7:06 p.m.
Following up to my email about the past models, here is a bit of thinking on principles
and next steps.
(Note that in my previous emails people have shown many of the "initial
thoughts" I posted to be flawed or to miss the point (or in one case, the GNU
trademark, to be ancient 1990s lore...) That's great because the result was clearer
thinking.)
Principles to bootstrap governance:
* Right now we have a "founding group" (all of us on this list) where "a
few active folk" are doing serious good work to prepare things.
* This is great, but the "few active folk" cannot make lasting significant
decisions on the structure of governance because they are self-appointed.
* The "few active folk" can bring a charter (proposal for governance) to the
"founding group", and the "founding group" can approve them by strong
consensus.
* The charter should include:
- a way of defining members
- a board election mechanism/schedule, outlining how those members vote
- the scope of the board's decisions (for example, the board cannot decide to
promote non-free s/w. but it can form committees to evaluate members, evaluate projects,
draft standards, further evaluate and tune governance, ...)
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.
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?