Thanks for keeping this clean. Question for the Board:

Many useful and good points about constructing bylaws, were made by people (like lma) here. Some were accepted and incorporated, but IIRC most, not - many were commented as "it's a feature, not bug" by former Council, that was working on bylaws up to now. Of course, controversies about feasibility of such proposed changes, remains (explanations by Council wasn't always satisfactory)

Here goes my question: How Board plan to work on bylaws? Is it going to be constructed in "authoritarian" way, like formerly by Council - i.e. suggestions accepted/rejected/modified by Board, or some FOSS-like way of "crowdsourcing" construction of bylaws will apply? (task force for this task, resembling steering group, or any other way of more direct incorporation of Community's ideas)?

Of course, what's above is just pack of ideas - generally, I would like to know how Board like to proceed, with process of creating Bylaws.

/Estel

I'm pretty sure all explanations presented addressed all the issues people have had, with the possible exception of those in the past week or so. There is nothing major in the document that has been challenged and not discussed and updated.

I don't think you quite grasp what's been going on here. This has not been some exercise of what might be... The Board doesn't have time to re-do this whole process and re-write bylaws from scratch. They must legally put bylaws into effect during their first meeting. There will be no "task force" or "steering group" setup to work on them while they continue on with no rules. That's not how the law works.

The current draft, with whatever minor updates come from the reviewing lawyer for legal purposes, will likely be what is adopted and voted into place. After that, the built in amendment process is the only proper way to make changes. The document has been out there for review for months, and has had quite a bit of review already, enough for over 7 overhauls.

The past few days have been trying for me. Between work, health, and the emergency situation going on in the north-east US right now, I've not had time to work on this as I did in the past. For that I'm sorry, but there's not much I can do to control that.

If there are further questions or concerns, please, do address them, preferably with new verbiage that can be cut/paste into the existing current draft. The formal review is going to happen very soon. (It should have already happened, but recent events have delayed that.)

Thanks for explaining. So, there is no chance for release-candidate bylaws posted on wiki (instead of files attached to random posts, flying in all directions), for final review, for a week or two?

Does Board see it as unnecessary? Disclaimer: This isn't meant as "sneaky" accusation. I'm rather asking about "status", not suggesting what should be done or not.

Sure, in my personal opinion, properly wiki'dized final version of bylaws would help much - it may be hard to trace what is current version of bylaws, for people less religi8ously following TMO - but na) it's just my opinion b) I would like to hear more about Board's opinion on that matter.

/Estel

I really think whoever was/is interested in that topic does know the bylaws text, but nevertheless a wiki page with that current documents would be nice.

@Estel
Maybe you could prepare such wiki page and woody adds the current documents?

Sure thing - here is a Quick'n'Dirty wiki page for bylaws:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Bylaws

As per your suggestion, I haven't risked to put actual revision of bylaws, due to not being sure which one is actual - lost orientation in binary attachments flying in all directions so I leave that step to Board/Council combo.

Last section of wiki page is just a skeleton - I've put one thing that I remembered from top of my head, feel free to ad more unresolved, (kinda TODO) yet important matters.

/Estel

I wonder what is the point to have that on wiki. AFAIK wiki will disappear in less than 2 months.

They've been available here for months for review. The posts here had been quite steady, and easy to follow, until people went wildly off-topic and started making baseless personal aligations.

Far from being "flying in all directions", the revisions are easily findable in this thread with a simple thread search for the word "attached". They're also numbered sequentially, so it's easy to tell what the latest revision is. In the last posted revision, I included back links to all the previous posts with revisions in them so they were easier to find.

It's not like they're being hidden somewhere, or you can't read the entire document (in 3 different formats). For each revision there's even a marked up "delta" version. Something not easily doable on the wiki, since the change logs are generally rather terse.

To be clear, I was the first to voice the idea of doing this on the wiki. But there was a valid concern that doing so would allow tons of random changes that may or may not be desirable, requiring extra time to deal with. Time that was promised by another, and then rescinded within an hour, I might add.

Woody, please ...
I do see your points, but from that log I can not read final decision against wiki. I just want to make sure it is easily findable later on so have them added to (maybe buried) wiki would be nice.
So then just put links in wiki to latest revision? (I did so)


Thanks for the work! And think about above proposal?

Because there wasn't one. It was simply a matter that I felt time was better spent discussing the topics here (and dealing with other issues) than transcribing a document from Word into wiki and back several times, maintaining both. And while some will scream "all you need is wiki", wiki doesn't do some things well, including printing in a reasonable format for filing.

If by later on, you mean any time after 3 months from now... These things are somewhat tied together.

Yes, I did see where you updated the wiki page with the link to the documents here, and updated it to include a full revision history. But to transcribe the entire document into wiki would be a bit more time than I have, and I don't really see a point to it. Anyone interested in this can pull down the PDF and read it on their N*[00].


I think the method used so far has been quite adequate. Several changes has been proposed and done both here and on the mailing list. We have full text formatting capabilities here, and the ability to include an explanation and logic behind why one feels the changes are needed. That's simply not as easily done on a wiki, IMHO.

In the end, having this discussion here that can been looked at down the road will be far more useful than knowing who updated what parts without the "why" later on.

That said, if someone wants to take the time to convert this to wiki, the documents are freely available, in their entirety. One could even start with the first available revision and "update" it with sequential edits to bring it up to where it is to maintain history if they like. If anyone has the time and willingness to do so, please, feel free. I simply do not have the time or the desire to do so.

Last time I checked, wiki was something to move (content) into another place. Have I missed something, or are you referring to doubts about success of migrating anything?

As for wiki, I don't agree, that it's hard to keep track of "random changes" - everything is logged, undo-able, and traceable. It worked fine for potential more "tempting" for abuse things - like keeping track of nominations for Community Awards, including already discarded ones. No reason, why bylaws couldn't be posted here, normally.

Also, wiki is much more easy to keep trace on, than "search for word attached" - as revisions were flying in all directions, you can't be sure, which found result is latest actual version (even date may be misleading, as some things could get revoked).
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Generally, working on such important document as Bylaws by binary attachments to poss,t is best way to get low cooperation ratio from Community - which is what we got, actually.

"it have been attached to posts for three months" is just like Hitchhiker guide to Galaxy - announcement about destroying earth was posted in galactic office for many months, too

/Estel