Re: Introduction: [...]

Hi Frank, I have no plans to fork anything — not unprompted anyway. Proposing governance structures — yes, that is what I think is a defining feature. There is little point in establishing a shared vision when there is no collective agency. People don’t agree to any form of governance by joining the assembly (certainly not at this point when no such thing exist). They merely step forward to become part of the discussion that may lead to a governance model that takes the social contract into account. (It may also fail entirely.) The social contract is the bare minimum that we agree on without further discussion. Anything concrete that goes beyond that is to be determined by the assembly through deliberation, discussion, and eventual consensus (with consent of those who have not expressed a different option). There is no formal process for reaching consensus, but the *necessary conditions* for consensus have been laid with the social contract (the domain of shared values) and the code of conduct (the bounds of acceptable discourse). I don’t think this can be answered in absolute terms — I’m eyeing the last paragraph in particular. It would likely be difficult to reconcile, say, “committing to providing a harassment-free experience for all contributors” with accepting a seemingly reformed serial harasser into the fold (purely hypothetical scenario). This does raise the question of an acceptance process, though. We don’t have one, in part because there is no actual membership and no formal decision making processes — membership is inherited from the existing GNU “project”. Currently, the assembly is open to any GNU maintainer or contributor endorsing the social contract and accepting the CoC. With an eye for the future and on preventing “infiltration”: perhaps we should agree on an acceptance process. This is too hypothetical for me to answer, because I find it very unlikely for this case to become reality. If rms had such a fundamental change of character that he would agree to give up his claim to absolute leadership and be The document spells out what it calls the “core committments of the GNU Project”; when contributors ignore the social contract (e.g. by changing the license to their project in violation of the four freedoms) it would become almost impossible for the rest of the project to cooperate with them, as one of the necessary conditions for consensus would no longer exist. A significant portion of the CoC is dedicated to procedure in that case. -- Ricardo