Re: A GNU “social contract”?

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Alfred,

On Wed, 2019-11-13 at 13:16 -0500, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> This 'we' that you are talking about is excluding people that are
> capable of making decisions, something you seem to not care about.
> You're not in a position to decide what the GNU project is, or how it
> should be managed.  So please leave it to RMS, the GAC, etc. instead.
> 
> This is not how you make decisions, or drive a fruitful decision
> making process.

Nobody is excluded, all GNU maintainers and developers are welcome to
discuss these GNU governance issues here. And the list is even open to
non-GNU-volunteers. Not everybody might choose to participate in this
early stage though. And it is certainly a difficult process because
governance for a volunteer organization like GNU is just really, really
hard to get right. Especially when you are trying to do it collectively
and publicly. But given that, I believe we are actually making good
progress. We have to start somewhere and the proposed GNU "social
contract" already saw a couple of important revisions (also based on
your own feedback). It might take a couple of more iterations to get to
something that can actually be adopted by developers, maintainers, and
GNU packages. And that only provides the core mission statement. After
that the hard work of actually defining roles and responsibilities, the
governance structure, procedures, working groups, etc. starts. I hope
by that time more people will get involved so we can make these
decisions more collectively.

Cheers,

Mark