Technical decisions?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

The X Consortium, and IETF, are both organizations that make technical
decisions.

I think GNOME _already_ makes technical decisions by the "rough
consensus and working code" technique, right? And so far, I don't
think the steering committee has even discussed any technical issues,
except when they relate to something else, like the release schedule.
I'm not sure technical decisions are a big problem that needs solving,
we seem to be OK at it as is.

I'm pretty sure the GNOME Foundation isn't supposed to be a technical
decision-making body. The project maintainers are supposed to do that.

So what we're really talking about is having an effective organization
to: 

 - take donations, and use them for buying disk space and such
 - give the community (or some representative persons from it, by 
   necessity) a place to talk to companies that aren't ready to go
   public
 - give companies a forum to talk to each other, free from antitrust 
   regulations
 - encourage communication within the community, by having 
   conference calls, open meetings at shows, and that type of thing
 - do some promotion/marketing/advocacy

Probably this makes a big difference in what kind of organization is
appropriate. Maybe some of these goals should remain in the scope of
the informal "rough consensus" mechanisms we already have. Others
certainly _require_ a closed group of individuals (the group that
talks to companies, in particular).

In any case, most decisions the organization will make are likely to
be of the "should we buy a hard disk" variety, not the "is gnome-core
an important package" variety.


Just a thought. We can certainly separate these two realms of
decision-making in our organization.

Havoc