Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> One of the confusions we regularly have, and are sure to have again as
> we approach the next elections, is the difference between the OpenSolaris.org
> website structure (which lists a bunch of "Communities" and their "leaders",
> who in reality are just members with editing privileges) and the
> OpenSolaris governance structure (which defines Community Groups and their
> Core Contributors). Since there is no official list I've seen of the
> Community Groups, I've tried to put one together - if we agree this is
> the list, we should post it somewhere for the record/easy reference.
>
> Right now, based on the official list on poll.opensolaris.org, these are
> the official set of Community Groups who can name Core Contributors to
> have voting rights in the election:
>
> Core Contributors
> Academic and Research 3
> Advocacy Community Group 96
>
I'm not sure if this is expected or not... as I'm not a member of the
Advocacy group. But the number of Core Contributors in that group is
double that of its nearest competitor (ON, 48 CCs) and *quadruple* that
of its next nearest (Tools, 22 CCs.)
As a member of the larger group I do worry what this will mean when it
comes time for the election. It certainly seems that something akin to
gerrymandering may be occurring, or at least have the *appearance* of
occurring.
While the constitution certainly doesn't require it, I wonder if anyone
else besides me would find it useful if a couple of the Advocacy CCs can
explain why that group should need so many CCs? Are the CC's in that
group *really* core contributors, or are they just people who
occasionally pipe up on mailing lists? I've lived under the belief that
core contributors should be people who are very actively helping the
community achieve its goals. In most other communities this would
probably be achieved by actual code contributions. In the Advocacy
group, I'd guess this would be work like writing PR content, managing
web forums, or maybe running User Groups.
Perhaps we should consider a constitutional amendment to limit the
number of CC's that a community can nominate (set at some number high
enough to reward those groups with greater participation, but not so
high that any one or two groups can dominate an election? 10?) Or
perhaps we should just abandon the distinction between CC's and ordinary
Contributors, and open the vote to the great unwashed masses? I'm not
sure... but I am wondering if the bar set to become a CC in some groups
(e.g. Networking or ON) is set substantially higher than in others?
The other wrinkle in all this is that some communities have considerable
overlap in their CC membership. E.g. many of the ON CC's are probably
also CC's in other groups. It would be an interesting data point to
measure "voting loyalty" for each CG, where each CC gets one vote, which
is divided equally amongst all the CGs in which they participate. CCs
that belong only to one CG contribute 1 to that CG. CCs that belong to
two contribute 0.5 to each of those two CGs, and so forth.
The resulting graph may yield some surprising data about how fairly (or
otherwise) weighted the election is likely to be.
Of course, I'm operating here under the premise that we actually *want*
all of the CGs to have a roughly equal say in important group-wide
matters... that may itself be an entirely false premise.
-- Garrett
