude many significant
Contributors since, under the interim rules, few people bothered to
nominate and elect others to Group Membership because there were few
tangible benefits for doing so.
Mark proposed that, in order to be as inclusive and meritocratic as
possible, the electorate for the ratification vote be defined using an
objective measure of actual contribution activity as recorded in the
OpenJDK Mercurial repositories. In particular he proposed that anyone
who has made at least ten distinct nontrivial commits into any OpenJDK
repository be invited to vote upon the Bylaws.
Adam wondered whether some other approach would be feasible, noting that
what we're looking for is a proxy to the eventual set of OpenJDK Members.
We could, for example, use the two-week review period to get the existing
Groups into proper order. Mark argued against this, observing that the
current process for expanding Groups is fairly heavyweight and many
Contributors are currently very busy working to finish up JDK 7. Adam
asked whether we could use the new rules in the draft Bylaws to expand
the existing Groups, but Mark countered that it's better to treat the
ratification vote as a very special case and make an extra effort to be
as inclusive as possible.
Doug observed that it will look bad if only Oracle employees vote in
favor of ratifying the Bylaws. He doesn't like that outcome, though he
doesn't think it's likely. Andrew replied that we shouldn't worry too
much about that: If only Oracle employees vote in favor then the Board is
going to have to do some thinking anyway and maybe make further changes.
Jason agreed. John added that if that were to happen, it won't be a
surprise; we'll be able to see it coming by paying attention to incoming
feedback during the public-review period, and if there is significant
feedback then we can delay the vote and revise the Bylaws further in
response.
Several variations of Mark's initial proposal were considered. Doug
suggested it might be better to restrict it to commits over the past
year, with a lower threshold of five rather than ten. John said that the
main goal should be to have a reasonable number of people voting; Andrew
agreed, saying that he liked the idea of inviting a broad set of people
to vote. Adam suggested that the formula defining the electorate should
produce about 100 voters, if not more; this was generally agreed. John
asked whether we should only consider people who have contributed into
JDK 7; Andrew pointed out that many, if not most, external contributors
have been focused on JDK 6.
The Board informally asked Mark to do a more extensive analysis of the
OpenJDK Mercurial logs, trying various time and commit-count thresholds
to come up with a reasonable formula for defining an electorate of about
100 contributors.
Mike suggested that the Board approve an explicit resolution to move
forward with draft 9 of the Bylaws. It was then unanimously
> AGREED: The Board considers Draft 9 of the Bylaws to be ready for a
ratification vote, assuming that no new issues are identified during
the upcoming two-week public review period.
3. Summary of upcoming process work
-----------------------------------
This topic was, once again, deferred to the next meeting due to time
constraints.
At this point the Board adjourned.
[4/21]: http://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/minutes/2011-04-21
[igr]: http://openjdk.java.net/projects/
[tr]: http://openjdk.java.net/groups/gb/bylaws/draft-openjdk-bylaws-09#_B
