Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Bootstrapping OpenACS governance

If you make continuous significant contributions to the project, there's no need to say "Hey, can I be in the core team please?". The core team and the community will say (as has happenned in the past): "Gee, what you're doing is pretty cool, and you've been doing it consistently and you work well in groups. We'll give you full CVS access."

This isn't really true, Roberto. Generally what happens is that *I'm* asked if so-and-so can have commit rights to the tree. I'm the person who decided to give Lars and Peter and Jeff not only commit rights to the tree, but access to the server so they to can grant commit rights to others.

My main reason for wanting to introduce a little formalism is that I think the community has grown to a point where it's not healthy to be so dependent on me. Of course I've already done that by continuing to delegate to folks like Lars etc. But we're still dependent on my dependably continuing to do so.

Regardless ... the designation of "gatekeepers" many moons ago was itself a kind of formalism, was it not?

Yes, you and Dan are both original gatekeepers but in practice I'm the person who is here every day putting in the time, so in practice decisions about such delegation fall upon my shoulders (also I'm the person in the "project manager" role) You and Dan are frequently busy with other things.

The PG model does involve some formalism, too, Roberto, though Lamar would know better than me. I do believe that they vote on new core team members, for instance, and the core team can vote to kick people off the mailing lists, to get rid of their commit rights, etc. I believe they try to work by consensus but I believe that in some circumstances votes do, in actuality, take place.

I don't think the Tcl core approach is bureaucratic. The "two yesses and no no" approach is really a way to reach decisions quickly - silence under this approach is taken to be consensus. It works well when folks are on vacation or otherwise unavailable, too.

As far as how we work, I'd personally prefer we continue to discuss things in the forums as we do now, with a private forum and private e-mail used when privacy seems necessary or perhaps even efficient ("lars: be sure to read this thread and comment" - it's OK to say that in private, isn't it?)

I'd prefer this over weekly IRC chat because my experience with the TAB hsa been that it's hard to schedule four people at one time. As you say, we have the normal OpenACS weekly chat. Perhaps our core team only meets by chat when an IRC meeting is requested, something like that. I'm not personally beholden to any particular model of communication, though, clearly core team people get to decide themselves, right?

But we do need transparency, that's clear.