[Evergreen-governance-l] Draft rules of governance for a more focused Foundation

Fri Oct 22 10:26:04 EDT 2010

Sylvia, 

I can answer this one for you: 

How does one get onto the Evergreen general mailing list? Who controls the mailing list and are comments moderated; if so, by whom? I’m not trying to imply anything, I’m just genuinely curious. Other than Galen and Dan, are the governance committee members on the Evergreen mailing list? I know the Indiana members are not and did not even know about the e-mail list until recently. What would be the plan to ensure that all the various interested stakeholders know of this list so they can participate in the board nominations and voting if they so choose? Is it every Evergreen community member for him/herself to figure it out or will someone be responsible for outreach and getting the word out about the e-mail list? 

The best link for the community to use to get to the lists is from evergreen-ils.org: 

http://evergreen-ils.org/listserv.php 

This is also a menu item on the banner at the top of each page of the site. 

The Open-ILS-General and Open-ILS-Dev lists were created by GPLS during the development of what was then known as "Open-ILS" (now Evergreen) for the purposes of communicating the goals, needs, and questions of the open source project. Open-ILS-Dev is intended for technical questions and discussions about Evergreen and Open-ILS-General is for anything else. 

I know the general assumption from PINES/GPLS's perspective is that members of the community are already on these lists - I'm sorry Indiana has felt like they're in the dark about this. Getting the word out to everyone to avoid this sort of thing happening in the future might be a good question for the Communications Committee to tackle. 

Chris Sharp 
PINES Program Manager 
Georgia Public Library Service 
1800 Century Place, Suite 150 
Atlanta, Georgia 30345 
(404) 235-7147 
csharp at georgialibraries.org 
http://pines.georgialibraries.org/ 

From: "Sylvia Watson" <sywatson at library.IN.gov> 
To: "Lori Bowen Ayre" <lori.ayre at galecia.com>, "Dan Scott" <dan at coffeecode.net> 
Cc: evergreen-governance-l at list.georgialibraries.org 
Sent: Friday, October 22, 2010 10:08:26 AM 
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-governance-l] Draft rules of governance for a more focused Foundation 

Without commenting one way or the other on the substance of Dan’s proposal, I would like to ask a few questions and make one comment. 

How does one get onto the Evergreen general mailing list? Who controls the mailing list and are comments moderated; if so, by whom? I’m not trying to imply anything, I’m just genuinely curious. Other than Galen and Dan, are the governance committee members on the Evergreen mailing list? I know the Indiana members are not and did not even know about the e-mail list until recently. What would be the plan to ensure that all the various interested stakeholders know of this list so they can participate in the board nominations and voting if they so choose? Is it every Evergreen community member for him/herself to figure it out or will someone be responsible for outreach and getting the word out about the e-mail list? 

I would also like to express a point of view regarding the requirement of unanimous votes. Requiring unanimous votes gives a lot of power to one individual on the board/committee. Which means the majority’s will is not always done. Rather, the minority has total control. What if 6 of the 7 board members want to expand the purview (stated purpose in the bylaws) of the Foundation, but the 7 th doesn’t. That one person has the ability to stand in the way of the Foundation’s forward progress. I understand the goal is to prevent abuse, but I would argue that abuse is more likely to occur if one person has that much power. The requirement of a supermajority is, in my opinion, sufficient to represent the will of the Evergreen community and inhibit abuse. As Dan points out, these people have been voted in by the community and, theoretically, collectively represent the will of the community. 

There are a number of us representing competing interests and because of that the group has been unable to come to a unanimous consensus on several important issues. I would argue that the only way you are going to get unanimous votes or unanimous consensus on major issues is if you have all members of like minds, and if that is the case then the board/committee is likely not representative of the various stakeholders. 

Sylvia 

From: evergreen-governance-l-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org [mailto:evergreen-governance-l-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf Of Lori Bowen Ayre 
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 6:25 PM 
To: Dan Scott 
Cc: evergreen-governance-l at list.georgialibraries.org 
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-governance-l] Draft rules of governance for a more focused Foundation 

Dan, 

I like what you've done. 

One potential correction...you specify the Initial Board will be 7 people that this group elects but then later in the document you state that the Initial Board will be everyone on Addendum A. 

Lori 

P.S. Yay to "Foundation Board" instead of "Oversight Board!" 

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Dan Scott < dan at coffeecode.net > wrote: 

I thought it would be a worthwhile experiment to try trimming down the 
Rules of Governance to fit a more streamlined model I had proposed. 
Attached is one possible result of such an approach. 

Highlights: 
* The document is approximately 5 pages of text, instead of 12. 

* The Treasurer is gone. The Software Conservancy will handle our 
financial matters and will generate reports on our behalf; that's 
one of the advantages of the Conservancy. 

* "Membership" as a concept is gone. 

* The standing committees and related verbiage is gone. 

* I should note that in trying to find other examples of "voting members" of a 
free-and-open-source software foundation, I almost always found that 
voting was limited to committers (committers of documentation, code, 
website...) See Karl Fogel's "Producing Open Source Software" for 
one example. Given that a strong preference for _not_ following this 
standard model has been expressed through the whole "membership" 
discussion, I suggested that voting for the board be open to "any 
self-declared members of the Evergreen community". 

* Voting for the members of the board occurs via electronic means 
(details deliberately not spelled out in the rules of governance, as 
better options might present themselves each year, but a simple 
option for year one would be to have voters email their choices to a 
" voting at evergreen-ils.org " mailbox that forwards to the people 
trusted with counting ballots). 

* In the interest of transparency, all meetings of the board are to be 
held online and recorded. (If the meetings are held by IRC, then you 
get both at once). 

* In the interests of fiscal responsibility, no compensation for board 
members. If meetings are held online, there is no reason for travel 
expenses, which are the only expenses I could think of that could be 
justified. Maybe I'm not very imaginative. 

* In the interest of trusting the Evergreen community to choose 
wisely, the rules about which subsets of the community are to be 
represented, and the limit on how many board members can be from any 
given organization, are removed. 

* Board membership is set to 7 members. With a tight focus, there is 
no need for a larger board, and although a smaller board would be 
tempting, it would be harder to dominate the board with 7 members. 

* Terms are set to one year. With fewer responsibilities to manage, 
there is less need for a transition year (and with board members 
eligible to be reelected forever, those who are interested in the 
fascinating topics of copyright, trademark enforcement, and managing 
our likely small amount of funds will be welcome to return year after 
year). And with one year terms, the amount of damage a bad apple can 
do will be limited naturally, without having to invoke the 
unpleasant "kick out of the board" mechanisms. 

* Changes to the rules of governance require unanimous consent by the 
board. With a tight focus, there should be little need to change the 
rules of governance often, and if the board cannot reach consensus, 
the rules probably should not change. If the community wants to see 
a change happen, they can vote in a slate of board members that will 
agree to make that change. 

* Changes to the rules of governance do not take effect until the next 
slate of board members is elected, to give the community a chance to 
prevent abuse. Again, with a tight focus, there shouldn't be a need 
to change the rules of governance often. 

* Rather than having all 20 governance committee members form the 
Initial Board, they will be elected from within the Evergreen 
governance committee members by the governance committe members. 

* Requirement that approval of the Rules of Governance by the Initial 
Board be unanimous. If we can't get agreement amongst our 7 
self-elected members, then we deserve to reboot. 

* Removal of the clause that the rules of governance need to be 
approved at the first annual meeting, as posting the rules of 
governance to the general mailing list for discussion should give us 
enough feedback to know whether we are on the right course. 

Anyway - I think it makes for an interesting comparison, and is useful 
to have a more fully fleshed-out counterproposal out there. 

As an aside, I would really like to get these discussions back on the 
open-ils-general mailing list. I'm not comfortable with the amount of 
closed discussion that we've been having on matters that are of 
significant importance to the Evergreen community. 

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