Hi Sam, > Do you have a concrete proposal? yes, I have. First, I do not have any problems with the Apache style of decision making, lazy consensus sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I like that style. This fits perfectly to the "meritocracy" principle.
My understanding is, that this principle is based on * contributing individuals * organizations/institutions contributing developers and/or money for the infrastructure/governance, these organizations contribute because they have derived products or other business around the regarding software. So users are represented in this model by own work power or indirectly by companies. This principle has been proven to work quite well for many open source projects. I think this principle may get enhanced by enabling a non profit organization to have their own resources on a project (This might fit into the Apache philosophy considering this organization as an contributing institution). I think this is necessary because there is already a lot of business happening around OpenOffice, but most of these businesses are just to small or have not the right expertise to execute on the "meritocracy" principle. So what the OOo project missed most was to have a path to get product feature or tasks done (or just 4th level support) with the help of money offered. So my proposal is continue project decisions the Apache Style but also to find a framework to make product decisions in a manner that also the concerns of Users, local communities, QA, business partners, etc. get honored. This framework also should enable to collect money so that development (committer) resources can be found to get the issues addressed in an equitable process. We already have thousands of feature requests and enhancements in the queue, we are putting a new bunch of requirements on top of it through the current transition to Apache, I think we should seek the power of _all_ OOo communities, users and businesses to achieve significant growth to make OOo a better and successful product. And I did not even included wishes like ODF Viewers, mobile and Cloud services around OOo. My offer is to develop (with all concerned parties) a new charter for all the groups mentioned above (as a successor of the Community Council Charter) and enable the project to have own development resources. The non profit organization Team OpenOffice.org e.V. played in the past just the role of being the cash box of the CC in a quite defensive way (http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html, will you find the path to donate ??), now Team OOo is preparing to offer a link between business, communities, users and developers to enable growth on the new futile ground we are now moving on. Martin -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted