Re: governance should probably come first - past models and next steps

Hello Mark, thanks for all these links; I will still have to take enough time to go through all of them. I share Léo's uneasiness about a governance structure with a board, and would once again like to propose a model similar to Guix Europe: - We do have a board of Presidency and Treasury, but these two persons are just there as figure heads to satisfy the requirements of the French law, and since someone needs to have the access codes for the bank account... - The real power lies with the Solidary Administrative Council (SAC). It is elected by the General Assembly (GA). The SAC decides on whether someone is accepted as a new member (this is supposed to work against the infiltration problem). Our idea in the beginning was that all members would take part in the SAC to reach truely collective decision making. But since the GA takes place once a year, in practice there is a retarding element: new members are approved by the SAC, and then have to wait until the next GA to themselves become members of the SAC. I think this hysteresis also contributes to work against infiltration. Given that so far we are not a formal assembly in any jurisdiction and that we do not have (and may not ever have) financial assets to handle, do we really need a separate board to take decisions? How about a process similar to Guix Europe in the GNU Assembly? The existing members decide on whom to accept (by consensus, however this works; it could be by voting with a 2/3 majority), and after a while (6 months?) they become part of the group that can decide on whom to accept. There should also be a process for removing members (again by consensus; voting with some kind of quorum?). This would have to be bootstrapped from something. You suggest all current members of this list, which is a somewhat random group, that has formed without any real governance process (I am not saying you should not be here, folks, thanks for joining!). However, I would suggest to go back a little: How about taking the maintainers in the sense of former GNU who were the first to endorse the Social Contract: https://wiki.gnu.tools/gnu:social-contract-endorsement

It would mean that some people on this list would have to go through the vetting process once again; apologies for what seems to be unwelcoming, but I do not see a problem in practice, while on the other hand the bootstrapping process would be on more solid grounds. What do all of you think? Andreas