>> Again, this is what I'd been assuming we all understood all along. It's up >> to every "collective" to decide what justifies Contributor status; > > Which contributor status? Are you talking about > > 1. The auth/website roles of Developer and Affiliate?
As I said many times before, the current website's treatment of roles and permissions is fundamentally misguided and needs to be ignored for this discussion. Doing otherwise simply confuses things. > 2. The constitutional role of Contributor as defined in the > electorate collectives? Exactly. Operationally, collectives are the only place where contributions are made and the only place anyone can verify that they were actually made. We are creating a system that is driven off of contributions (a meritocracy), so it is important that, at the core grassroots level, the collectives manage their acceptance and acknowledgment. You are making a false simplification when you say that contributions and their associated merit are only part of the Electorate and not part of the local governance of a collective. You can't have it both ways - if you care about building a community where collectives themselves are governed by a meritocracy, then you must build in a structure that recognizes and rewards the generation of merit. If that structure ignores the merit associated with contributions, then nothing anywhere in the community can be based on contributions, because there will be no mechanisms for tracking them or valuing them or acknowledging them. > If the definition of "Contributor" here is 1 (Developer/Affiliate) then each > collective awards it as it sees fit, and the idea that the OGB can dictate > and micro-manage the internal operational affairs of each and every > collective seems absurd. It is the OGB's job to set and enforce community norms as part of its governance of the community. Each collective awards "contributorship acknowledgments" as it sees fit following the guidance and policies set forth by the OGB. This isn't absurd - it is how every form of society (other than anarchy) works. > > If the definition of "Contributor" here is 2 (each collective awards voting > rights), then you effectively force - within the framework as described > above - each collective to manage the electorate. Why force every collective > to take on all this bureaucracy for something that the collective itself > doesn't need? This is your blind spot - each collective needs to self identify their own contributors so they can figure out who their own leaders are. Remember meritocracy? The ones who generate merit by contributing get to make the decisions in a collective. > A. Each collective is free to hand out and remove Developer/Affiliate > status according to its own rules and desires, with no interference (or > even guidance) from the OGB. Those roles only have meaning within > the individual collective they are awarded by. I obviously strongly disagree with this. > B. From A, there are - and should not be - any expectation of equivalent > standards between different collectives, even of the same type; and > this isn't a problem. And this. > C. Governance is a global concept; it thus seems to me that it should > be administered globally rather than locally. I disagree again - governance is local to a collective as well. Global governance simply builds on top of the local governance mechanism - everyone who is, by right of their contributions, participating in the local governance of the community can also choose to join the electorate and participate in the governance of the global community. > > D. We have decided (or are working on this basis) that electoral right > should be contribution-based; contributions happen at the collective > level. Yup. > > E. We have decided that wanting to take part in governance is a key > part of awarding the vote. We have decided that wanting to take part IN THE GLOBAL governance is a key part... We ASSUME that LOCAL governance is merit based as well. > > F. We want to eliminate bureaucracy and complexity. But not at the expense of anarchy or chaos. I don't think we are converging here. -- -John
