[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Draft rules of governance for Evergreen Software Foundation - for discussion

[Joe Atzberger]

>
> > > The question is: should a library be able to be a voting member (one
> vote)
> > > if the extent of their contribution to the community is simply to use
> the
> > > Evergreen system being run by their consortium.
> >
> > My sense is, yes.  They have a legitimate stake in the project.  And it
> > won't be as if most institutions that are concerned enough to exercise
> their
> > vote will stay otherwise uninvolved with the project.  The Koha community
> > has several prominent examples of people who started as "just users" and
> end
> > up as regular contributors.
>
> I believe that we need to encourage more participation in and
> contribution to the Evergreen community, and that the currently drafted
> membership rules are one small way to encourage that.
>
> I don't see what relation your Koha example has to the proposed
> membership rules, unless you think that the person would have said to
> themselves "I'm just a user and not a member, therefore I'm not going to
> contribute"...  which seems unlikely to me.
>

Yeah, that wouldn't make sense.  The question at hand regards characterizing
"non-contributing" users (NCUs).  Will there be a lot them?  Will they bog
us down?  Firstly, we're talking about a subset of "non-contributing" users:
the ones who will actually exercise the membership I would extend to them
and use their vote.  Secondly, if you are active enough to be voting, I
consider it quite likely you will become involved in other aspects of the
project, whether that is sending code, building test systems, testing
features, training users, hosting the conference, editing documentation,
wrangling bugs, translating strings, helping new users with installs or
whatever.  The Koha community illustrates this pretty well.

But basically, I see responsible membership in the Foundation as a form of
participation in the community itself, not as a payoff for some other
activity.  Membership in the community should only require that you have a
legitimate interest in EG.


> For your scenario, in the rules as currently drafted, the contributor
> would become eligible to become a member, and the library that employs
> the contributor would also become eligible to become a member. In the
> currently proposed model, membership is a reward/incentive (slim though
> it might be) for being an active participant in the project. That
> ensures that when members vote, they have a legitimate stake (in the
> form of having contributed effort / resources) in the project, rather
> than just a passive role. And further, as only members are eligible to
> be elected Board members, it ensures that the Board would be made up of
> people who have participated actively.
>
> Take the requirement for active contribution away, and the meaning of
> membership becomes watered down significantly.


I don't think I would want to see a lot of contributions that were
significantly incentivized by voting membership.  This is one of those "be
careful what you wish for" type of things.  If you're writing patches to get
membership, I'd question both the patches and the membership.  But I agree
whatever real incentive exists is smallish.

Users who stake their enterprise on the utility and longevity of our project
are not, in my opinion, so much disposable solvent.  They are in many ways
more committed to its long term success than a hypothetical developer of a
given feature or bugfix.  As the userbase grows, I think we can reasonably
expect to see more contributions from coders who are not
career-evergreenists, perhaps not even career library techs, just people who
had to integrate w/ X or successfully run on unpopular platform Y.  I don't
see any reason to privilege that group over, say, a director who has kept
their library on EG over 3 major versions (should we be so lucky).

One other entailment: under your model, the Foundation would be required to
police membership for minimum activity and against inactivity.  I find it
problematic trying to determine, say:

   - how many patches a first period of membership should require?
   - how many for a second?
   - how long should the periods be?
   - or should that be lines of code instead of patches?
   - what's the equivalent number of strings translated?
   - or pages documented?
   - etc.

I'd rather just evaluate whether someone has a legitimate personal or
institutional interest.  It's not a dealbreaker though.  The Foundation will
be useful and valuable either way, it'll just be differently composed.

--Joe
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