[Evergreen-governance-l] FW: Be sure to do this

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Aug 27, 2010, at 9:07 PM, Lori Bowen Ayre wrote:

> 2) expanding the concept of "contribution" such that it isn't limited to writing code

As Dan had suggested, the Sugar Labs model is a good basis for defining contributors.  Quoting http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Members:

"Any "significant and sustained" contributor to Sugar Labs is eligible for membership. Although it is difficult to specify a precise definition, a contributor generally must have contributed to a non-trivial improvement of the Sugar project or Sugar Labs activity. Contributions may be code, documentation, translations, maintenance of project-wide resources, running a Sugar deployment, or other non-trivial activities which benefit Sugar Labs. Membership eligibility is an individual determination: while contributions made in the course of employment will be considered, they will generally be ascribed to the individuals involved, rather than accruing to all employees of a "contributing" corporation. The Membership and Elections Committee (MEC / MembCom) will oversee membership applications (Please apply by sending email to members at sugarlabs.org)."

Applying this to Evergreen, a significant contribution could take many forms:

* running an Evergreen system that is in production use.  I would suggest defining "running" as broadly as possible, so that a library whose Evergreen catalog is hosted by another party or is part of a consortium would be eligible for membership.  Since "running" is an institutional function at most libraries, the library could designate the individual (be it the systems librarian, the director, or someone else) who would be that institution's representative. 
* writing documentation
* creating translations
* hosting Evergreen project resources, which would include things such as the website, public test servers, continuous integration servers, and so forth 
* writing code
* providing significant funding for any of the above activities
* employing (and explicitly supporting) an individual member's contributions

If an individual or institution contributes in more than one way, however, they would be entitled to only one membership.

One consequence of the funding clauses I'm proposing is that a library who employs a direct Evergreen contributor would thereby be able to count on at least two memberships, one for the contributor and one for her employer.  Another consequence, to put it bluntly, is that no vendor is going to be able to have more members than the number of contributors they employ plus one (for the vendor itself as employer).  We all want and expect Evergreen's usage to grow; even now the potential membership among libraries simply running Evergreen is greater than the total employment (of current or potential contributors) among all current vendors.

One issue that I think has not been settled upon is the membership status of libraries in a consortium.  My proposal is that if a self-governing library uses Evergreen via its membership in a consortium, that it would qualify as a contributing member, as would the consortium itself.  However, to prevent potential for problems, I would also suggest that:

(a) All members have to explicitly apply for membership; while a library using Evergreen would automatically qualify for membership, they have to at least go to the effort of applying.
(b) Voting by proxy is forbidden; in particular, a consortium or employer cannot register a vote on behalf of its member libraries or employees.
(c) A consortium is forbidden from *requiring* its members to vote in any particular way via the member's agreement with the consortium or through undue contractual pressure.  A consortium is also forbidden from contractually requiring that its members show up for votes.  This does not rule out a consortium lobbying its members to establish a unified voting bloc, but raises the bar sufficiently to prevent abuse.

> 4) agree members should approve members (but perhaps the Oversight Committee could have a role in the case of an appeal of the membership decision???)

An appeal process is a good idea.

> 5) agree that membership has to be for individuals because otherwise what happens when those individuals change affiliations?  Seems like we need individual members plus institutional members but somehow ensure that an institution can't pay for a bunch of memberships in order to take over a vote.

In my proposal above, no institution (be it a consortium, library, or vendor) would be able to have more than one institutional membership.  The only way for an institution to gain (influence over) additional members would be by employing more contributors or by expanding its consortium.

> 1) does it make sense in this day and age that you have to be present to vote?  seems like it could be  hardship for an international organization.  Couldn't there be accommodations for absentee ballots?

We're already pretty geographically distributed, so I am in favor of structuring the rules so that foundation business is expected to be conducted electronically.  Even now, the only events where we could expect a sizable number of members to be physically present would be the Evergreen Conference and (for the moment) ALA Annual.  I fully expect that there will be multiple large Evergreen installations in Europe in the next couple of years, which would make a physical presence requirement even more untenable.

> 2) 10% of members have to vote in a "Member requested referenced."   Does this mean 10% of the people present at any given membership meeting?  or 10% of all registered members?  Seems potentially low or too high depending how you interpret it.

In general, I am favor of structuring the rules so that 

(a) showing up (physically or virtually) to vote is rewarded
(b) if a member cannot be bothered to vote, they are ignored

In the case of referenda, I would suggest going with an lower threshold, say 2% of all registered member is sufficient to float a referendum.  For other votes, I think a combination of long notice periods for formal votes (say, a minimum of two weeks) would allow votes to be conducted with a relatively low quorum threshold.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
VP, Data Services
Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
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