Open Stack

Jonathan Bryce wrote:
> Now that we've settled on a good baseline of what the mission of the Foundation will be, it's time to set down the details of how it will be organized to accomplish that mission. Over the past couple of months, we've talked to a variety of people involved in other foundations (in leadership positions and as developers on specific projects) as well as individuals and companies already involved in OpenStack. We now have a basic framework for review that we think fits with our mission and community. This framework is not exhaustive, and there are several open questions and details that we have purposefully not taken a stance on yet, such as the details of the Technical Committee. We are working on publishing a list of those questions and we'll post those to the list and discuss in the meetup next week.
> 
> http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation/Structure

Nice! It's a different model from the full individual members
meritocracy that Mark proposed, but with the safeguards you placed
around the technical committee, it can certainly work. A few comments
from my first read:

* How do you limit the number of strategic members to 6-8 ? I agree with
you that you need to have a limit to have a functional board...
Solutions include only allowing "founding members" (first come first
serve, a bit unfair and exclusive to late comers), or have the
"strategic members" as a whole vote for their 6-8 directors seats (more
fair, but meaning each member would not be entitled to a seat).

* Individual members should contribute to the OpenStack project in a
meaningful way. For code contributions, that's easy to measure: if you
commit code, you can be a member. For other contributions that's
harder... I propose that you have a individual membership committee that
is tasked with reviewing proposed non-developer members.

* You use individual members for two elections: board election and
technical committee. While I agree that non-technical roles (think
marketing, advocacy, legal guidance... but also potentially users)
should definitely have a say in the board election, I'm not convinced
non-technical individual members should elect the technical committee
representatives. If you agree, that means you would have two categories
of individual members (technical and non-technical) with slightly
different rights. This probably means two separate membership committees
(one rarely used for technical non-developer types, and one for
non-technical members). If that's too complex, you can avoid extra
complexity by using lazy consensus on the ML for the technical
(non-developer) members, instead of a separate committee.

That's all for now, more on this next week :)

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack