On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 4:06 PM, Patrick Finch via governance <governance@lists.mozilla.org> wrote: > To sum up: > -Declaring Mozilla to be a de facto “meritocracy” fails to acknowledge > evident bias in representation in the project. > -The word “meritocracy” itself has become a bone of contention which is > unhelpful to us.
I agree that we should lose "meritocracy" from the governance description. A while ago, on this list, I linked to https://webmink.com/essays/open-by-rule/ and before doing so debated with myself whether I should include a disclaimer about terminology that hasn't aged well. I ended up not doing so and got Warnocked. I think we should communicate two things that have previously been supposed to be covered by "meritocracy" and are still reasonable aspects of good Open Source governance: 1) Positive participation in an area of the project is generally a prerequisite for authority over that area of the project. We expect module owners to have contributed to the area they are module owners of prior to becoming module owners. (This has the downside that authority needs the kind of time commitment that may be hard to sustain unless paid to commit the time, which introduces bias in terms of people who are able to commit a lot of time to the project despite not being paid to do so. Still, the next item wouldn't really work without some relation to demonstrated positive participation. It doesn't mean that people who haven't committed the time to have formal authority shouldn't be heard.) 2) Authority in the Open Source project shouldn't be tied to being paid by a particular entity. (Firefox development is now much more concentrated to being paid by Mozilla than it was e.g. in 2004, but co-development is a generally healthy thing in Open Source. Therefore, I think we should keep our governance structure open to more co-development again in the future and be careful not to close off governance participation to current co-developers.) A third point that we historically haven't been good at but have become better at of late is: 3) Authority in an area of the project should involve continued participation in that area of the project. (We now have the module owner emeritus status, which acknowledges past participation while withdrawing current authority.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@hsivonen.fi https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
