As I mentioned in the meeting yesterday, I've been looking at what I think would need changing in the current constitution to bring it into line with where I believe the community needs to go. Some random scribblings here:
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/Constitution/ So, the fundamental principles that I started from: - Community governance is completely separate from Collective governance - Simplify and don't specify implementation These are just me thinking in public, which may get a bit ugly. But the process has clarified some things in my mind. One of the aims for me was to enumerate what in the old constitution gets changed or removed, and to see whether we had just dropped anything along the way. But the more I look at this it's not entirely obvious to me that I can actually get to the new constitution from the old. Hopefully the process will stimulate other thoughts as well. I replaced Community Group by Collective to simplify the terminology. In particular, *every* part of the OpenSolaris Community is a Collective. I don't enumerate Collectives, deliberately so that we can add more without having to rewrite the Constitution. But no individual Collective is going to use the term "Collective" in its name, so it stays as an abstract concept. Note that in this model the OGB could be classed as a Collective. Then separate community roles from collective roles. So there are Collective roles, and each Collective has to implement the roles, but is free to use other names for the roles if they like. And community roles are explicitly separate, and are really only about Membership. Membership is handled by a Membership Committee - the Collectives have no role in Membership. One thing I realised here is that it's the Membership Committee that maintains the membership records, not the Secretary (the proposed new Constitution also has the Membership Committee, but still says the Secretary keeps the Membership records, which doesn't seem right). I'm sorely tempted to add a phrase to the constitution that says something like "thou shalt not use these roles in any other context", but that shouldn't really be necessary. One thing I realized is that, if you expect Collectives to be self governing and autonomous, then a Collective needs a set of rules and minimum standards. At the moment I think we've got the balance wrong - we've set the paperwork bar very high and ignored the functional bar completely. What we need is to remove the paperwork and let the real work come to the fore. And, if we're going to expect things like reporting to take place (which we should) then again we need more formal structures. So somewhere in between the bad bureaucracy of the current constitution and the rather loose anarchy of the new. The scheme I ended up with throws up some interesting problems. For instance, all Collectives need 3 Core Contributors, and I've kept that in. Not all Collectives will have 3 people working on them, even. One possible way out of this would be to introduce the notion of Junior Collectives. The idea here is that a Junior Collective needs no OGB oversight, needs not follow the rules like voting, minimum Core Contributor count, or reporting. But they can be created in a very lightweight manner and, if they don't work out, then they just stop. That leads to a slightly different lifecycle. In the same way that the participants in a Collective become more Senior over time as their participation evolves - growing in Seniority along the participant, contributor, core contributor path, then all Collectives are born as Junior Collectives and mature into full Senior Collectives in a natural manner. This allows the very lightweight and organic development of the community while imposing the structure that's needed to keep the community healthy. Basically, once a Junior Collective matures sufficiently, it can come to the OGB and request to be made a full Collective. We don't have to guess whether a new Collective will be a success; Collectives are self-selecting as the successful parts of the community. (If this sounds like the Apache Incubator, then I'm not going to claim that it's original.) -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
