On Sun, 24 Mar 2019, Craig Russell wrote:
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 14:51:59 +0000
From: Craig Russell <apache....@gmail.com>
To: dev@community.apache.org
Cc: Roman Shaposhnik <ro...@shaposhnik.org>
Subject: Re: on "meritocracy"
To me, meritocracy was always a force-fit to describe what we strive for.
The terms with -ocracy all have the intended effect of invoking a
top-down rule system of governance. I reject all such descriptions of
how Apache works.
How about just "merit-based" as a guiding principle. We don't have
-ocracy at all. We strive for merit-based governance.
Our audience is very international ; for many readers
English is a second language.
'Meritocracy' has 50+ language references in wikipedia,
so the concept can be understood by almost everyone.
When using the word 'Meritocracy', is is important to
explain on which merits the meritocracy is based :
-- community building
-- software construction
-- whatever
With that in mind, 'Meritocracy' is better than some
vague euphemism.
Henk Penning
Craig
On Mar 22, 2019, at 4:47 PM, Kevin A. McGrail <kmcgr...@apache.org> wrote:
On 3/22/2019 7:28 PM, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:
On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 4:25 PM Naomi Slater <n...@tumbolia.org> wrote:
I suspect the answer is not to replace the word but to do away with it
entirely
I still would like to have a succinct handle to reference the ethos of ASF.
From my experience, there are words that are landmines in open source:
free and meritocracy happen to be such words without question.
Switching meritocracy to do-ocracy might be a good way to handle it and
I know that's what other orgs like LF have done. However, we are
straddling the middle of having both principles of duopolies like JFDI
and elections with the necessary hierarchy for fiscal / corporate
oversight. That means the definition of do-ocracy doesn't fit. I
usually do mention the issues like a meritocracy often morphs into a
dictatorship and that people can amass too much merit that it's viewed
as harmful. I see that when I mention my $0.02 sometimes and it's taken
with more weight than I intend.
So like Roman, I've been search for a word or a succinct handle to refer
to it. I don't have an answer but agree that do-ocracy and meritocracy
don't work well.
I usually say all the things we aren't in my Yet Another The Apache Way
talk (TATAW per Daniel Ruggeri). I think I'll start saying we aren't a
meritocracy OR a do-ocracy/duopoly either but it's the closest thing I
know of.
I don't like the idea of NOT saying what we are so do you have
suggestion of what word you think fits?
Regards,
KAM
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Craig L Russell
Secretary, Apache Software Foundation
c...@apache.org <mailto:c...@apache.org> http://db.apache.org/jdo
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