On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 09:59:21PM -0700, Glynn Foster wrote: > That's one issue where I feel out of place - I see the constitution > as a backup when everything goes wrong. As long as we do things in > the spirit of the OpenSolaris community, with no strong objections > to the contrary, I'd be more than happy to 'bend' what's officially > written in the constitution. I suspect I'll be the minority on this > view, but I think it's important that we don't continually look to > the constitution as a way of governing our communities - the people > do that instead.
The problem with this approach has already been described by Roy; it's not reasonable to expect everyone to agree on what "the spirit" is or on what constitutes a "strong objection" or on what differentiates "bending" from "breaking" the rules. Informal governance is efficient and effective for small groups of people with a deeply shared heritage and mutual trust. If you feel that describes the OpenSolaris community, you've been living on another planet - one without Internet access. I'm going to stand up for formal governance and the Constitution. If people feel those are getting in the way, I'll make myself available for IRC or phone meetings 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We can schedule a "regular" meeting every single hour of every single day and let 99% of them never occur, just so that we can always meet to conduct whatever (trivial and noncontroversial) business can't possibly wait just a few more days. No skin off my teeth; I ain't got a life anyways. Might be a little hard to find candidates next year, though, if that's the way we're going to operate. The reality is that waiting a few days for the next meeting to roll around is insignificant compared with the time between issuance of a proposal and receipt of the last response to it - we're at 6 weeks now and still going on Project Inception (which is one of the simplest issues we might hope to tackle). I'm sorry, but I just don't think this change is important. It's not necessarily *wrong* provided that it's written to prevent disenfranchisement of absent members, but neither does it solve any real problem. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
