On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 6:09 AM, John Plocher <john.plocher at gmail.com> wrote: > 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...
The problem is that we don't seem to have basic agreement on what the electorate is or how it's managed; wordsmithing doesn't seem worthwhile that. >> ?- 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" But we're supposed to be separating collective governance from community governance; therefore we cannot take the fact that a collective has granted contributor rights for its own purposes as any indication that they've contributed for the purposes of granting electoral rights. Originally I envisaged a scheme whereby getting some acknowledgment from a collective agve you the right to apply; now I'm not even convinced that that's a valid approach. >> ?- 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... The current draft doesn't give anybody - even the secretary - the rights and responsibilities involved in managing membership. It pushes everything out to a process document. And we don't have to stick to the current model of dumping all the work on the secretary anyway. >> 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. So you're saying that there isn't, and shouldn't be, any need for consistency in what qualifies as a contribution? And that it's OK for us to grant that right to collectives while taking away any ability of the OGB to have oversight of the process? >> 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.... I've suggested Special Interest Groups several times; they would fit the way that many communities work pretty well. >> ?- 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" :-) They are too detailed. There's no need to describe them - if you do, you end up in situations where somebody argues as to whether something is or isn't appropriate for a give collective type "because the constitution says so" and we end up debating which pigeon hole a collective should be put in. >> ?- 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. Really? The way I read the draft, and the process documents, is that we are firmly targeted straight at the lightweight end of the spectrum - the sourceforge model as you call it. If we want to reinvent the heavyweight structures we have today, then we need to be very clear that we're doing just that. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
