[foundation-board] CKAN licence?

Wed Aug 31 06:54:11 UTC 2011

On 30 Aug 2011, at 17:02, Ben Laurie wrote:

> 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.

Just a note that in company law terms the board are already all members of the foundation. We are also the only members at present.

> 
> 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.

In company law terms I'm not sure how this would work. Members have the right to vote, so either they are no longer members or we look and see if there are any options for creating a non-voting class of membership. Either that or we look at ways for people to give proxy votes by default to the board (or somesuch).

Thanks

Jordan

> 
>> 
>> 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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> 
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____
Mr. Jordan S Hatcher, JD, LLM

More at: <http://www.jordanhatcher.com>
Co-founder:  <http://www.opendatacommons.org>
Open Knowledge: <http://www.okfn.org/>