Peter Tribble wrote: > Groups have no role in adding Members. That's entirely in the hands of the > membership committee.
It needs to be a shared responsibility -- just as it is now. The purpose of the Membership Committee is to provide some standards and oversight (if needed), not to take on the details, operations, and decision-making of granting everyone Members for the groups. The decisions about this need to stay with the groups, just as it is now. In other words, if someone wants to be a Member and they cite various accomplishments and contributions in the Advocacy CG, then the members of Advocacy will make the decision as to whether that person qualifies, not the members of the committee. > Contributors propose themselves to the membership > committee; We also need the flexibility for people to nominate others since some people will not propose themselves due to cultural reasons. For some people it's considered inappropriate to make the assertion themselves. Heck, I'm a pretty assertive American and I'm uncomfortable with it, but it's quite impossible for some others around the world. However, once a person is nominated and accepted by his/her peers then he/she has to acknowledge that grant. That was the compromise we came to, and I think its more than reasonable. There are groups that do this now. > the only role that groups may play is if the membership committee > needs to ask a group if the potential Member has in fact done what they say > they've done. Although, in general, I would expect Membership applications > to be supported by individuals - the applicants peers - rather than collective > groups. > I'm making no distinction between the applicant's "peers" and the "group" he/she belongs to in this context. As a practical matter, it will be the Facilitatory who sends the name to the OGB after the group has decided that it wants this person to be a Member. The committee should be small and act quickly to complete the process because the decisions will have already been made and they are obvious. Generally, I don't want the committee making decisions unless there is a dispute to be moderated. I view the committee as a policy board, not an operational board (which is how I view the entire OGB, by the way). Operations remain distributed, not centralized. > You absolutely don't want every single component of the OpenSolaris > structure to have to worry about putting forward valid Members; Yes I do. > by not > forcing that responsibility on them you also don't have to worry one bit > about what standards groups apply for Membership - because they don't, > that's all done in one place by the Membership committee. > But we have to worry about this to a certain degree. We need at least one overall standard that the OpenSolaris community agrees is reasonable so we don't have a situation where one group piles up many voting Members in a way that other groups may feel is below their standards. Becoming a Member based on code contributions to ON will be vastly different to becoming a Member based on work in the Advocacy area. So, although the local standards will be different because work is different, the standards themselves have to be consistent with the Membership Committee's overall standard. I want the Membership Committee to write a lightweight specification that we all agree can be implemented multiple ways. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
