Daniel Curran-Dickinson <dan...@daniel.thecshore.com> writes: > I wasn't meaning it to be hostile (the other guy I think was),
who? me? No, grumpy is just my default mode. I need to work on that. But I never rant without caring, so "hostile" is not correct. Anyway, I want to apologize for breaking the "Be nice to eachother" rule. There is no excuse, so I'm not going to make up any. It was a daft thing to do. Sorry. Thanks a lot for all the constructive feedback despite my error, which turned this into a very fruitful discussion after all. That's a very good example of the "Be nice to eachother" rule in pratice, having an extemely positive effect. As for the examples of open governance in other communities, I'd like to point to the Linux kernel. Not because that is a comparable project or perfect in any ways. But they do some very good things wrt governance policies. Remember that this is a project mostly managed by a small elite being paid full time to do just that, and with a dictator for life on the top. Not exactly open by default. Most of the high level plans and policies are nailed at a yearly summit, open only by invitation to a limited set of core developers. If they just did this "the natural way", then the rest of the community would just see the agenda and the resulting outcome, and maybe an input paper or two. But this is where they don't follow the stream, and instead are an example for all other open source communities: - The summit is announced to everybody (LKML): https://lwn.net/Articles/650226/ - Anyone with a topic of interest can nominate themselves, or be nominated by others. - All discussions of topics and nominations happen on the open and archived ksummit-discuss list, See for example: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/2015-July/thread.html This really opens up a process which would otherwise appear as extremely closed. The LEDE project certainly does some things right, like announcing meetings on the lede-adm list and keeping the draft agenda public while it is discussed. But it would do a lot better if the discussion of the agenda happened on the mailing list too, instead of just being keyword edits on a wiki. If this was complemented with an explicit invitation for anyone to propose topics, with the possibility of being invited to participate in the meeting, then I think the process around the meetings would appear much more open. Not that I believe it would actually change much. Both topics and participants would likely be the same. But *if* there were some outsider with an interesting topic, then they would easier see how to get it discussed. I realize that this is just about appearance. I know that anyone can make their case e.g. here, and if it is considered an interesting topic for a meeting then it will be. I note for example, that the question I asked about copyright on makefiles ended up in the agenda of the last meeting. But I don't think this is obvious enough to the whole community. Statements like "Only committers should change the agenda and participate in the doodle poll" does not help. Of course there need to be some restrictions on who can add topics to the agenda. But you should not need to restrict who can propose a topic. If the invitation requested topics on the list, and a "program committee" turned them into an agenda, then you would not have to have any restrictions on participation. Bjørn _______________________________________________ Lede-dev mailing list Lede-dev@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/lede-dev
