On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 3:12 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote: > 1. Membership > ?- Treat the whole issue of the electorate as a whole separate > section in the constitution > > ?- Remove the electorate from the list of collective types; it doesn't > work like the other collectives and is important enough to merit > distinct treatment
I agree. Please suggest some concrete wording. I tried, and the current stuff is my best shot... > ?- Clearly establish in the constitution the criteria against which > membership shall be judged (I'm almost happy with the current > "substantially and verifiably contributed" wording, provided we > explicitly create the structure that can substantiate a claim of > such contribution) There is a suggestion to change it to "a Contributor anywhere", since being a Contributor means "substantially and verifiably contributed, as validated by the community where it happened" > > ?- Create the mechanism for managing membership; a membership > subcommittee, and assign it the rights and responsibilities it needs > to operate Why does this belong in the constitution? The Secretary is responsible, period. The Secretary, in a process and procedures document, can spell out an OGB SubCommittee to manage membership if needed, but such bureaucracy doesn't need to be enshrined in the constitution... > > Simply putting all this into a process document isn't enough; membership > is core to the community and the process document should only be about > implementation details. The constitution already covers the membership criteria: Any Contributor simply needs to ask, and they will be added to the electorate. "Asking" involves showing that you have substantially and verifiably contributed, and someone to do the verifying, thus the process document that spells out who to email or what web form to submit or ... > Also, we need to make sure that it's the membership committee ... > We don't want to create the centralized > bureaucracy necessary to impose common standards on all the > independent collectives, We don't centralize the standards - the collectives do it by awarding "Contributor grants" to their participants. All the Secretary/membership committee does is to verify that the collective indeed granted the Contributorship for something the collective deemed substantial - a secretarial responsibility that is there in the current constitution as well. > 2. Groups > ?- The list of collective types should be allowed to grow; those given > should be taken as examples Please suggest wording to do so - I believe that was always the intent, even though nobody has yet come up with an example of another collective type.... > ?- We shouldn't provide detailed description of the collective types; I don't believe the 1-liners in section 1.1 can, in any way, be called "detailed" :-) > - All collective types are equal in the eyes of the constitution Again, please suggest wording changes if you don't think the current words capture this sufficiently. > ?- Establishing a collective should be lightweight. It should be trivially > easy to just do stuff >... > That last point is where I've come unstuck myself in trying to define > a community structure: how do we define a structure that scales to > fit? At one point (3-4 years or so ago) I had hoped we could do something like sourceforge, where anyone could initiate a new collective instance and run with it. The pushback from the tonic community and the OGB was too much for me to fight, so I gave up on the idea. The draft we have today is aimed at a heavier weight collective - the 3 friends in a pub and the 1-person projects aren't our target audience. -John
