On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 8:24 AM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Last comment from me for today:

Thanks very much for continuing to exercise discipline in rate-limiting your
communiques, Benson.  I dread the prospect of returning to the overheating,
rapid-fire IPMC of a few years ago.

> to me, PMC membership, and especially PMC chairship, is a big deal. If you
> accept it, you accept real responsibility, with real potential legal
> consequences to the Foundation if you screw it up. There's nothing like that
> about being a mentor. Legally, today, responsibility for podlings sits with
> the IPMC chair and the IPMC members, collectively, not with the particular
> mentors in particular of the particular project,. So, again, to me, the pTLP
> scheme is very different from the current scheme. It seems that other people
> don't see this the same way that I do. If the general feeling is that PMC
> membership is 'a joke' like mentorship is 'a joke', then this scheme of mine
> is just more standup comedy.

The problem is that exercising that level of responsibility as a PMC member is
optional.  Some people take it that seriously, and those individuals anchor
our projects -- but we have also found that keeping the bar for PMC membership
low and offering people a governance stake earlier rather than later has
beneficial effects in terms of inclusiveness and motivating contributors.

Currently, the Incubator treats Mentorship the same way: the more the merrier,
contribute what you can, merit basically never expires.  But it doesn't have
to be that way.  We can require ongoing activity for Mentors and remove those
who become inactive.  We can limit the maximum number of Mentors, perhaps
returning to having only a single Mentor per podling.

In fact, I'd say that treating Mentorship differently than PMC membership will
be key to addressing the Incubator's structural incentive difficulties.

Marvin Humphrey

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