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

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Sep 1, 2010, at 4:40 PM, Amy Terlaga wrote:
> If members have to approve new members, how do we get that first group of
> members into membership?  Who has the authority?  Is there some tacit
> understanding that at inception, the Board approves the first wave?  Do
> members approve each other?

Members approving each other, in effect?  That isn't necessarily so strange; any formal organization has to start somehow.  The eligibility criteria establish (what I hope is) a non-controversial set of initial members:

* Libraries and consortia running Evergreen in production
* Past EG conference site sponsors, if not already included
* People who have the commit bit for Evergreen and OpenSRF (past practice has been to require that a developer establish a track record of good, substantial patches before getting committer status)
* Current committers to the DIG repository
* Libraries not otherwise listed who have contributed resources to EG development but who aren't in production with Evergreen yet; KCLS is an obvious member in this category.
* Members of the EG governance committee - this overlaps with many of the pools of people and institutions I've already mentioned; anybody who doesn't already fall in the previous categories has contributed via fortitude, if nothing else; more seriously, it would establish continuity from this committee to the foundation.

A public announcement of this approach for seeding the membership, followed by an immediate open membership period, would be sufficient transparency.  Yes, the initial membership of the foundation would be self-selecting, but how could it be otherwise?  The likeminded people have to gather first to form a new organization.

The same chicken-and-egg problem would occur if we said that the board approves new members - by what criteria do we establish initial members for the board?

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
VP, Data Services
Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 352-215-7548
skype:  gmcharlt
web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/