Open Stack

On 02/12/2012 03:12 PM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> 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

Jonathan and others, well done on the above document. Comments on 
Thierry's proposals below...

> 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).

Agreed with the above concerns, and I'd also like to point out that I 
believe the following two points should be covered in the structure 
documents at some point:

* How do members of the board of directors get removed from the board, 
if such removal is warranted?

* Is individual and strategic membership granted for a certain amount of 
time? For example, if I contributed to a project early on, because an 
individual member, and then did not contribute or participate in the 
community for 2 years, do I still get the same voting power? Same goes 
for strategic/corporate members. If they cease being active in the 
projects, do they lose membership?

> * 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.

While I appreciate Thierry's point here, I'm not sure an individual 
membership committee would be seen as anything more than a "clique of 
developers who gate the community"...

> * 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.

I agree with the above point about only technical folks voting for 
members of the technical committee.

Cheers,
-jay