On Mar 5, 2007, at 2:00 PM, Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 09:55:37AM +1300, Glynn Foster wrote:
But there's absolutely no consistency with that. There's no
guidelines or best practices of how to apply the membership. If one
community's interpretation of the process is easier for geting 'Core
Contributor' status compared to another community's process, then
you're potentially going to get a weighted community. No one wants
that, it'll only lead to bitterness among the wider community.
Yes, that's a valid concern, and in fact I noticed very early on that
we had this problem already.
Some imbalances won't matter, since the community-wide elections
are very general anyway. However,
105 usergroup
is just a ridiculous number. 105 contributors, sure, but there is
no way that there should be that many *core* contributors. The core
contributors are the people who have made significant contributions
over a long period of time.
Likewise. A lot of this depends on exactly what role the OGB will
claim for itself. The proposed Constitution gives vast, dare I say
unconscionable, power to the OGB and to my way of thinking relies far
too much on the goodness of its members and the vigilance of the
electorate to ensure proper use of that power (rather than placing
stricter limits on the OGB but giving its members greater independence
to act within those limits).
Keith, you have made that comment before and I still can't find any
basis for it in reality. The OGB has almost no powers. It has no
money.
It cannot hire or fire. It has no property. It cannot even make
copyright licensing decisions. In fact, the sole powers of the OGB
are to decide what content appears on opensolaris.org (which power
is entirely delegated to the communities) and the right to approve
or dismantle those communities. So, what powers are you talking about
and why are they unconscionable?
The requirement for such widespread and
intimate participation in government may well turn out to be a serious
handicap in a community in which many or most participants would
rather engineer software, especially if such an unbalanced situation
arises. That's doubly true given that, so far, the balance of power
is firmly against those who "just want to write code." If this
situation persists, the OGB may need to consider structural changes to
the Constitution, assuming it's ratified. What shape those changes
might take would depend on the nature of the imbalance and the
rulemaking areas into which the OGB chooses to wade.
Or the OGB can simply abolish the communities that abuse their right
to name core contributors, as is afforded by the constitution.
....Roy
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