Draft of new associated-project-howto for review

[Henrik Ingo]

A few comments based on my recent experience with Drizzle becoming and
Associated project:

In general I think the old material was fairly good already. I always
felt SPI was easy to approach and it was clear what to expect.

But things can always be improved so here are a few ideas:

1) Enumerating SPI services up front is great - exactly what one wants
to know first. ("Why" before "How"). Please add registering and
holding domain names to intangible assets, I think it's a very
important service. Many projects essentially are the .org website that
they have.

2) A thing that is not mentioned at all is liability protection of
individual developers.

As an example, SFC says this:
When a project joins Conservancy, it formally becomes part of the
Conservancy. (The project is thus somewhat analogous to a division of
a company or a department in a large agency.) As such, project leaders
benefit from some amount of protection from personal liability for
their work on the project.
(http://sfconservancy.org/members/services/)

Possibly there's some similar benefit in joining the SPI too, for
instance money is not transferred through anyones individual bank
account and SPI also signs the contracts. On the other hand I don't
see that SPI is the kind of organisation that takes responsibility for
the actual code being produces, e.g. SPI isn't liable for things like
copyright or patent infringement lawsuits.

Whatever the SPI's position on that is, it could be good to clarify.

3) Liaison

The Howto effectively recommends or at least suggests a simple model
where a Liaison appoints himself and then his successors.

When we joined, Josh Berkus recommended we adopt a model which also
includes an appointing council, yet is similarly lightweight and self
appointing in spirit:

4. Henrik Ingo is recognised by SPI as the authoritative decision maker and
   SPI liaison for Drizzle.  Successors will be appointed by simple majority
   vote of the Drizzle SPI Council.  The Drizzle SPI Council will initially
   consist of Brian Aker, Lee Bieber, Stewart Smith, Monty Taylor, and Henrik
   Ingo, and may fill vacancies on the Council by majority vote of the
   remaining Council members on resignation or absence of any Council member.

This model has many advantages over a single self appointed person
having all control, but doesn't really add any overhead in normal
circumstances. I'd recommend to template this format and suggest it as
an alternative (or the primary?) model of appointing a liaison.

Also, please link to the pages on postgresql.org and debian.org that
outline how they elect their liaison. If a project wants to learn
about more elaborate governance models, those are great examples to
look at.

henrik

On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 7:16 PM, Robert Brockway <robert at spi-inc.org> wrote:
> Hi all.  I personally feel that the associated-project-howto could be made
> clearer.  I also read a few threads on various forums where some people had
> expressed confusion over certain aspects of how SPI works, even after
> reading the associated-project-howto.
>
> I've written a new version which I'm submitting here for review.  It can be
> found here:
>
> http://www.spi-inc.org/drafts/associated-project-howto/
>
> The changes I've made include:
>
> * Rewritting the document to be in the 3rd person
> * Rewritting certain sections to be clearer
> * Putting information on services offered at the top[1]
> * Rearranging large sections to be consistent with the new structure
> * Adding more headers to stop it easier to find a relevant section.
>
> [1] Projects considering applying for associated project status will want to
> answer 'why' before they answer 'how'.
>
> I stress this is solely my work and is not endorsed by the SPI board.  I
> hope that this (or something close to it) meets with the approval of the
> contributing members and the board.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rob
>
> --
> Email: robert at spi-inc.org               Linux counter ID #16440
> IRC: Solver (OFTC & Freenode)
> Web: http://www.spi-inc.org
> Director, Software in the Public Interest (http://spi-inc.org/)
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>



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