Re: gnome foundation: some key issues to discuss.

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

rms39@columbia.edu (Russell Steinthal) writes: 
> >>  - the group will be membership-based, where members vote on
> >>    the board of directors and also vote on major issues.
> >>    We will need some way to select the initial membership;
> >>    additional members will be added by a vote of the current 
> members.
> 
> This seems to imply a restrictive "membership," unless the vote 
> becomes pro forma.  Why couldn't membership be handled similarly to 
> the way gnome-hackers is now?  I.e. anyone who is a bona fide 
> contributor (defined in some way to exclude pure users, although that 
> doesn't even need to be a requirement, IMHO) can make request 
> membership, and as long as there's not some hint of irregularity, 
> just let them in?  Obviously, that would need to be formalized, but 
> the point is that it could be a self-declaration of one's 
> contributing status, subject only to disapproval by the 
> board/membership (but generally *not* requiring an affirmative vote).
> 

I think we need something a bit better than that. Personally I'd like
to keep a strong decision-making ability; I don't want Debian levels
of bureaucracy. Too many random people leads to inability to get
anything done. 

So I'd like most decisions to go through a group of people that are
definitely current active contributors, who track what's going on in
the GNOME world on a daily basis.

Exactly how to achieve that I don't know; maybe have a broad
membership, but most decisions are effectively left to the board; or
maybe have a smaller membership, including only major contributors to
the most significant packages.

I'm not sure. Anyway, certainly we need a more formal membership
mechanism than gnome-hackers has ("ask Miguel").

Havoc