Open Stack

Mark Collier wrote:
> Today the first draft of the Bylaws for the OpenStack Foundation were published on the wiki here: http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation/Bylaws, per the process detailed on the wiki: http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation/DraftingCommitteeProcess
> [...]

Nice work! A few remarks from my first pass at reading it.

General remark: A board of 24 sounds a bit huge, but I guess there is no
way around it with 8 proposed platinum members and the tier rule for
Gold and Individual members.

Article I, Section 2:
"A Technical Committee shall [...] admit new projects to incubation. A
Board of Directors shall [...] admit new projects into core OpenStack
after incubation."

I certainly see the value of having the Board and the Technical
Committee involved in selecting projects that get into Core. However,
the question of being ready to graduate from incubation to core is a
technical decision based on the maturity of the project and how well
aligned it is with the obligations of a unified release cycle. Maybe the
technical committee should propose projects (for incubation, for core)
and the board should ultimately approve those ? That way both incubation
and core graduation would have to be approved by the TC *and* the board.

Article II, Section 4:
"The size of the Gold Membership shall not exceed twenty four (24) members."

I'm not sure what's the goal behind that. Avoid dilution of the original
Gold members ? If a 25th company wants to get into the Foundation, why
would it be less relevant than the 24th ? There is no risk of board
inflation: they would elect 8 members anyway.

Article III:
"On the written request of at least three (3) representatives to the
Technical Committee, the Board shall appoint a mediator to assist in the
resolution of any dispute or deadlock in the Technical Committee."

There shouldn't be any deadlock, since the TC uses voting to decide.
There is certainly value in mediation in extreme dispute cases, but I
think the vote of the committee should decide disputes in most of the
cases. We shouldn't have a mediation every time 3 representatives of the
TC are a minority in a vote... so I'm not sure how to limit abuse of
this clause.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack