Foundation thoughts

To the best of my knowledge, we've never voted on the bylaws. In principle it
would suffice to have the trustees vote on it, but I'd really prefer that we
have a general vote on them. We can combine that vote with the vote for
trustees, presumably. That said, we may want to consider revising the bylaws
some. Last year we decided that all active devs who'd been with Gentoo for one
year were eligible to be foundation members, so our list of members is much
larger than that of the Python Software Foundation, which served as the source
for our current bylaws. For example, it seems unlikely that we're going to be
able to attract a quorum of 1/3 of the members and the required annual meeting.
Also, the current rule is that new members must be nominated by an existing
member, a membership application has to be filed by the person wanting to be a
member, and a majority of existing members must vote to approve a new member.
Assuming that last year's system was more in line with what we want, then
perhaps what we really want is a requirement that foundation membership be tied
to Gentoo devship (presumably continuing the must-be-a-dev-for-a-year rule). A
much more minor issue: the bylaws require a corporate seal; do we really need
one? I suspect there are other things we're going to want to change, too.

As far as elections go, it would be good to have new trustees in place before
our fiscal year ends (which is 30 June, I believe). This last year we started
with 13 trustees, and we finish the year having lost at least three, and
several others have contributed rather little during the last year. I'd really
like to see the number of trustees drop dramatically. The major issues for the
upcoming trustees are going to be: (a) moving the corporation to a state that
doesn't require a member to live there, (b) continuing to assert our
intellectual property rights (thanks Swift for all of your work on this area),
(c) move banking away from netbank, (d) make some sort of decision on copyright
transfer, and (e) get some sort of real budget put together, and (f) other
things that escape me right now. Of course, this list is fairly similar to last
year's list, which is not so good, although during the last year we saw a
complete transfer of all IP from Gentoo Technologies, Inc to the Foundation,
seemant, ramereth, klieber, and dmwaters all worked with our legal folks to
address copyright transfer issues, but it's such a complicated problem that we
still lack a definitive solution (I believe), we have a funding process in
place (thanks to spyderous, if I recall correctly), and we even have the Gentoo
name registered (in the US) as a registered trademark. Nonetheless, I really
think the foundation would benefit from having a much smaller number of
trustees, like five, with an expectation that if a trustee becomes inactive a
new trustee takes that person's place in a reasonably short period of time.

I'm sure there's more that I should mention, but that's all that I can think of
right now.

Still around

Just a note that I'm still around. Indeed, I've clearly decided that I now have
too much free time on my hands, since I've volunteered to be a mentor for
Summer of Code students. It should be fun!

Foundation elections should be happening sometime "soon", which means a lot
needs to be done to make that process be not quite so dead. I'll have an update
on that later this weekend.

Voted!

I just submitted my ballot for the inaugural Gentoo council. Of course, I have
the option to change my ballot until the end of the month, but I probably
won't, so I'm essentially done with it.

Thanks once again to Aron Griffis for our nicely functional voting software.

First Gentoo council election

As the polls are about to open for the election of the first Gentoo council, I
thought I'd take the opportunity to share my thoughts about the council. Since
I'm one of the election officials, I need to remain impartial, but at the same
time I'm the person who created the blasted thing, so I feel like I should also
state my opinions about what I think the council should be.

My hope is that the soon-to-be-elected council will represent the best of
Gentoo. These people should be wise in the ways of Gentoo, first and foremost.
It is the council who will set gentoo-wide policy, and thus hard-earned
knowledge of what works, what doesn't, and why things do or don't work seems
essential.

The new council members should be trusted and respected by a large swath of the
community. The council sets policy, but policy is useless if devs refuse to
follow it, which is likely if the council members are not trusted by the devs
to know what they're doing. A trusted and respected council, on the other hand,
will have the "moral authority" of having been elected by their peers to enact
sane and essential policies. Presumably such trust and respect comes from
having a track record of significant accomplishments within Gentoo.

Besides being accomplished, the new council members also need to be dedicated.
Although I don't expect serving on the council to be an immense amount of work,
it does require that the council members hold at least one open meeting per
month, and all council members are expected to attend (or provide a proxy).
That's really the minimum requirement, though. The real measure of a council is
going to be the council's ability to keep Gentoo moving on track. Right now a
number of projects are stalled because they require cross-project decisions to
be made, and that desperately needs to end.

The new council members need to have vision. As members of the first Gentoo
council, these members will set the tone for councils to come. To a significant
extent, the success or failure of this new metastrucure depends on the
accomplishments (or lack thereof) of this new council.

Best of luck to all of the nominees.

Running a condorcet election

Here's a quick write-up on what needs to be done (from a technical standpoint)
to run one of the Gentoo Condorcet elections. Since these elections are ones
that only involve Gentoo devs, we handle authentication by the simple process
of running the election on dev.gentoo.org, collecting and counting the ballots
that eligible devs create and store in their home directories on that machine.

We use agriffis's code to handle ballot distribution and vote collection and
counting, and that code lives in ~agriffis on d.g.o. The necessary code is
~agriffis/votify (which uses ~agriffis/elections/Votify.pm) and
~agriffis/countify. An election needs three files to run: ballot-$name
(where $name is the name of the election--"council2005" in the most recent
case), a randomized version of which will be distributed to voters,
officials-$name which lists the voting officials (specifically the Gentoo
usernames of the officials, one per line), and voters-$name which lists
eligible voters (again listing the usernames of the voters, one per line). This
last list is generally obtained from devrel, although for a gentoo-wide vote
getent passwd | cut -d: -f1 > voters-$name suffices. One also needs to
touch the files start-$name and stop-$name with the start and stop
dates (and times) for the election. Currently all of these files must reside
in ~agriffis/elections, but that will hopefully change when somebody has a
bit of time to put into doing some recoding. All of this is done before the
polls open, and infra copies or links /usr/local/bin/votify from
~agriffis/votify (if the link doesn't already exist), but nothing needs to
be done to officially "open" or "close" the polls, since that's what the
start-$name and stop-$name files are for.

After the polls close, somebody from infra runs (as root on d.g.o) perl
~agriffis/countify --collect $name to collect all of the ballots. Then each
official runs perl ~agriffis/countify --rank $name to count the ballots.
Not only are the results reported (of course), but the master ballot (which
resides in the officials' results-$name directory as master-$name) is
mailed out. Also, voting confirmation e-mails are mailed out, which agriffis
has done using the following one-liner from the results-$name directory:

while read num user; do grep -q "confirmation $num" master-$name
|| continue; (echo "To: $user@gentoo.org"; sed
"s/^INSERT.*/Your confirmation number is $num./" email; )
| /usr/lib/sendmail -oi $user@gentoo.org; done < confs-$name

So far I've spent about five minutes getting this upcoming election ready to
go. Thanks, agriffis!

Taking a break

Well, we have signed copyright and trademark transfer agreements now, but
I don't know if we've managed to resolve the issue about the copyright
assignment forms that some devs signed. Time will tell, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, in my roles as trustee and ombudsman it seems that I'm doing
a pretty good job of irritating all sides of a number of disputes while
actually accomplishing essentially zip. so I think it's time for a break.

Back in a week or so.

Foundation stuff

Every now and then I remember that I'm a Gentoo Foundation trustee, and I do
some actual work to that effect. We now have an actual bank account with
money in it, and I even have a debit card from the bank. Unfortunately, it
seems that our bank and PayPal don't play well together. Worse, our bank
requires a US social security number for anybody who can access the account,
which is not exactly helpful for our non-US trustees. So, if anybody has a
favorite bank that can easily be accessed online, allows read-only (or other
limited) access, and works well across national borders, please do let us
know.

I've also been pushing to get some sort of membership policy for the
Foundation. We need to hold elections for a new board of trustees within a
month after the Foundation's date of incorporation, and that means by
mid-June. To elect a new board we really need to have members. So that begs
the question, who should be a member? There's a straw poll being taken now,
and we'll see what it has to say.

In my spare time, I've been working on getting a copyright transfer agreement
put together so that Gentoo Technologies, Inc can transfer copyrights (and
also some trademarks, some equipment, and a smattering of domain names for
good measure) to the Gentoo Foundation, Inc (the non-profit). It looks like
we're reaching a consensus there between the trustees and Gentoo Technologies.
I don't suggest holding one's breath, but I think we're almost there.