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

[Joe Atzberger]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 12:14 PM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 05:46:57PM -0400, Joe Atzberger wrote:
> > > 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.
>
>
> You're comparing an attempt to set up the rules of engagement for a
> legal entity that handles financial and legal matters (the Evergreen
> Software Foundation) to an informal community (the Koha community).
>

Yes, notably one that has recently dealt with some of the exact same
problems that this Foundation expects to deal with (or circumvent).  And to
do that, they also had to determine membership eligibility and recognize
votes.


> 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

I don't see where, in the draft rules of governance or in any
previous emails in this thread, users were ever characterized in
anything remotely close to this fashion.

The phrase was "the meaning of membership becomes watered down", water being
the solvent.  Not that they were useless to EG overall, but that they were
undesirable as Foundation membership.

So these users, who may or may not be running EG themselves in house or
accessing it via consortium or cloud service, operating with or without the
assistance of 3rd party vendors, they have their enterprise staked on it.
 They have a bona fide interest in the Foundation, but do they have a role?
 Please correct me if I misstate it: your position seems to be "some do,
some don't", depending on the level of in-house-ness or other qualitative
measure of community contribution.  I'd prefer not to have a remainder of
folks with critical stake and no role.

Also, not speaking for ESI, but personally, if I was a vendor with many
institutional players of various sizes utilizing my hosted solutions who
were otherwise not represented, I would not want to be stuck having to
synthesize their conflicting viewpoints for the purpose of representing them
to the Foundation with *my* vote.

Anyway, I think I've had my say on it.  I appreciate that people are taking
it seriously at the outset.
--Joe
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