[foundation-board] CKAN licence?

Tue Aug 30 16:02:02 UTC 2011

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 3:00 PM, Becky Hogge <becky.hogge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 26 August 2011 22:21, Jason Kitcat <jason.kitcat at okfn.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 26 Aug 2011, at 18:00, Ben Laurie wrote:
>>> The impedance mismatch, it seems to me, is around what a committer is
>>> in the OKF. The rest would seem to fit quite naturally.
>>
>>
>> That has always been the main issue in my mind when ASF-type models are considered for the OKF. Our working groups are core to our community but their membership is not equivalent to committers in a software project, nor is participation so easy to define/measure unless we start counting emails which is a very crude measure.
>
> Yes, I agree this seems like the central knot of the problem. Ben, you
> mentioned that a few others had progressed towards membership of ASF
> based on activities beyond committing. Is there anything we can learn
> or model from based on how this happened?

The ASF measure has always been "sustained, significant contribution".
It just happens that this is usually in the form of code commits, and
thus usually follows appointment as a committer.

I don't see any reason the OKF could not adopt the same underlying
measure, the question is more what organisational structure recognises
the appropriate level of contribution? In the ASF this naturally works
out to be the PMC for almost everyone, and the rest get caught by
vociferous existing members.

AIUI, the OKF has projects, just like the ASF, and has people who work
on those projects. They seem like member candidates. So, I guess a
completely off-the-cuff proposal would be something like this:

Step 1: the board become members.

Step 2: the members solicit proposals for new members - these should
be supported by a paragraph or two like "so-and-so has worked for the
last year on CKAN documentation, spending at least 5 hours a week on
it".

Step 3: the new members elect further members based on "sustained,
significant contribution" as determined from the above proposals (and
individual estimates of trust in the proposer, of course). No doubt
discussion should be permitted amongst the members.

Step 4: rinse and repeat.

One thing we should do that the ASF didn't from the start is to have
some mechanism for moving members to some type of emeritus status: the
ASF got dangerously close to being unable to elect new members because
of failure to achieve quorum - a simple formula is that anyone who
doesn't vote for n member elections in a row is automatically moved to
emeritus.

>
> Jordan's right - this is exactly the sort of experience we hoped you'd
> bring to the Board, so many thanks for starting this thread...
>
> Becky
>
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