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

[Amy Terlaga]

>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?

Heh-heh.  Yes, I thought of that, too.

Looks like we'll have to turn that over to the members as soon as they
approve each other.

Next question - once we think we have our acts together concerning these
by-laws, when do we solicit member feedback?

=======================
Amy Terlaga
Assistant Director, User Services
Bibliomation
32 Crest Road
Middlebury, CT  06762
(203)577-4070 x101
http://www.biblio.org
----
Bibliomation's Open Source blog:
http://biblio-os.blogspot.com/


Join us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=171935276419

-----Original Message-----
From: Galen Charlton [mailto:gmc at esilibrary.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:09 PM
To: Amy Terlaga
Cc: 'Watson, Sylvia'; evergreen-governance-l at list.georgialibraries.org
Subject: Re: [Evergreen-governance-l] FW: Be sure to do this

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/