Re: Questions

[Máirín Duffy <duffy redhat com>]

Hi Behdad,

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 22:47 -0500, M��Duffy wrote:
> > Well - the Fedora Project Board is made up of a certain percentage of
> > community contributors and Red Hat employees. Since there is already a
> > restriction on the number of people who can be on the GNOME Board from
> > one company, it may be worth considering something similar requiring
> > that a certain percentage of Board members are from the community. I'm
> > not quite sure how this would work in practice. Just an idea. 
>
> We *are* the community.  Are you suggesting that we reserve a spot on
> the board for unemployed people?!  Even without having such a reserved
> spot I believe we have been having students or self-employed peoples on
> board since forever.

I totally understand your point, Behdad, and I realize now my choice of 
words was quite poor, unfortunately. I should have said 'volunteer' 
rather 'from the community.' I also mentioned that I'm not sure how such 
a rule would work in practice - how do you define a volunteer? How do 
you define a corporate contributor?

Here is the issue as Robert originally worded it:

'Concerns can be heard throughout the community every now and then,
that the increasing corporate interest and investment makes it harder
and harder to contribute code for volunteers.'

I defined this problem to mean that perhaps companies that have interest 
in and invest in GNOME may have an unfair say in the way GNOME is run 
and that we should make sure volunteers always have a voice. So the 
restriction on Board membership I threw out as an idea would only be 
valid for Board members who are members of companies in this class - 
interest and investment in GNOME. There are problems with this idea 
though as you pointed out:

- What if someone is employed by a company that has no affiliation with 
GNOME? What if they are a student and are affiliated with a university? 
Are they considered a 'corporate' Board member? (my answer here would be no)

- What if someone is employed by a company that does have a strong 
affiliation with GNOME, but is not employed in a position that involves 
them contributing to GNOME? (this is more of a grey area, are they 
considered volunteers because they aren't paid for their work? Yet, they 
also have loyalty to their employer in some way?)

I am not sure what companies Robert specifically had in mind, if any. 
I'm not sure what could really define in letter the spirit of the ideas 
above. My idea was not well thought-out or researched, just something I 
perhaps foolishly threw out there. For us to really address the issue 
Robert brings up I think we would need to work with him to better 
understand the problem and its context.

~m