Og’s latest blog post links to David Bolter’s blog with a post on “Transparency in Community Decisions”. David writes:

Transparency should be applied to how decisions can get made in FOSS communities. This can involve different layers; for example, transparency could apply to:

  1. Who gets to participate in decision making.
  1. How these people are selected.
  1. The process of decision making.

In FOSS communities I think transparency should apply to all three where reasonably possible. What do I mean by this? Let’s take a couple of examples:

A) Getting hired by a FOSS organization which is integral to the community.

B) Getting commit access to an svn repository.

C) Getting syndication of one’s blog onto a planet/aggregator.

The timing of this couldn’t be better. The Foresight Marketing Team is about to tackle some of these exact tasks, specifically on what it means to become a user and developer within Foresight. This includes perks, such as IRC hostmasks or foresightlinux.org email addresses, but more importantly how to get commit access.

We don’t have all of the answers yet, especially for 1-3 above (other than Ken gets veto power!). But David’s post highlights the need for transparency, not only in how we build these processes, but how we execute them going forward.

We will be having a Marketing meeting sometime in the next week or so, with details to come soon.