Re: Suggestion for XFree86

On Friday 21 March 2003 21:49, Egbert Eich wrote:
>
> A group? Which group?
>
> At times where things are unintentionally or intentionally
> misunderstood I still think this should be rephrased to clearify
> things. We used to have an explicite 'membership' the bylaws
> talk about a membership which has been a topic on this list
> today already. Just to many possibilities.

There a number of different kinds of membership, maybe distinguishing them 
might help the talk:

First social memberships:
1) The group membership in which the other group members recognize a person A 
to be member of the group, but where the person A himself does not consider 
himself part

2) Membership where a person considers himself member of a group, but the 
other group members do not.

3) Full membership, where a person considers himself member of a group, and is 
also considered to be so.

There is also formal group membership which exists only in one flavour. One is 
or is not member of a group. This membership in general does not fully 
correspond to the social membership of a group altough social membership can 
be hard without formal membership.

With most open source projects that I saw there is normal a notion of a core 
group where formal membership can be determined. The main process though is a 
group of social members that is considerably wider than the core group. 
Formal membership of the core group is in general determined by how well the 
person in question is considered to be a full member, and his/her importance 
in the group (this could be influence, but factors like respect also 
determine this).

Formal or core membership is often perceived by people as recognition of their 
group membership and as such plays an important role in maintaining developer 
interest in the project. (opensource developers want to be rewarded like 
everyone else. As humans are social animals they consider peer recognition 
very rewarding.

Besides that core membership is a protection of a group from unwanted 
elements. Within a semi-closed group a form of trust can exist which is 
unable to exist within a completely open group (take a marketplace). It also 
means there is a cost involved (removal from the group) in nonconforming 
behaviour. (And no, I don't have any opinion on KeithP's case as I am not 
well informed on the case. I recognize his objections as such and welcome the 
new wave of openness that seems to have followed this crisis).

So I believe a core group of developers should exist. Maybe there should even 
be multiple group levels or rings to cope with too big amounts of members. 
Looking at a core group of a max of 15 people (many more is unmanageable) 
they should be responsible for overall decisions only. Besides this core 
group I imagine steering groups responsible for parts of the project. 
Examples of such parts are: the font subsystem, each driver, the driver 
architecture, 2d, 3d, build environment. Each of those groups should have 
some level of access to the source, and could even have separate releases.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Researcher
Mail: [email protected]
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

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