[RadioExam Dev] charter ready to send to the board?

[Ian Kluft]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 03:07:12PM -0800, Heather Stern wrote:
> I've dug up the "SIG Charters" section of the bylaws-in-plain-English to use
> as a checklist.

The checklist already has all the charter requirements checked at
   http://wiki.sbay.org/twiki/bin/view/SIGs/RadioExamIncubationChecklist

> Summary:  it looks like we've got all the parts, I only saw one spot where
> we might want to tune it up.

> We might want to say "oversees the SIG" and "are officers of this SIG" since
> some people reading too fast might think "the organization" somehow refers
> to Sbay as a whole, [...]

The definitions section already defines "the corporation" as SBAY.
Since the charter uses "the organization" in places to refer to RadioExam,
it can be added to the definitions to clear that up.

> The duties we currently describe are the vague minimum "here to do what the
> SIG needs to do, per its bylaws and the parent org's requirements".  Would
> we like to call out any particular roles?  Or come up with them as a charter
> amendment later?
> 
> A possible role might be whoever's at the heart of the source-control
> software, this being a software dev SIG.

The Steering Committee is already given the authority to create volunteer
positions and appoint volunteers to them.  The allows the organization
to evolve as needed without amending the charter every time.

Since this is intended to be an Open Source Software project, the use of
a Steering Committee is modeled after the "Project Management Committee"
(PMC) used by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) for each of its projects.

> [+]       * a title for their leader
> We seem to be defaulting to "SIG Coordinator". If that's ok I'm ok with it
> too.

"SIG Coordinator" is required by the bylaws to be defined in the charter.
It can refer to any name.  We just used Coordinator.

ASF has a "PMC Chair" appointed by their Board of Directors.  We differ
in allowing each SIG to choose their own officers and coordinator.
ASF actually requires that the PMC Chair has to be a vice president of
their corporation.  (So they have a huge number of vice presidents.)
We require that SIG officers be members of our corporation.  Those
requirements are all to ensure that the project is legally part of the
corporation.

> by one level of indirection;  its Steering Committee is elected, then its
> Committee selects one among themselves to be Coordinator.  It can be argued
> that this is the reason that its Steering Committee members all need to be
> corp members too, because they all need to qualify for the Coordinator post
> - even if we didn't require it per the item below.

It doesn't say this so it needs to be added.  The Steering Committee was
not supposed to be an annual term - appointments to the Steering Comittee
are indefinite.

Members of RadioExam are all the developers or operational participants.

ASF has indefinite terms for its projects.  Open Source projects usually
do not elect their leadership - those who participate work their way up
in meritocracy style.

> [*]     (It does not require: how the SIG accepts members of its own.)
> 
> However, this charter does list it, and the description looks good to me.

SIGs are not all required to be organized as membership organizations.  On
some projects, it wouldn't necessarily make sense.  In this one, it does.