While co-ment is great for commenting on individual parts of a document, it doesn't seem easy to bring up more general issues. Some additional thoughts:
There are two basic issues that concern me: 1. Membership Defining the electorate ought to be a core part of the constitution. It's one of the most important parts, especially as we largely devolve the governance of individual collectives down to the collectives. Given the importance of defining the electorate, it has little coverage in the current draft. To address this, I think that we need to: - Treat the whole issue of the electorate as a whole separate section in the constitution - Remove the electorate from the list of collective types; it doesn't work like the other collectives and is important enough to merit distinct treatment - Clearly establish in the constitution the criteria against which membership shall be judged (I'm almost happy with the current "substantially and verifiably contributed" wording, provided we explicitly create the structure that can substantiate a claim of such contribution) - Create the mechanism for managing membership; a membership subcommittee, and assign it the rights and responsibilities it needs to operate Simply putting all this into a process document isn't enough; membership is core to the community and the process document should only be about implementation details. Also, we need to make sure that it's the membership committee that has all the power in determining membership. By devolving operational responsibility, we build a community in which the standards of being a contributor (and even its meaning) will vary between collectives. So that award of contributor status in a collective cannot of itself be entitlement to membership. We don't want to create the centralized bureaucracy necessary to impose common standards on all the independent collectives, and we've established as a fundamental principle that roles mustn't be overloaded. It may be that being a contributor to a collective may be regarded as a necessary prerequisite; it cannot be taken for granted that it is guaranteed to be sufficient. (Although one would hope that the community would naturally evolve to a state where the two are pretty similar most of the time.) 2. Groups The section (1.1) on community structure is very brief. Which is interesting given how rigidly we've managed the structure of the OpenSolaris community. I think there are fundamental principles the we need to establish: - The list of collective types should be allowed to grow; those given should be taken as examples - We shouldn't provide detailed description of the collective types; individual instances vary widely (and the existing collectives almost form a continuum rather than being perfectly pigeon holed) - Establishing a collective should be lightweight. It should be trivially easy to just do stuff - All collective types are equal in the eyes of the constitution - Note that the above applies to types; within a given type there are huge variations in scale and responsibility That last point is where I've come unstuck myself in trying to define a community structure: how do we define a structure that scales to fit? The point being that we have single-person projects; user groups may scale down to a handful of friends meeting in a pub. We should not expect such small groups to have the same formal administrative structures required by, say, ON, or a national user group. There is also the issue of structure. Having every single collective report directly to and interact directly with the OGB doesn't scale. One thought that occurred to me was that there would be senior and junior collectives. Senior ones have more power, and corresponding responsibility (formal voting; facilitators; reporting). Junior collectives have no such worries; they can be created and disbanded almost on a whim, they have zero barrier to entry, they can operate freely and respond with nimble agility. Almost darwinian, some junior collectives prosper and grow into senior collectives, while others fall by the wayside. This is essentially an incubator, and the real questions I haven't addressed are: - Do junior collectives have to live under senior collectives, in some sort of sponsorship arrangement? - What is the level at which a junior collective reaches the maturity of a senior collective? -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
