I'm assuming that in posting this, you are asking for opinions. I believe that a form of recognized membership should be open to anyone that someone plays a *significant* role. The reason for such is to make sure that people feel part of the community and that they are appreciated. A member should be defined as someone who actively and directly contributes to a release or to the welfare of the community. That does not mean that members have to be coders or involved in package maintenance. Other tasks for example, could just as easily be translation, QA testing, community organizers, or documentation writers.
All should be equally important with no one person being accorded more status than another in a different role. Financial or material support should not be grounds for membership. Although they are certainly appreciated, sponsors should not make decisions. We have seen the results of that in the past, and the accusations that get thrown about. However, just to be absolutely clear, if a sponsor stepped up and offered to pay certain individuals for their work on Devuan or to add specific features, I have absolutely no problem with that - even if no one else gets paid for their work. Member consensus should have significant influence on decision making. Ultimately, however, I am not advocating a democracy or voting membership like Debian. I am only suggesting an advisory group from among the general members to advise the core team of developers. The sole purpose of an advisory group is to make sure that the core developers never lose touch with everyone else, not make decisions. The core team should be chosen by themselves based on merit from the general membership who has to have been with Devuan for at least 1 year. The core team should really make the important decisions, because quite frankly, they have the real experience, and have been in for the long term. t.j. -----Original Message----- From: Hendrik Boom [mailto:hend...@topoi.pooq.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2015 7:28 PM To: dng@lists.dyne.org Subject: [Dng] Devuan governance (changed the Subject to reflect thread drift) On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 11:53:01PM +0000, Nuno Magalhães wrote: > On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 10:44 PM, Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> wrote: > > until they've been a > > member > > What constitutes Devuan membership? > _______________________________________________ > Dng mailing list > Dng@lists.dyne.org > https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng Good question. At the moment, decisions seem to be taken by the Veteran Unix Administrators. And the appear to be doing a good job, listening to the people on the mailing list, buf making thir own decisions based on their own needs and the technical exigencies. Considering that their needs are, lrgely, the needs of the systemd refugees that define this loose grouping of users, this is working now. For the long run, it's not clear what we want. Who should be represented, or whether there should be any kind of voting or democracy at all. This has, historically, been the hard part of having a successful revolution. Deciding what the new regime should be, rather them merely being against the old. Of course, one great difference between this and the revolutions we have learned about in history books (sometimes written by the winners) is the the devuan constituency is not defined by geographical boundries. Debian is being forked. SO can Devuan be forked. It's this forkability that can make autocratic rule work -- ultimately, there are no real autocrats. -- hendrik _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
