[seul-edu] Managing the coalition--membership

[Doug Loss <drloss@home.com>]

We've got some increasingly concrete ideas about what the coalition
should do and what it should look like, but we haven't yet talked
about its day-to-day management.  That's what I'm going to do now.
These are my ideas, not my dictat, so I'm not going to couch
everything in "I think" and "I believe."  Just assume that those
words are in every paragraph, and feel free to discuss and disagree
with any point I make.

First thing: who gets to be a member of the coalition?  Membership
should be by groups, not by individuals.  Individuals can, and ought
to be, members of one or more of the groups in the coalition, but
not members of the coalition itself.  The coalition doesn't do much
of the actual work of promoting free resources in education.  It
just provides a unified face to the various groups for the outside
world to see, and gives them an easy means of communicating among
themselves.  Individuals should be where the work is, in the member
groups.

What are the criteria for membership?  A member group must be
furthering the advancement of free resources into the educational
field in some way.  That could be by providing educational software
that runs on Linux, providing discussion fora for educators and
techies on using free software and other resources in the schools,
providing documentation on using such resources, contracting support
services for such resources, etc.  We should have a broad definition
of this, but not bend over backward to make every group that might
conceivably want to join fit in.  For example, if some project
writing a first-person shooter game for Linux wanted to join the
coalition on the idea that some students might enjoy playing the
game in a school computer lab, I'd say they haven't met the
requirement.

A qualifying group would agree to post an agreed-upon logo and the
text, "A member of the Schoolforge coalition" prominently on it's
website and promotional literature.  Again, we should interpret this
broadly rather than have hard and fast requirements for a specific
size and position on a site's front page.  It would also agree to
post a press release to Linux PR or the equivalent announcing its
joining the coalition.

Along with this each group will post a list of links to the major
coalition areas on its website, in some non-obscure area.  This
could be on the front page, or on some linked page, or could be just
a front page link to the coalition website.

Groups in the coalition would need to be active, defined as having
their website/CVS/documents/whatever-their-primary-project-is
updated at least once every X months, where X is a number agreed on
by the coalition (I'd think 3-6).  Groups not meeting that
requirement would be declared inactive members, with no vote in
coalition management (I'll get to that later) until they do begin
updating things again.  After a similar period as inactive members,
groups would be removed from the coalition.

--
Doug Loss                 Always do right.  This
Data Network Coordinator  will gratify some people
Bloomsburg University     and astonish the rest.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain