Re: Planning releases

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bart Decrem <bart@eazel.com> writes:
> I think it's important that we not shy away from making decisions.
> There needs to be a group of people who are actually empowered to
> make decisions, and then those folks should be accountable to the
> larger community.
> 
> As a practical matter, there'll be lots of consensus building,
> especially since the power of the board as proposed is already
> extremely limited (it sets release schedules and decides which
> modules are part of Gnome) - but I don't think we should weaken
> those specific powers by softening the language of the board's
> charter.
> 

Now that it isn't 3 AM, I think this makes sense.

So, how about these points in the bylaws:

 1. The board is elected as an entire slate by the membership
 2. The board carries out the "mission" of the organization,
    including release planning, spending money, talking to people,
    etc. ("carry out" may include delegation and committees, but none
    of that is institutionalized in the bylaws)
 3. The membership can vote to fire the board and start a new 
    nomination/election process; this requires some percent to 
    petition for a vote (5%? 10%?)
 4. The board has 9 members (why not, it seems to work well for the
    steering committee)
 5. The board is made up of people who are also members of the 
    organization
 6. Technical decisions are not made by the board, though the board 
    may "arbitrate" if a decision crosses project boundaries and the 
    maintainers can't agree.
 7. The board may set release policies (no breaking binary/source
    compat in this release, that sort of thing) since this requires
    cross-project coordination
   

Remaining issues:
 
 - We seem to have no really good ideas on how to select the initial 
   membership and then later add/remove people.
 - We need to determine how to nominate the board slate. (see IETF info
   from Jim Gettys). Random note: when people vote on the board slate,
   I think it would be good to choose between multiple slates instead
   of simply approving one slate. Otherwise you have no realistic 
   choice in the matter.
 - Do "projects" have some formal status in the organization? What is it?
   (Or did we decide they didn't?)

Havoc