[OOTB-hive] [GOV] Draft by-laws

[Richard Esplin]

I agree with Oksana that having a name and photo on the web site should be 
reserved for contributors. I think that is easily solved by restricting it to 
voting members. It can be treated as a different issue than who gets to be a 
"member".

I don't think it should be required to be part of a committee to be a voting 
member of the order. People can be contributing members of the community 
without wanting to participate in one of the narrowly defined actions of the 
committees.

As for who would remove voting rights, I think that is safely done as a board 
action on a semi-annual basis with appeals possible as a vote to the general 
membership.

Richard

On Thursday, September 04, 2014 11:56:41 Oksana Kurysheva wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
> 
> Sorry, but I still disagree with our policy of approving new members.
> 
> > (1) We allow anyone to become a member. If they found out about us
> 
> yesterday and do nothing else but submit the form, they can be added to the
> list of members with no questions asked. They will be non-voting members
> but they will be members. This will help us grow our community and make our
> supporters visible without granting casual participants any power at all.
> This also gives people a "ramp" for participating in the community. It's a
> low barrier to entry (with a corresponding low level of power).
> 
> As I remember our first messages in this mailing list, the idea of the
> Order was to unite people who contribute to the community. How people, who
> just installed Alfresco, can guarantee the existence of the Alfresco
> Community as a free open source product?
> 
> We have a large community (anyone can join it), but the Order is an
> organization that makes something valuable for the community, so I don't
> understand why should person who just installed Alfresco yesterday join us.
> Do you really want to have hundreds of photos on the
> http://orderofthebee.org/about/#members page? I understand the positioning
> of "so we can have more people in the Order", but I would prefer smaller
> Order, but when all people contribute.
> 
> Another reason I don't like it is that managing of the members require time
> and energy. Now I add new members to the website and give them access to
> Github. Also I track changing of the positions/companies of the members and
> new photos. I'm not ready to do it on the everyday basis, if we add
> everyone who wants to be added, I cannot spend 8 hours a day searching for
> photos, resizing them, adding new elements to our JSON with members,
> reformulate a list of contributions and summary for publishing. If you want
> to say "ask them to send you all needed information", then I can reply that
> it will never work.
> 
> But I'm ready to work on it, if these people are valuable for the
> community. They may organize meetups, write tutorials, develop add-ons and
> so on. They are valuable for the community, and I want to be valuable for
> the Order and maintain our list of members in the actual state. If you find
> someone who will work with "inactive" members, who does not contribute, but
> we still should spend a lot of time working with them (not only publishing
> information but also collaborate with them to see how they can contribute
> and where can we help them), then ok, let's approve all requests.
> 
> > (2) Everyone starts as a non-voting member. A voting member can propose
> 
> that a non-voting member be changed to a voting member once they've proven
> themselves by working on a committee. The voting member does this by
> sending an email to a list that is private to existing voting members. The
> existing voting members discuss whether or not that person has made enough
> contributions to the Order (not only to the Alfresco community, but to the
> Order, specifically) to be made into voting members and they hold a vote on
> the private list. If this vote passes, they are now voting members. This is
> basically the Apache process.
> 
> Two questions from my side:
> - who decide to denude voting rights?
> - What to do if a person is very active in developing add-ons, writing
> posts in blog, but he doesn't like all this politics, so he doesn't join
> any committee? I don't think that be listed in some committee members list
> is a good reason to give a person voting right. You can be added to a
> committee and don't do anything for a long time, because there are too many
> members in the committee and nobody controls you.
> 
> > Alfresco employees
> 
> I think that "having contributions in the last year or two" requirement to
> join the Order partially solve our question with Alfresco employees. I
> don't think that it's so important to be a voting member. We are not going
> to vote every day. The most of the questions should be solved without
> voting. But if all members are valuable for the community, then the fact of
> publishing information about a person on the website is a rewarding - you
> are one of people, who work on doing this world better, you don't only
> consume, but you invest and create something new, people know about your
> contributions and appreciate it.
> 
> Best regards,
> Oksana
<snip>