> All the community can do as a group of people is to point out that we > need a change, express what's been wrong and what is the range of > acceptable solutions and let some individual take the lead and make it > so.
I can't agree with that. You seem to suggest that ultimately only an individual can take decisions. I believe that a more community driven decision making process can be made: commissions. I will use parliaments as an example, and since I am spanish, I will use the parliament of Spain, although most parliaments in contintental Europe work in a similar way. There are 350 members of the parliament. The power ultimately resides in them, but the decision making very rarely lays upon the 350 MPs. Commissions are set up, so small groups can discuss and plan, and then they ask for the assent of the rest of the members. Thus, the decision is taken by all 350 MPs, but only 10 or 12 actually worked in the decision. How does this apply to any open-source project, not just Gnome? Well, it's easy. There's a community, made up of users, programmers and 'group-members' such as us. The groups are open, and anyone who wants to become part of one can actually do it. That makes decision making within the groups rather difficult. If 10 members of the group would commit themselves to drafting the proposals, and then submit them to the group for approval, the decision would be legitimate, since it would have been approved by a majority (or a plurality) of group members, while it would be feasible, since the working group would be made up of 10 members. That is a quite workable group. That wouldn't be the same as 'voting for the theme', since the 10 members wouldn't come up with three, or ten, possibilities, but one. A is the theme, please vote YES or NO. All this comes from the top of my mind, I have not thought too much about it, so the figures are quite rough. What I mean is that delegation can make an open project just as open, and still be able to make decisions efficiently. It's moving away from direct democracy to representative democracy. Maybe this is too philosophical, but i don't think the current model can work a lot longer. It's actually not working too well any more. Rafa.- _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
