I'm assuming that in posting this, you are asking for opinions.

I believe that a form of recognized membership should be open to anyone that
someone plays a *significant* role. The reason for such is to make sure
that people feel part of the community and that they are appreciated. A
member should be defined as someone who actively and directly contributes to
a release or to the welfare of the community. That does not mean that
members have to be coders or involved in package maintenance. Other tasks
for example, could just as easily be translation, QA testing, community
organizers, or documentation writers.

All should be equally important with no one person being accorded more
status than another in a different role.

Financial or material support should not be grounds for membership.
Although they are certainly appreciated, sponsors should not make decisions.
We have seen the results of that in the past, and the accusations that get
thrown about. However, just to be absolutely clear, if a sponsor stepped up
and offered to pay certain individuals for their work on Devuan or to add
specific features, I have absolutely no problem with that - even if no one
else gets paid for their work.

Member consensus should have significant influence on decision making.
Ultimately, however, I am not advocating a democracy or voting membership
like Debian. I am only suggesting an advisory group from among the general
members to advise the core team of developers. The sole purpose of an
advisory group is to make sure that the core developers never lose touch
with everyone else, not make decisions.

The core team should be chosen by themselves based on merit from the general
membership who has to have been with Devuan for at least 1 year. The core
team should really make the important decisions, because quite frankly, they
have the real experience, and have been in for the long term.

t.j.


-----Original Message-----
From: Hendrik Boom [mailto:hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2015 7:28 PM
To: dng@???
Subject: [Dng] Devuan governance

(changed the Subject to reflect thread drift)

On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 11:53:01PM +0000, Nuno Magalhães wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 10:44 PM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???>
wrote:
> > until they've been a
> > member
>
> What constitutes Devuan membership?
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Good question.

At the moment, decisions seem to be taken by the Veteran Unix
Administrators.
And the appear to be doing a good job, listening to the people on the
mailing list, buf making thir own decisions based on their own needs and the
technical exigencies. Considering that their needs are, lrgely, the needs
of the systemd refugees that define this loose grouping of users, this is
working now.

For the long run, it's not clear what we want. Who should be represented,
or whether there should be any kind of voting or democracy at all.

This has, historically, been the hard part of having a successful
revolution. Deciding what the new regime should be, rather them merely
being against the old.

Of course, one great difference between this and the revolutions we have
learned about in history books (sometimes written by the winners) is the the
devuan constituency is not defined by geographical boundries. Debian is
being forked. SO can Devuan be forked. It's this forkability that can make
autocratic rule work -- ultimately, there are no real autocrats.

-- hendrik