Re: Membership dues [ was: Re: Advisory Board Letter ]

[Frank Hecker <frank collab net>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >  Also, corporations typically want someone who can "speak for the
> > project", as well as someone who is perceived as relatively
> > independent and is not associated with a competitor or potential
> > competitor.
> 
> Only the board can really do this.

To clarify, I don't necessarily mean "speak for the project" in terms of
having decision making authority to set policies, I mean being able to
talk as someone associated with the project who can speak fairly
authoritatively about what is and is not the case. IMO such a person
does not necessarily have to be on the board, but does have to be an
"insider" in some sense.

> Honestly I think anyone who wants to participate in the project first
> has to get hit with the open source clue stick, and then they have to
> just dump their engineers into our channels of communication (mailing
> lists, IRC) and tell them to use said channels and get the work
> done. ;-) This is the only way it happens.

We'll have to agree to disagree a bit on this issue. While I agree that
there is no "royal road" to effectively participating in an open source
project, I also see many cases in the Mozilla project where companies
would have had an easier time of it if we had people who could take time
to give them an initial orientation and introduction. This is especially
true for companies that had lots of developers; I would prefer to start
them all out with a good grounding and let them go from there, as
opposed to having all of them independently try to get oriented.

Note also that I was referring not only to corporations wanting to
participate in active development, but also corporations just wanting to
use the results of that development, e.g., in mozilla.org's case
companies wanting to use Mozilla source in their own products and
services. The learning curve for that shouldn't be as high as for
contributing to development, although right now with Mozilla we can't
provide all the information and services that I think could lower the
learning curve.

But in any case your point is valid that this function doesn't
necessarily have to be provided by foundation staff, it could be
provided by third parties.

> Why not decide first if we want an administrative assistant type of
> person as Telsa described, and then if we do, figure out how to get
> the minimum necessary funding to afford one, and no more.

I agree that Telsa's idea is a good one. However I also think that in
order to be effective such a person would have to have a fair amount of
authority to make decisions and some reasonable amount of budget
authority.  Some decisions are going to be below the threshold worthy of
board attention, and in some cases going to the board would take too
long given the urgency of the situation.

Depending on the scope of decison making and the amount of budget
authority for this person, I'm not sure it would make sense to call this
person an administrative assistant or instead give them a different
title. In any case the important point is that the person is not making
policy (except on a relatively limited scale), they are carrying out
policies decided on by the board.

Frank
-- 
Frank Hecker            work: http://www.collab.net/
frank@collab.net        home: http://www.hecker.org/