On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Peter Tribble<peter.tribble at gmail.com>
wrote:
> ?- Simplify and don't specify implementation
> Hopefully the process will stimulate other thoughts as well.
At the risk of turning this into the creation of yet another new
constitution (which I oppose), here are my running commentary thoughts
as I read thru your document...
I'd rather see this energy go into the other draft, rather than
starting over again...
-John
====
> 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.
>From a governance perspective, you seem to have
3.3. Roles within Collectives
Lurkers/Observers (aka Participants),
People who have contributed something substantial (Contribs),
Contribs who are in a leadership position in a collective (Core Contribs)
Former Leaders (Emeritus).
I'm somewhat opposed to letting every collective rename these roles -
IMO it is asking for general confusion...
3.4. Roles within the Community.
People who have contributed something substantial (Contribs),
A contributor who has sufferage (Member)
Former Leaders (Emeritus)
If you are trying to simplify, why not get rid of Emeritus - if you
give up leadership, you simply revert back to a contributor. Since
the role does nothing, the same result is obtained by simply requiring
that the existence of all leadership grants (Member or Core Contrib)
be retained in perpetuity. The list of grants, ordered by time
becomes your community resume.
You kept the constitutional concept of anonymous contributors ("A
Contributor may request that their status not be published or
published only in the form of a pseudonym that is unique within the
Community"). I believe this is undesirable, both because it is
somewhat of an implementation detail, and because having a hidden (and
thus unverifiable) Leader/Member seems to me to be a bad thing from a
community building perspective.
=====
3.6. Suspension of Participants
... according to the following procedure ...<procedural details>...
We intentionally moved all the implementation details like this from
the "new" constitution so that we didn't have to do constiutional
changes if the procedures evolved.
====
4.2. Admission of Members.
There is a great benefit in having the contribution bar set
equivalently for all collectives such that Contributorships granted
anywhere are sufficient as-is for Membership qualification. The
situation of "I'm a Contributor <there>, but that's not good enough
for me to become a Member" would be a huge failure of our community
structure.
We don't need to be an exclusive club of snobs. "Significant
contributions" should not be hard to make; a healthy community
acknowledges contributions from as many people as it can. In my mind,
the act of doing <pretty much anything> with the intent that it be a
contribution that benefits the community should be sufficient; the
only reason we don't simply enumerate a list is due to a lack of
imagination on our part - if we said "anyone who contributes a code
patch", we'd lose the web content providers, if we said "... commits
something into a repository", we'd lose the ARC community reviewers,
etc etc etc.
This would move the Membership committee's duties from gatekeeping
anyone who wanted to have suffrage to being a resource for collectives
in setting appropriate policies for promoting Participants to
Contributors, IMO a better and lower effort place to spend time.
====
4.3. Duration of Membership. The right to Membership, once granted, is
permanent.
this conflicts with the rest of this section, as well as with 3.4.
Roles within the Community, Emeritus Member, both of which suggest a
reapplication is required. Membership application/renewal should be
as easy as a button on a Contributor's profile that says "click here
if you wish to become/renew your Membership for the next year".
====
5.4. Notice. Written notice stating the place, date and hour...
Rather "starting date/time and duration"...
====
5.6. Waiver of Notice.
I don't see any reason for this section other than to raise the
obtuseness level of the document.
====
5.11. Proxies. -and-
5.12. Action by Members Without a Meeting.
Proxies are needed with stockholder meetings where the brokerage holds
the stock, or funds, where the manager is the proxy for the fund
owners/brokerage, but IMO not needed here. As for 5.12, the logistics
required to deal with the written consent is worse than that needed to
call a special meeting. Just get rid of them and simplify things.
====
6.1. Powers
The OGB shall serve as the official liaison between the OpenSolaris
Community and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Said company will cease to exist sometime in the next month or so.
The new name of the company will be "Oracle". In any case, we will
need to have a constitutional update to fix the current constitution -
unless the community ceases to exist at that point because the charter
becomes invalid.
(the company name is also hardcoded in ARTICLE X. Dissolution)
====
6.9 (OGB). Action Without a Meeting.
Is this wording in line with the OGB Email decision making policy
(OGB_2008/003)?
====
ARTICLE VII. Collectives
7.4. Initiation. ...Collective must be nominated by at least three (3) Members
Members? Not simply Contributors? Is this setting the bar too high?
Projects, in particular, should be easy to set up by Contributors so
they can contribute new things...
====
7.7. Contributors. The Contributors of a Collective shall include ...
including (but not limited to) every person who has contributed
intellectual property to the OpenSolaris Community as a result of
those efforts.
According to the website terms of use
(http://www.opensolaris.org/os/tou/), this seems to mean that anyone
posting to a forum/email list could be automatically a Contributor:
"11) ... Any Content provided by you is made available to Users and
Host under the terms of the license(s) applicable to contributing such
Content to the Website. For all Content, including ... intellectual
property rights ... submitted or otherwise made available by you on
the Website or to the Users and/or Host (collectively "Material"), you
grant ... license... indefinitely. "
This is probably not what is meant here, but.... :-(
====
7.8. Core Contributors.
This sounds like a lot of implementation detail is being encoded in
the constitution rather than being factored out...
====
7.12: Termination
...to the at-large community ...
I thought you'd deleted references to the at large collective...
====
-John
