[LEDE-DEV] OpenWRT tree vs LEDE tree

[Bjørn Mork]

Daniel Curran-Dickinson <daniel at daniel.thecshore.com> writes:

> I wasn't meaning it to be hostile (the other guy I think was),

who? me? No, grumpy is just my default mode.  I need to work on that.
But I never rant without caring, so "hostile" is not correct.

Anyway, I want to apologize for breaking the "Be nice to eachother"
rule. There is no excuse, so I'm not going to make up any.  It was a
daft thing to do.  Sorry.

Thanks a lot for all the constructive feedback despite my error, which
turned this into a very fruitful discussion after all.  That's a very
good example of the "Be nice to eachother" rule in pratice, having an
extemely positive effect.

As for the examples of open governance in other communities, I'd like to
point to the Linux kernel.  Not because that is a comparable project or
perfect in any ways.  But they do some very good things wrt governance
policies.  Remember that this is a project mostly managed by a small
elite being paid full time to do just that, and with a dictator for life
on the top. Not exactly open by default. Most of the high level plans
and policies are nailed at a yearly summit, open only by invitation to a
limited set of core developers.  If they just did this "the natural
way", then the rest of the community would just see the agenda and the
resulting outcome, and maybe an input paper or two.  But this is where
they don't follow the stream, and instead are an example for all other
open source communities:  

- The summit is announced to everybody (LKML): https://lwn.net/Articles/650226/
- Anyone with a topic of interest can nominate themselves, or be nominated
  by others.
- All discussions of topics and nominations happen on the open and
  archived ksummit-discuss list,  See for example:
  https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/2015-July/thread.html

This really opens up a process which would otherwise appear as extremely
closed.

The LEDE project certainly does some things right, like announcing
meetings on the lede-adm list and keeping the draft agenda public while
it is discussed.  But it would do a lot better if the discussion of the
agenda happened on the mailing list too, instead of just being keyword
edits on a wiki.  If this was complemented with an explicit invitation
for anyone to propose topics, with the possibility of being invited to
participate in the meeting, then I think the process around the meetings
would appear much more open.  Not that I believe it would actually
change much. Both topics and participants would likely be the same.  But
*if* there were some outsider with an interesting topic, then they would
easier see how to get it discussed.

I realize that this is just about appearance.  I know that anyone can
make their case e.g. here, and if it is considered an interesting topic
for a meeting then it will be.  I note for example, that the question I
asked about copyright on makefiles ended up in the agenda of the last
meeting.  But I don't think this is obvious enough to the whole
community.  Statements like "Only committers should change the agenda
and participate in the doodle poll" does not help.  Of course there need
to be some restrictions on who can add topics to the agenda.  But you
should not need to restrict who can propose a topic.  If the invitation
requested topics on the list, and a "program committee" turned them into
an agenda, then you would not have to have any restrictions on
participation.




Bjørn