Hi Mark,

I have some more reading to do, but at least I finally got started.  :-)

Again, the info you provide is exactly what we need to get started, and
the historical links for the GNOME Foundation help get a better feel of
how things can go in practice.  Thanks!

Mark Galassi <mark@galassi.org> skribis:

> Order of events:
>
> A possible order that the "few active folk" (I'm guessing those mentioned on https://wiki.gnu.tools/wiki:admin and maybe a few more who will do specific real work rather than just writing rambling emails) might want to follow is:
>
> 1. Examine existing projects (previously I suggested Gnome, Debian, Python, and gave some details on early Gnome) to distill how they bootstrapped.  We might even mostly just copy one of their histories.
>
> 2. In parallel: we can all (not just the "few active folk") examine our current list of members to see if it's diverse enough and has wide basin of projects.  The initial endorsement at https://gnu.tools/en/people/ seems reasonably diverse, possibly with Guix having a bigger representation than others.  But let's keep looking for people to make sure that we don't feel like a guy's club of a few projects.  (It's not possible to determine gender for sure, but it looks problematic.)  Remember that the more representation we get in our membership, the more valid and robust our elected board will be.

Regarding projects, we could do better.  Someone for a project not yet
represented was going to subscribe (I haven’t seen their intro message
yet).  I’d love to see more people from the toolchain and I hope those
already here can reach out to others.  It’d be great to have Emacs folks
too, though I suspect it might be harder, for fear of a backlash.  Then
there’s a long tail of smaller projects.

Regarding gender… it’s problematic (probably the same demographics as
GNU maintainers in general) and we should try hard to fix that.

> 3. Propose a draft charter, as mentioned above in the "principles" part of this email.
>
> 4. The "founding group" (all of us) would discuss the charter and propose mods, which the "few active folk" might use to amend the charter.
>
> 5. The charter would call for board elections in a short amount of time.  Not much reason to wait long periods -- just to wildly put some dates out: we could allocate May 1-15 for declaring candidacy, May 15-25 for questions by members and responses by candidates, and then vote on May 28.
>
> 4. Then those who got elected (which might or might not include our early "few active folk") can earn their glory and dollars by doing all the hard decision-making work from then on :-)
>
> I'm hyper-simplifying in much of this, but it might get those who are doing serious detailed work something to improve on.  Some details might include board size -- should it scale logarithmically with membership size?  Fixed?

I’m still unsure about the board.  I guess I need to read more about
other forms of organizations, such as that of Debian.