[CREATE] Libre Graphics Whatever - charter prototype

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/01/2010 12:36 PM, José Cruz wrote:
> Hi! I'm agree with Jon about the differents classes of membership. We are a
> small company (just two persons) in the graphic design world, using only libre
> software, and I think it is interesting to bring more professionals (wich are
> intensive users) to FLOSS.

In the vein of discussions about either insufficient or excessive 
"power" that might come about from various schemes of membership, we can 
consider that there can be some kind of whole-cloth membership for all 
those interested as individuals, then we can have the association also 
consist inside as a number of Sections, each of which could pertain to a 
subgroup, eg, artists/designers, as opposed to another section of 
developers, and others.

The reason for suggesting this is to find a way around simply recreating 
within the organization the same thing we have in the outside world, 
where non-programmer users complain that the developers won't listen to 
their needs/requests, and developers complain that users don't 
understand the constraints of the development process.

This isn't to suggest that a User Section could not have within it some 
developers or that a Developer Section could not have users -- if 
nothing else, there are those who could legitimately claim both kinds of 
activities, as we saw at this year's LGM. Furthermore, one might be a 
member of more than one section.

A section of users might discuss among themselves various feature 
requests or user operability issues so that the best, most coherent 
final requests might be presented to the Developer Section and projects. 
Developers might discuss the feedback from users and the direction 
individual projects are taking to propose improved interoperability, 
then solicit feedback from the User Section to see if these seem worth 
pursuing.

This might also enhance future LGMs by naturally leading to some planned 
BOF-like meetings for individual sections, so that fewer things take 
place in such an ad hoc way.

Greg