Welcome to the GNU Assembly
by Mark Wielaard
Hi all,
The GNU Assembly was first proposed after the GNU Hacker's Meeting in
Paris (2011). Even though there was broad consensus at the time that
the GNU project would be healthier and more effective if GNU members
had the ability to act more collectively and publicly, it took till now
to actually set it up. gnu.tools is what we hope will be that GNU
Assembly:
The GNU Assembly is a public community of GNU project members who
want to transparently and collectively produce technical and
organizational recommendations for GNU packages following the GNU
Social Contract <https://wiki.gnu.tools/gnu:social-contract>. The
recommendations will aim to actively defend user freedoms, create a
consistent GNU System, collaborate with the broader Free Software
community, and through mentoring and apprenticeship, make GNU a
project that welcomes contributions from all and everyone.
The current members of the GNU Assembly are those who, as GNU
maintainers, FSF stewards or GNU package developers have endorsed the
GNU Social Contract:
https://wiki.gnu.tools/gnu:social-contract-endorsement
At the moment there are already 15 of us (plus an FSF observer) on this
mailinglist, which has a public archive at
https://lists.gnu.tools/hyperkitty/list/assembly@lists.gnu.tools/
Only list members (minus the FSF observer) can post to this
mailinglist. For now only those who have already endorsed the GNU
Social Contract can subscribe.
During the GNU Social Contract discussions we contacted all the GNU
maintainers as listed in the maintainers file on fencepost twice. There
are ~400 GNU maintainers listed, but the first time ~50 addresses
bounced, and the second time ~30. We don't have exact numbers for the
number of maintainers who gave feedback, but it was less than 50. There
were 3 people who said they would personally endorse, but not as GNU
maintainer. There were 4 people who said they were a maintainer, just
not registered in the maintainers file. There were 3 people who said
their project is (no longer) GNU. In the end 23 people sent in their
endorsement, there were no maintainers who explicitly didn't want to
endorse the GNU Social Contract.
It is not entirely clear how to interpret these numbers. It might be
interesting to know the average number of maintainers per package and
the active number of packages (perhaps take the definition of the last
state of the GNUnion) to see how many of the maintainers should still
be active. But I think it is fair to say that, even if most maintainers
don't seem active anymore, that we currently don't have a majority of
GNU maintainers being part of the GNU Assembly yet.
So I think one of the first public discussions we should have is how to
expand the GNU Assembly so that it can represent the majority of GNU
members in a way that keeps it focused on the GNU mission and keeps the
group effective.
The GNU Assembly currently provides two resources, <
https://lists.gnu.tools/> a GNU Mailman based site for public
discussions, and <https://wiki.gnu.tools/> a git backed wiki for
storing discussion documents.
Use of any gnu.tools resources is covered by the Contributor Covenant
Code of Conduct <https://wiki.gnu.tools/wiki:code-of-conduct> and the
current administrators can be found at <
https://wiki.gnu.tools/wiki:admin>. These are simply the people who put
in the work till now. But others are certainly welcome to join.
We have setup the most requested resources, a public wiki and a public,
but members only, mailinglist. But we would like to provide others that
the GNU community needs. Personally I would like to make sure we have
the resources to hold virtual conferences, like LibrePlanet 2020 had (a
mumble, etherpad, jitsi and icecast server). Given that the GNU Tools
Cauldron has already been postponed and it isn't clear whether the next
GNU Hackers Meeting can be held in person.
Does anybody have suggestions for user/account management? It would be
nice if all our resources had the same user accounts, so it is easy to
grant access to everybody who registered. I have been looking at
FreeIPA and Keycloak, which should plug into almost anything that has
some kind of user authentication mechanism. But maybe there are simpler
solutions?
Cheers,
Mark
4 years, 1 month