5:23 p.m.
On Sun, Apr 18, 2021 at 04:03:46PM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
Hi Mark,
> A very good piece of advice given was:
>
> "Define your governance before you make any significant decisions.
> Otherwise those decisions will come from the early volunteers instead of
> from the accepted governing body.
This is a very important point and one I’ve been struggling to articulate.
We have a bit of a problem in that we’re bootstrapping from an existing
shallow pool of GNU maintainers (and contributors), so we’re inheriting the
diversity imbalance currently present in GNU.
The infiltration problem also needs to be addressed; the solution proposed
by Ludo (to temporarily exclude those that are not “official” GNU
maintainers from voting on foundational matters, or to restrict potential
members to “long-term” “contributors”, where each of these terms need to be
defined) would make that pool even shallower. This may be a cost we need to
pay to avoid unsustainable growth at a time when we don’t have processes
needed to keep it from eventually becoming a clone of gnu-misc-discuss.
To start tossing out ideas on how to divide people into categories I
feel the obvious one is actual GNU maintainers, (often categorized by)
their names on the official project page and access to the private
mailing lists.
Rekardo's right, defining long-term or contributor isn't easy. I always
felt like (informal) membership in GNU was more of an association, you
either wanted to be part of it or not so much. And that without the
project leads there might be a project to work on, but without everyone
else there wouldn't be much of a project to speak of. I'm not an
official GNU maintainer, I'm _just_ a contributor but Guix was the first
GNU project I found that didn't seem super niche, was welcoming and
didn't have me over my head in programming.
So what I think I'm trying to say is I looked at it as "you want in?
Good. We want people who want in. You can join." in terms of welcoming
people who want to make a difference.
Bringing it back to the discussion at hand, I have no idea. I feel like
it'd be easy to create some formula and tally commits per project or
longevity or some other metric but that's only one part.
--
Efraim Flashner <efraim(a)flashner.co.il> אפרים פלשנר
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