Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: RFC: OpenACS Governance
A little background for the curious ...
About three months ago Lars, Jeff, Dan and myself began talking about writing down a description of the dotLRN TAB. Jeff came up with the documents referenced by Peter in his other thread. Without going into great detail (I think Peter and Malte's notes may cover our Copenhagen discussion about this) we came to realize that it was time to start thinking about adding some formality to the OpenACS project at large, in particular regarding technical stuff.
We decided that the time to do this would be after OpenACS 4.6 and dotLRN 1.0 were released, and when the Copenhagen meeting was organized I proposed we have a post-conference/social meeting to discuss governance on Saturday morning. We did, and roughly two dozen people attended (quite amazing seeing as some of us didn't get back to our hotels until 3 AM that morning!)
As I said at the meeting, "currently the organization of the OpenACS project depends on my mood when I wake up in the morning", and while that was fine when we were a very small group of implementors, it's not scalable. It's also not entirely accurate, of course, but my joking comment is accurate in that our organization is really just whatever we happen to think it is on any given day.
Among other things we seem to be attracting more and more skilled people to the project. We've grown and are still growing. Not only is it not clear to newcomers who the decision makers are or how decision making is done, it's not clear how a newcomer can become a leader in the community.
When reading through the documents, the Tcl TIP document seemed to fit reasonably well for technical governance. The voting details seem a bit geeky to me and as much as possible I'd like to see our project run by consensus, but it is lightweight and the description fits in a few pages.
As Peter mentions, it's very code centric, but I personally think that getting better organized in this regard would be a very good first step for us as a group. Getting organized at large - in Copenhagen we discussed forming a non-profit as a possibility - is important, too, but there's no reason to hold back on talking about our tech organization while we try to figure out the rest.
One of the things I like about the Jarkarta document is that it does a good job of defining roles in the community, including non-tech roles like users. Folks may want to peek at that.
Anyway, I do hope that Peter and Malte post their meeting notes here (anyone else who took notes is welcome to also, of course) as it was a good discussion.
