@robb,
Just been listening to the SUSE video and reading the contents of this thread, I am happy to see that NS is taken the issues surrounding governance seriously.
I will be very interested to see how this idea progresses over the next couple of months.
This could very well work. Just to be complete here you can find info on trustlevels in Discourse: An Explanation of Trust Levels
Member (2)
Members keep coming back to the site, and have participated long enough to earn complete citizenship.
They come back often enough that you know you’ll see them again soon – they can be trusted to be present enough to actively participate and be held accountable.
They can get to trust level 2 by…
visiting at least 15 days, not sequentially
casting at least 1 like
receiving at least 1 like
replying to at least 3 different topics
entering at least 20 topics
reading at least 100 posts
spend a total of 60 minutes reading posts
*Users at trust level 2 can…
Use the “Invite others to this topic” button for one-click onboarding of new users to participate in topics
Invite outside users to PMs making a group PM
Daily like limit increased by 1.5 Ă—Hi @robb,
thanks for this great thread and all your work you’ve done for it.
What do you think about to sent a link to this discussion at a newsletter-mail to involve more people.
In my opinion it is a very important topic and as more people are involved as more it represents the meaning of the whole community.
PS: Next days I try to collect and write down what in my opinion the tasks of the community are.
Didn’t @alefattorini start a news letter styled mailing list early last year?
What ever happend with that idea?
I haven’t gone through everything yet, but with regards to the Governance question - I think that OpenSuse is the closest to what we trying to achieve and it would be a good model or starting point to base Nethserver’s Governance off.
Of course! This year too 
March issue is coming, I just put the topic on the list
I love the discussion and what I think matters most is
I’m ok with the board and the vote only if it’s clear what board members should do on the daily basis.
Given that they should serve the community and not the way around
I have to agree with @alefattorini, I do beleive that the NS open source community shouldn’t be overly-structured and should be able to examine, consider and give a fair hearing to any critiques or comments (as well as apprecation) that is expressed by more junior members of the community.
Very well stated @alefattorini and @medworthy.
A simple and transparent and not over-structured is definitely the way to go.
Good advice here from Jono Bacon
recommend you start with a simple board of 3 – 5 people whose charter is focused on general community matters (e.g. handing sponsor funds, how the community is moderated, publishing policy etc). For technology communities, the board would not have any technical authority: that is for the developers to decide (this avoids impacts on engineering agility). You could grandfather in the initial board members, have them meet every month on a public channel, and log outcomes on a wiki. After a set period of time, open up nominations, and form the first independently elected board.
What do you think @robb ?
I support the idea of a lean governance board. The idea underlines the professional approach of the current development team and the “evangelists”.
Before it is established, the objetives and the “business value” should be clearly defined.
Objectives could be:
Possible business values in the figurative sense
Please take this only as suggestions for reflection. I do not know enough about the current structures and methods already in use.
Regrads, Marko
I recently noticed the @support_team started to build some internal rules and I think their work is a model for our entire community.
This was just an idea. Today I’m thinking differently, I think about groups
The “those who do decide” principle can become reality once group membership rules and scope is defined.
As someone else has already proposed (@m.traeumner?) , the new @board_team can be composed by members of other groups. I’d grant the right to vote board members only to members of other groups.
In other words the NethServerian citizenship can be awarded by people that contribute. We must work to make contributing easy, straight and effective.
People that contributed in the past become “emeritus”. They should always be welcome when they get the time to come back here. Joining their old group should be even simpler!
I tend to agree with @davidep. If we adopt the policy of : “those who do, are those who decide” then it makes sense to make the @board_team from votes from all the other teams.
We do have to consider the backdraws. In Jo Freeman’s anarchy of structurelessness, the big red flag is: creation of islands of power. Aren’t we creating those when we adopt this?
How can we propagate the need for members to join a team and be active? (besides the things we already do with activating people through mentions etc…)
To make such a construction work it there must be very low barriers for people to actually start joining groups. I love the ideas posted for the @support_team and I do think they should be adopted for all other teams too. Maybe they need some polishing but it sure is a good start.
Yes you are right, I mentioned this:
but @robb’s statement is right too.
As I wrote my answer at the other thread I thought about 1 person of every group that represents the group and their interests, so we have a speaker for every group. Of course it’s an island.
An other easy rule can be:
Everybody active since x days can be voted.
But who has the right to vote? In my opinion it should be the whole community for this scenario.
I think it is fair to limit voting rights to a certain degree of commitment in the community. Just like political elections, not everybody is allowed to vote. In political elections minors are not allowed and I think in most countries anyone without a legal status to live in the country isn’t allowed either.
We could adopt this by not allowing member level 0 (non legal/too short time/without activity residents?) and member level 1 (minors) to vote for @board_team
I think it is either this or election/representation by 1 member of each team.
Again, the role of the @board_team should be very limited. The community should be run through activity of all the members: Those who act, are those who decide. If you are not satisfied with a decision, make work of alternatives and convince others of your ideas and (more important) actions.
Just another thought on the option to let the @board_team be represented by 1 member of each team.
How many teams are we talking about? What if we get 25 different language teams? Or like we have now an @education_team, there arise several other special groups (for example SoHo users, NGO’s, java specialists, etc…) There can be several dozens of different groups… I see this as a possible inconsistent base for the community governance setup.
IMO this could be avoided by giving those groupmembers a vote instead of representation by one of their team members.
Well, let me push the group idea a little further
There can be as many groups as people want in our community. By time they should reach a mature shape, where we consider them official groups. Such groups have some basic traits, I’d say just to start
Citzens here are “Nethserverians”: to be a Nethserverian, one must be member of an official group.
A special group, let’s call it board_team is elected by Nethserverians among other Nethserverians. I don’t want to put constraints on the number of members from each group. The board_team
This basic structure can grow up as necessary. So far, it is partially implemented in our community.
Absolutely, no! I think this structure encourages contributions. IMO anyone who respects our community rules and contributes back, even with a little contribution, is a NethServerian.
I’m not sure anymore the Discourse platform can help us with its trust levels. They are a really cool and automated feature. It gives an idea of what someone has done. Anyway, I’d prefer to follow what the Support Team is pioneering for us: discussions of easy membership rules, enforced by group coordinators/owners.
Edit
List of groups NethServer Community
I like this approach!
The reason I mentioned Discourse member levels was to have some kind of maturity for members with voting rights. But I agree that your approach is a lot better: those who do and participate gain voting rights. I think we all can agree that granting voting rights to an account that has just been created 1 day before an election, is something to avoid. A person could create many accounts and then rig the elections.
I also agree completely in the amount of groups: that is not important, as long as they are active and organized.
This way we create a very organic and active organization around the community.
The 15th of April is behind the corner, but I still see a little debate. Do you think we need a time extension?