Re: Draft of Proposal for the GNOME Foundation.

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

One other important global comment:

What is needed now is the "meta-process": the way that Gnome processes
for making decisions get made.  This is all that should be enshrined in
any organizational document.  You know that over the life of Gnome
(potentially very long), the processes under which Gnome is governed will
need to change.  Much/Most of the discussion to date has just been discussion
at the process level, rather than at the meta-process level.

To enshrine the processes themselves in the fundamental organizational
document is an organizational nightmare, as it can be impossible to
change them without great hassle: instead, documents should be
structured:
	Metaprocess -> initial process
as a pair.  Only the metaprocess document is part of any legal incorporation,
though they might often state things like:
	"There shall be an appeals process."

	"Processes can be modified by the process modification process" or by:
	"Vote of the board", or what ever.  Note that the difference is key:
	in one case it is a board decision, in the other, the normal governing
	processes are used to change how decisions get made.
The companion document, not part of the incorporation documents directly,
has the actual initial appeals process/and or process modification process.

There are legal terms for all this kind of stuff, but I'm not a lawyer.

Again, I look to the IETF: its processes can be changed by the normal 
standards process they defined (its processes are RFC's along with all 
other documents)  As in GNU systems, the IETF is fully recursive 
internally... :-).

				- Jim
	
--
Jim Gettys
Technology and Corporate Development
Compaq Computer Corporation
jg@pa.dec.com