Item261: Create a procedure for official community-decisions (120min)

• There have been a couple of situation, where we needed legitimate decisions by the community.
• Examples include:
  • MichaelDaum searched and created a new name with Stefan.
  • MartinSeibert wants to create a logo with his team of Designers (see wiki-page).
  • MartinSeibert wants to set up Google Ads as soon as we have a download page (see wiki-page).

Do the bylays or our our archetype KDE e.V. offer something on this?

First ideas

• Have a duration of 14 days until a voting is over.
• Decide by majority.
• Have public proposals and decide by voting.
• Only real community members (at the moment this would be everybody with a login) can vote.
• ...

---

Sven: Could you deal with that issue? You did a great job preparing the bylaws. Maybe you could take over this one also?

-- MartinSeibert - 30 Nov 2008

Why not use the Feature Proposal process?

With an application very similar in Community Web.

I put myself as Co-Actionee on this one.

• KennethLavrsen - 30 Nov 2008

Now that we have a stable release I will put some attention on this topic.

I posted this on discussion mailing list

On the decision meetings I stopped arranging them after we forked and I have not taken any step to revive them because I still have "burned fingers" from showing up meeting after meeting and seeing that the same 5 shows up.

It just did not work and I do not want to repeat a failure.

I have been thinking about making a new type of virtual meetings that take 24 hours instead of 1.

This may sound odd. But the idea being that items that are up for decision are expressed as topics on Development and Community webs.

Development web using the current feature proposal application. And making a similar application on Community web for community type decisions.

The idea is then to open an IRC channel for 24 hours that people can open and follow (maybe even just use the one we use today) and let the debate be open in a more ad-hoc fashion - maybe with some times where some of us declare we will be there. Votes for and against are added to the proposal topic and after the 24 hours we count and decision is made.

The advantage for this is that it will give people in all time zones a chance to participate on equal terms. Those with family and kids that just cannot make it at a specific one hour meeting can hop on and off during the 24 hours.

The only rule would be that the proposal has to be defined before the 24 hour period and put on an agenda topic. And we need a meeting leader who can decide to defer a decision till next meeting if a decision lacks further information to be taken.

I avoid proposing this on the Foswiki.org site because at the moment is it just an idea and it is nice to discuss it in a media where things "disappear" before trying to make a definition topic in Community web. The old Codev web was too full of silly discussions that noone knew if it was decision or discussion. So I would like some first impression responses (I love it, I hate it, sod off punk, your're the best, I don't care) before I try to make a proposal Community web.

-- KennethLavrsen - 22 Mar 2009

I'm new around here, but it seems this item needs a little push, so i'm adding a my own 50cents here.
Basically i'm using Lavrsen idea and formalize it a bit more into a "state machine".

Start	Owner	The owner creates a Discussion Topic (is there anything like that already?) It should contain something like: * Title : small description of what is being discussed * Context : contextualize the discussion; why is it needed; what triggered it * Goals : what should we get from this discussion (very important to keep the discussion on track and avoid dispersion) * Inputs : data for the discussion (emails, other topics, local comments to the discussion topic) * Date : when will the discussion occur * DeadLine : when a decision must be reached * Participants List : those who are invited to the discussion * Minute : this field will be use to summarize the IRC discussion * Conclusions : what was decided. The owner then makes the invitation to the participants list.
Preparation	Participants	Participants will be notified of the new discussion. They can add information to the topic (in the Input field) which they feel important and helpful to the scheduled discussion. They can also suggest some of th other fields to be updated (Ex:date of discussion), but these fields should only be writable by the Owner.
Discussion	Participants	In the date set for the discussion the IRC channel will stay open for 24 hrs (as described above by Lavrsen).
Summary	Owner	The Owner makes the minute of the IRC, collecting the main conclusions (full conversation can be added as an attachment).

| Close | Owner | The Formally closes the discussion, by filling in the Conclusions.The results of the discussions \ can vary (mostly Actions items) and shall be tracked in the proper web/tool. |

-- RuiProcopio - 13 Oct 2009

BTW, i haven't used foswiki/twiki for a while and i totally forgot how to use it!!! it took me 4hrs just to write the above comment I'm soooooo frustrated

-- RuiProcopio - 14 Oct 2009

I am closing this. I recently updated the process for feature proposals. The rest is handled by the association.

-- KennethLavrsen - 18 Mar 2010