Association. Comments on some definitions.

Technical committee, council and all-active-developers (“cooker”) definitions and their relations. Suggestions to discuss.

This occasion is used to once more invite all active developers to enter Association and speak out (even they are not members) about any concerns they have. Association is to serve these concerns and solve issues, this is exactly why it was founded.

Result summary:

Here are some main definitions, which were agreed.

Definition for clarity:

Cooker community = OpenMandriva Association.  (This means, there exists just one community, involving everybody. There is no separate “cooker” community).

This includes developers, translators, artwork people, marketing people, etc. Everyone that likes or contribute, including users, testers, those who do support – is part of this broader community (community is a term to refer to the active devs, inactive developers and users and sporadic contributors)

Any contributor/member/developer/manager could be free will contributor or paid by sponsors through the Association.

Everyone has the same chances and no one is going to be protected or treated in any special way.

Some notes on wording and extras:

Cooker is OMA’s, but contribution is open

Cooker is also the active/rolling development of the OMA project.

It is also meant to be a base for other projects outside of OMA’s scope (it’s more inclusive of people who want to use the code base to build something else).

The project predates the association, and MDV saying they were giving the project to the community predates the association. The association was set up to help support the project. It could potentially support other projects too if it wanted.

It’s possible to contribute in the community and have no involvement with the association.

TC (Technical committee).

The TC is a form of representation inside the cooker community.

Currently TC involves all active developers.

The next TC (whenever it comes, tomorrow or much later) is to be the most valuable and experienced members, or natural born leaders that take the front.

Who can be in TC?

The members of the “cooker community” who are also OMA member,  (s)elected by “cooker community”  (with some possible argumented recommendations from council). TC acts as the projects engine and communicator with all other involved parties, including council, and takes the technical responsibilities. Veto power (if needed in some extreme case not easily solvable) on decisions and selection of members is a shared responsibility of the council (representing the majority of the community that shares the same ideas) and the TC itself, that regulates the technical responsibilities.

(TC members need to be OMA’s members. There are exceptions possible, given full mutual agreement (cooker including council).

(to be defined ASAP with cooker: exact roles, who should be in the TC (from the point of view of functions, next step asap: ideas for candidacies).

Project leader (s).

Members of the TC, responsible for overall route and development. Take decisions based on extensive consultations with cooker members. Take the RESPONSIBILITY for decisions in case of conflicts or attempts of hijack. If it can solve it by itself, or the decision taken is in conflict with other TC members, a joint decision need to be taken, reverting the power to the unity of the community.

Council:

The directive body of the Association, responsible for coordinating overall work and resources. Important to remember: council consists of members of the association, and is designed to represent everybody in the Association, and is elected by the members.

Council does not have own opinion as such, these people are elected to represent members (this means, that when council speaks, it is not just a blunt group of people out of nowhere: they were elected to represent community. They do not produce their own opinions, they represent).

2.    Association as an entity: why founded, for whom and it’s functions

Membership in OMA is free and open to anybody, no obligations or restrictions. OMA’s goal is to make the project’s distro successful (by providing resources, infrastructure, marketing, attracting sponsors, etc.).

Normally OMA members should include both all cooker community + other non technical contributors.

We use this chance to say once again: contributors are most welcome to join OMA, the association was founded to serve your needs. Become a member and influence decisions, elect your representatives, participate and form the common work with your input and opinion.

If anybody was bypassed with invitation so far, we apologize, this was not the intention. Association is young, it all just starts. Doors are wide open.

The association is representing a lot of people that share the same vision for the future of the, soon to be, best linux distro of the world

Normally all cooker community should be OMA members if they share the goal to make the distro successful.

3. Distro name issue.

The temporary solution is go with a distro with no name for

Now. We still don’t have the appropriate technical resources (support on ABF) in place to a multi-name/multi-spin distro right now, and we never discussed this topic thoroughly so can we agree on having no-name now, not to go into that? The issue caused enough trouble already.

Reason is simple: if we were to decide now, how would we do that? Vote? By who?

Just decision of several people? Who?

We can make support on ABF  for shared packages with different spins to support generating multiple distro, changing even the name, and we probably want to include some discussion on how our merit ( based on xxxx TM) should be approached.

So whatever spin we want, we need support on ABF first and then we can even let the RPM patched to be “nothing” , and the spins can tag the names appropriately depending on the platform used to compile

So, no name for now, until we can find a proper way to do it.

We could call the distro cooker, or some other fancy codename.

And each spin can name the ISO and artwork the way they want.

There is a suggestion to have Innominata (Latin for noname) as temporary name. Most people in a meeting said they are in favor of it, however, a separate discussion will be started by Gmoro in cooker ML for that.

Update: Joao Patricio drafts a suggestion on rules, how we choose the name. Draft to be discussed all together (details of procedure to come soon). The target is to have the rules and fully common community decision on the name before the release is out. For the moment “Innominata” takes the place as a placeholder.

Attention! If the topic is important for you, please follow it in general ML and the blog,  in order to supply your opinion on time.

4.    Recent conflict, summary from Association and suggestion for discussion/closing the topic.

Postponed to next week. Gmoro will post an agenda and confirm the time.