Thank you, Jaromil, I appreciate the specific mention.

My purpose for replying though has little to do with gratitude. While I understand that getting Devuan "off the ground" is the absolute priority, I do believe that most of us are not personally acquainted with D-Cent or how it specifically applies to Devuan's situation. I think that it would be very advantageous that a temporary statement be issued by the VUA outlining a temporary governance of the project, with a more firm framework to be established at a later date. It will settle a lot of questions that people presently have, as well as preventing the diverting of attention away from the work when new people arrive asking questions.

It does not have to be something as extensive or nor as permanent as Debian's Constitution or Social Contract. Just a one page statement would do, and would probably go far in answering a lot of uncertainty. It would also begin legitimizing Devuan to the general public, who might be looking for some solid idea as to how far Devuan has progressed. A lot of the VUA chatter on the list is fairly pedestrian.

I realize that it really is not something that anyone really wants to do - I'm sure you would rather be coding - but sometimes those sort of gestures are important to others.


Thanks
t.j.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jaromil [mailto:jaromil@dyne.org]
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2015 7:46 AM
To: T.J. Duchene
Cc: dng@???
Subject: Re: [Dng] Devuan governance


dear T.J. and others,

thanks for this thread, I think most of us and the VUAs find consensus with the general principles that T.J and others have stated, also regarding the pitfalls of majority voting.

Dyne.org is professionally involved as a research organization in this EU funded project http://d-centproject.eu (FP7/CAPS 610349) focusing on large pilots that also include emerging political parties engaging in direct democracy and open rating systems for reputation and trust.

In the resources section of D-CENT you will also find extensive literature we have already produced on theoretical and technical frameworks that can be adopted in various situations to facilitate "decentralized citizen engagement" and in general participation beyond the canonical framework of XX century democracy as we know it.

I believe the D-CENT project offers solid grounds for innovating governance also in large GNU/Linux distributions as we hope Devuan will be one day. At the very least I hope it will offer experimental grounds that everyone involved will be able to engage, comment upon and adapt since all results are licensed as free and open source.

As Dyne.org continued involvement in Devuan is naturally following, I'm confident we will adopt the tangible results of D-CENT in Devuan, for instance to provide well accessible tools for drafting and deciding on policies.

Right now we obviously have other priorities, but this discussion certainly look at some common direction we will take after the 1.0 release. Ultimately I believe that the literature produced by D-CENT and the mature tones of this discussion are even more solid than a declared "manifesto" or "constitution" at this stage.

ciao


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