[Koha-devel] Re: Koha steering committee

[Rachel Hamilton-Williams]

Hi,

Firstly appologies for not getting back to you on this earlier in the week, and 
for likely missing most of the meeting today.  

My biggest question would be "what are the problems we're trying to solve"

If we can write those down in a coherant fashion then we can see if a board 
will solve them. 


I went and had a look at the Apache and Gnome committee/board sites 
(after I asked who else worked like this), and found the following things 
interesting.

1/. One of the prime reasons (given) for setting up a foundation (and they 
implied board but that my not be the case) was so that other organisations 
could contribute finacially to a central fund, that would then pay programmers.

2/. They only let people who have contributed be members and elect and be 
on the board.  Which is a bit different to what you're suggestiong.

3/. They weren't big on having people who were "just" users on the board etc.

> We're proposing an oversight board (steering committee) for koha.  The
> board would be elected by the body of koha developers, users, and
> related people. (We want to include people into the general body
> rather than excluding them, but probably need to think about
> controlling membership somehow.)
 
> The board should be responsible for activities such as:
>   * choosing functionality targets for upcoming releases
>   * making policy decisions regarding koha
>   * organizing a koha presence at trade shows and the like
>   * acting as a liason with outside groups and foundations (GNOME,
>     KDE, Apache, ALA, etc.) where needed
>   * creating guidelines for granting developer access to the koha cvs
>     tree

If we need to fund some of these activities (I don't know if we do or not) then 
we may need to set up Koha as a charity.

> The board should meet weekly or bi-weekly (via irc?) and post minutes of
> their meetings to the koha (and koha-devel?) mailing lists and to the koha
> wiki.
> 
> To reduce potentially improper concentrations of power, only 2
> representatives from any organization should be allowed to serve on
> the board at a time (e.g., a company providing development or support
> for koha, or a library using koha).
> 
> For now, the board should be something like this:
>   4 developer seats
>   4 librarian seats
>       These 8 positions should serve 2 year terms, and half of them
>       should be up for re-election any given year.  (In the first
>       election, half of the developer and half of the librarian seats
>       should be elected for a 1 year term.)
>   3 at-large seats
>       The three at-large seats should either serve 1 year terms or
>       staggered 3 year terms.

I think thats too many people.  Particularly meeting via IRC that's a lot of 
people to meet.  I'd rather see a smaller committee, but have meetings open 
to observers or something similar.

> The board members should elect a chair person from within their
> number, Chairs chould serve a one year term.

cheers

Rachel

_____________________________________________________________

Rachel Hamilton-Williams             Katipo Communications            
WEBMISTRESS                          ph  021 389 128 or +64 04 934 1285 
mailto:rachel at katipo.co.nz           PO Box 12487, Wellington
http://www.katipo.co.nz              New Zealand
Koha Open Source Library System
http://www.koha.org