Re: the slate issue

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Ariel,

If your concern is to come up with a board that has adequate representation
from the different constituent groups, then voting for individual seats is
the absolute worst way to accomplish that.  One of the major advantages of
having slates is that you get to look at the entire group before you vote.

It's impossible to have a 'law' that sets aside slots to guarantee the
representation you ask for, because there are many different dimensions of
diversity that people want in a board: you want representation for
different geographic regions, different core technologies of the project,
different corporate affiliations, NON-corporate affiliations, consensus
builders, people who have played a key role in getting us this far etc.
When you slice it all up, the math doesn't work and you have to make
arbitrary decisions about what constituencies deserve guaranteed
representation.

Traditionally, open source projects have not been democratically run at all
(in fact, many people use the term 'benevolent dictatorship' as a badge of
honor).  In the case of GNOME, we're going from a loose governance model
that left a lot of decision-making authority with just one or two people to
a collective governance model where we'll have a board of directors that
will be accountable to the community, that can be voted out at any time by
the community, and whose decisions can be overruled by the community.
I believe that slates are the best way to balance the needs for effective
governance, a representative leadership group, and democratic principles.
I firmly believe that the GNOME project will be more democratically run
than ANY open source project, bar none, and definitely a lot more
democratically than has been the case in the past.

And yes, I think a slate proposed by the steering committee would have an
'incumbency' advantage, but I think that's OK and appropriate.  The
steering committee includes people who are widely recognized as leaders in
the GNOME project, who have earned their respect, and they have worked as a
group for the last 6 months struggling with the kinds of issues that the
future board will be dealing with.  And, yes, I do hope that there will be
one or two strong alternate slates, and there'll also be the Null Vote
slate, so that there'll real alternatives and the opportunity to send the
group back to the drawing board if they don't do a good job.

But you know what, we'll find a way to make this work either way.  So let's
see if we can come to some sort of resolution on this and then move on.
There's more important stuff we'll need to work on.

I'll try to refrain from further advocacy on this issue.

Bart


Ariel Rios wrote:

> >
>
> The problem with slates is that they may lead to important
> misrrepresantations of
> certain parts of GNOME.
>
> I would be happy with slates if by 'law' each slate must have an
> indiviudal
> representing certain parts of the project
>
> One 'seat' for europe, for the americas, language-binders, documentation
> guys,
> translators, and every possible important part of the project that
> should  be represented
> in the slate.
>
> The idea of 'you shold vote for a balanced slate' does not seems just a
> good one.
>
> Voting for indiviudal seats will be better.
>
> ariel
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-list mailing list
> foundation-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list