Re: Technical decisions?

[Robert Humphreys <rob collab net>]

this is the tricky part - convincing these corporations that contributing to
the Foundation is a good thing to do, but that it doesn't guarantee you a
seat on the board or influence in the direction of the Gnome desktop, per
se.

Bart has a good idea we may want to explore, setting up an industry advisory
board, comprised of companies (IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, Oracle, Informix, etc
etc ) that are interested in seeing Gnome evolve and flourish, etc. It would
also provide a forum where these companies could collaborate on
ideas/development/etc without necessarily having to worry about competitive
agendas, etc.

Just some thoughts.....

Bart Decrem wrote:

> I agree.
>
> Another thing we need to figure out is how to structure corporate
> involvement.  Say we want Oracle and Informix to be involved with the
> Gnome foundation because we want to get major industry players 'on
> board', but we don't want our board taken over by their reps, but we do
> want some money from them, then how do we structure that?
>
> Would we set aside some seats on the board of directors for reps from
> those types of big companies, or would we have an industry advisory
> board, or what?
>
> Bart
>
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-list mailing list
> > foundation-list@gnome.org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-list mailing list
> foundation-list@gnome.org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list

--
Regards,

Rob
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Rob Humphreys
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