Gluster users - Sep 2013 - Feedback Requested: Gluster Community Governance

Greetings, Gluster people.


tl;dr
 - This is a long description designed to elicit constructive discussion of some
recent Gluster Community governance initiatives. For all things related to
Gluster Community Governance, see http://www.gluster.org/Governance


The recent initiatives around GlusterFS development and project governance have
been quite amazing to witness - we have been making steady progress towards a
"real" open source model for over a year now, and the 3.5 planning
meetings are a testament to that.

You may have also noticed recent announcements about organizations joining the
Gluster Community and the formation of a Gluster Community Board. This is part
of the same process of opening up and making a better, more active community,
but there is a need to define some of the new (and potentially confusing)
terminology.

- Gluster Community: What is the Gluster Community? It is a group of developers,
users and organizations dedicated to the development of GlusterFS and related
projects. GlusterFS is the flagship project of the Gluster Community, but it is
not the only one - see http://forge.gluster.org/ to get a sense of the scope of
the entire ecosystem. Gluster Community governance is different from GlusterFS
project governance.

- Gluster Community Board: This consists of individuals from the Gluster
Community, as well as representatives of organizations that have signed letters
of intent to contribute to the Gluster Community.

- Letter of Intent: document signed by organizations who wish to make material
contributions to the Gluster Community. These contributions may take many forms,
including code contributions, event coordination, documentation, testing, and
more. How organizations may contribute is listed at gluster.org/governance

- Gluster Software Distribution: with so many projects filling out the Gluster
Community, there is a need for an incubation process, as well as a need for
criteria that determine eligibility for graduating from incubation into the GSD.
We don't yet know how we will do this and are looking for your input.

We realized some time ago that there was quite a demand for contributing to and
growing the community, but there was no structure in place to do it. The above
is our attempt to create an inclusive community that is not solely dependent on
Red Hat and enlists the services of those who view the Gluster Community as a
valuable part of their business.

All of this is in-process but not yet finalized. There is an upcoming board
meeting on September 18 where we will vote on parts or all of this.

If you questions or just want to discuss this initiative here, reply to this
email substituting "gluster-users at gluster.org" for
"announce".

For all links and documents regarding Gluster Community governance, you can
always find the latest here: http://www.gluster.org/Governance

Thanks,
John Mark Walker
Gluster Community Leader

_______________________________________________
Announce mailing list
Announce at gluster.org
http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

John Mark,
Thanks for sending this out. It would be good to have more clarification
around some of these points/observations:

- Scope of the governance overview. At the one end the overview document
has a "high level" organizational theme, and on the other hand it
jumps all
the way down to the specifics on how code patches must be voted, with lots
of missing details in between. The proposer / maintainer of the individual
project knows best how to accept patches. We already have multi member
projects other than glusterfs in the forge (e.g gluster-swift,
gluster-hadoop, gluster-samba) which have formed their own governance
models based on the initiators. Maybe voting on code patches is probably
best left out of scope of such a high level document.

- Membership criteria - The first criteria listed for membership is code
contributions. I understand that code contributions alone should not be the
criteria for membership, but the skew of non code contributors to code
contributors ratio in the current board seems a little unbalanced. After
all, open source communities grow around developers and expecting
developers to be at least close to majority in the seed is both natural and
normal. Of course, over time and elections the distribution may organically
evolve into different forms.

- Initial members - It would be good to highlight the contributions and
reasons of selection of the initial members. Some of the names are very
familiar, while some are not known to everyone. I'm sure everybody there
have been selected for having qualified based based on the criteria.
Mentioning those criteria against respective members seems important for
clarity. E.g - X: for super awesome support on IRC, Y: for building a
massive community in their country, etc. Once seeded openly, reasons for
further members would be clear based on the election proceedings.

Thanks,
Avati


On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 11:26 PM, John Mark Walker <johnmark at
gluster.org>wrote:
> Greetings, Gluster people.
>
>
> tl;dr
>  - This is a long description designed to elicit constructive discussion
> of some recent Gluster Community governance initiatives. For all things
> related to Gluster Community Governance, see
> http://www.gluster.org/Governance
>
>
> The recent initiatives around GlusterFS development and project governance
> have been quite amazing to witness - we have been making steady progress
> towards a "real" open source model for over a year now, and the
3.5
> planning meetings are a testament to that.
>
> You may have also noticed recent announcements about organizations joining
> the Gluster Community and the formation of a Gluster Community Board. This
> is part of the same process of opening up and making a better, more active
> community, but there is a need to define some of the new (and potentially
> confusing) terminology.
>
> - Gluster Community: What is the Gluster Community? It is a group of
> developers, users and organizations dedicated to the development of
> GlusterFS and related projects. GlusterFS is the flagship project of the
> Gluster Community, but it is not the only one - see
> http://forge.gluster.org/ to get a sense of the scope of the entire
> ecosystem. Gluster Community governance is different from GlusterFS project
> governance.
>
> - Gluster Community Board: This consists of individuals from the Gluster
> Community, as well as representatives of organizations that have signed
> letters of intent to contribute to the Gluster Community.
>
> - Letter of Intent: document signed by organizations who wish to make
> material contributions to the Gluster Community. These contributions may
> take many forms, including code contributions, event coordination,
> documentation, testing, and more. How organizations may contribute is
> listed at gluster.org/governance
>
> - Gluster Software Distribution: with so many projects filling out the
> Gluster Community, there is a need for an incubation process, as well as a
> need for criteria that determine eligibility for graduating from incubation
> into the GSD. We don't yet know how we will do this and are looking for
> your input.
>
> We realized some time ago that there was quite a demand for contributing
> to and growing the community, but there was no structure in place to do it.
> The above is our attempt to create an inclusive community that is not
> solely dependent on Red Hat and enlists the services of those who view the
> Gluster Community as a valuable part of their business.
>
> All of this is in-process but not yet finalized. There is an upcoming
> board meeting on September 18 where we will vote on parts or all of this.
>
> If you questions or just want to discuss this initiative here, reply to
> this email substituting "gluster-users at gluster.org" for
"announce".
>
> For all links and documents regarding Gluster Community governance, you
> can always find the latest here: http://www.gluster.org/Governance
>
> Thanks,
> John Mark Walker
> Gluster Community Leader
>
> _______________________________________________
> Announce mailing list
> Announce at gluster.org
> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/announce
> _______________________________________________
> Gluster-users mailing list
> Gluster-users at gluster.org
> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/gluster-users
>
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