On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 1:44 AM, John Plocher<john.plocher at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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...
Thanks!
> I'd rather see this energy go into the other draft, rather than
> starting over again...
Well yes, but (speaking just for myself here) I'm having real trouble
trying to work on the other draft, and found working through the old
constitution a much more fruitful way of defining my thoughts. So I want
to use this to drive improvements to the new draft. It's just another way
of doing that.
> 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...
I was thinking that Collective Types could use other names. Clearly not
every individual Collective!
The new draft is unclear in this area. It defines the base "Leader" role
but then talks about "User Group Leaders", for example.
> 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.
Actually, no. Not all contributors become Members. Once a Member,
you have an additional right in perpetuity. You have to renew your
Membership in order to use it, but you don't need to requalify.
> 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.
As an implementation, that's fine.
> 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 Contributor may request that their status not be published or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.
Oops. Yes, that ought to go.
> =====
>
> 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.
Yup.
> 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.
One of the key principles here is to separate Collective roles from
Community roles. You don't want to apply the same bar to all
Collective Types or to all Collectives within a given type. You don't want
each Collective to have to create and maintain a set of bureaucratic
processes that comply with central rules, and you don't want to have
individual Collectives have to worry at all about the Constitutional
ramifications of promoting someone to a certain role. Collectives manage
their own affairs. It's much better to do the Constitutional stuff once in one
place than force every Collective to worry about it and effectively have
to have their own Membership Committee.
In practice, I would expect standards to converge; the Membership
Committee should feed back to Collectives that consistently set the
bar wrong.
> ====
>
> 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".
The right (qualification, maybe) is permanent. To keep current, you
need to renew.
> ====
>
> 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.
There are waivers elsewhere, and all should go. What was this all about?
> ====
>
> 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.
Zap.
Is anything needed for adjournment?
> ====
>
> 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)
Well. yes, I know that. That's a separate problem.
> ====
>
> 6.9 (OGB). Action Without a Meeting.
>
> Is this wording in line with the OGB Email decision making policy
> (OGB_2008/003)?
Probably. It was taken from the current Constitution, so it should be.
Should probably defer to the policy.
The new draft doesn't have any provision for the OGB to take
action without a meeting. Probably need to fix that.
> ====
> 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...
This is an interesting problem. And this is where I started thinking about
Junior Collectives. Then the Junior Collectives could be initiated by any
Contributor at any time, being very lightweight. But to mature to a full
Collective would still need 3 members and approval by the OGB.
I really don't want to have to explicitly enumerate all the possible
collective types and the inner workings of each one.
> ====
>
> 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.... :-(
That's always been an issue. But do you need an SCA to post to the
fora or mailing lists?
> ====
>
> 7.8. Core Contributors.
>
> This sounds like a lot of implementation detail is being encoded in
> the constitution rather than being factored out...
Needs tightening up, certainly.
This actually raises the question as to how much commonality of
process we want to embed in the constitution. Looking at the new
draft in comparison, I don't think there's enough detail.
But the overall notion of the new draft is sound. Participants grow
into Contributors who grow into Leaders, and it's the Leaders who
designate new Contributors and Leaders. I think that progression
needs highlighting more, and that also means that we need to
strengthen the Contributor role.
> 7.12: Termination
> ...to the at-large community ...
>
> I thought you'd deleted references to the at large collective...
I'll claim the "work in progress" cop-out.
--
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
