On 20/11/2007, Ghee Teo <Ghee.Teo at sun.com> wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: > > On 20/11/2007, Brian Nitz <Brian.Nitz at sun.com> wrote:
<snip> > Secondly, we want to increase the number of core contributors in the > desktop community. > Looking at http://vote.opensolaris.org/ we have 10 core contributors > and 7 contributors. > 8 out of 10 core contributors were granted in the boot strap phase > (2007-02-24). We have > 11 unique communities under desktop. I would think we need at least 2 > core contributors in > each of the community. The current number may only reflect the specific > activities level > of each these communities, will proper recognization encourages > activity, may be :) > While I think it's admirable that you want to grow the set of core contributors, I would encourage you to not have that as your main goal. Growing the set of *contributors* is good, growing the set of core contributors has certain advantages and disadvantages. As an advantage, having a large set of core contributors is good because it means your community has a large group of very active, involved individuals. As a disadvantage, however, having a large set of core contributors makes it harder to achieve consensus when it comes time to make decisions for that community group. Keeping the number of core contributors small and encouraging others to "step down" to emeritus when they are no longer able to maintain a sustained level of effort is a good way to ensure your community retains proper scope. > > Obviously, one of the primary responsibilities of a Core Contributor > > is that of voting. > > > This is important. I would like to think if all the communities within > the current desktop > community is active. If we measure the scope by line of code, it will > certainly be one of the > BIGGEST slice of the OpenSolaris community while it has only 10 votes > out of the roughly > of 390 core contributors. So I think this is important to at > proportionally represented better. I wouldn't hold much with the number of core contributors across the entire community at the moment. There are a lot of folks with grants from the bootstrap that (in my opinion) should not have their grant renewed automatically as they are not involved in a sustained, active manner in the decision making processes for their group. Some of that perception might be from community groups not making enough decisions in the open in certain cases, but I can't account for that since it's not in the open :) > > It is my firm belief that Core Contributors must demonstrate a > > continued willingness to participate in guiding their respective > > community and projects by participating in the voting process. Someone > > that continually (since there will always be exceptions) does not > > participate in the decision-making process of a community or project > > for which they are a core contributor should have their status > > re-evaluated. > > > This is probably a harder thing to pin-point in practice, some one > who is very good > in guiding technical decision can make significant contribution > technically may not want to > involve in how the community is organized or run. Though I would at > least expect they > should utilize their rights to vote regardless of their taste as in the > constitution of OpenSolaris, > they are representing the communities in the higher level, Two things come to mind in response to that: 1) Technically inclined people should be require to abstain from votes they are not interested in at the very least so that the consensus required by the constitution for a vote can be achieved readily. 2) Not every technical decision is going to require a vote and thus those that are primarily interested only in the technical aspects would be best suited with a contributor grant. > > > >> Your application will be processed by a working committee oversee by > >> existing Core Contributors. > >> > > > > Possibly s/overseen/administered/ ? > > > > Does this imply that members of the working committee would not have > > to be core contributors themselves but could be contributors and/or > > core contributors? > > > My thinking is approval for contributors be done by working committee who > themselves are not necessary core contributors but are entrusted by the > core contributors > for a fixed length of time of specific delegated tasks. > > For approval of as a core contributor, article 7.8 dictates that it > has to be nominated by > a core contributor and approve by consensus vote. > http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/cab/governance/#ARTICLE_VII.__Community_Groups > > But the working committee could filter the applications and pass onto > the core contributors for > final approval. In this way, the seeking of core contributors can be a > two ways process. The important thing to note here is that the constitution implies that the consensus has to be among *all* the core contributors of a community group. This means that all core contributors (or as many as possible) should be voting yes, no, or abstain for each application. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..." --Larry Wall
