That's one concern I get from these details:
We're working over the numbers we got from the JCP, which
is great for hard and real values. But those numbers also
reflect a situation where individuals' contributions were very
low, and the environment was considered very "hostile" to them
(well, hostile isn't the correct word, but I can't think of a
better one right now... Counter-productive, maybe?).
Wasn't one of the points of the new Jakarta EE going to be
to drive the community participation up?
If the whole thing is designed for having only a handful or
two of individuals interacting, we'll obviously never have
more than a couple of handfuls of individuals.
I followed the JCP processes for years, and joined as a
member about a year and a half ago. And yet, I never
contributed a single line of code, since I didn't find
anything I could chip in with a worthwhile input.
With the new process of building projects from scratch,
following FOSS tenets, and then standardizing/aggregating them
to the umbrella project as they mature, I thought the idea was
for all of us fence-sitters to be able to actively join in the
advancement of Jakarta EE.
My fear is that, from all the comments explaining the
current charter, I get the vibe of "things worked ok when we
did things this way in the JCP, we're just removing Oracle
from the throne".
And I thought the point was that Oracle having supreme
powers was not the only issue we had with the JCP.
As I said before (many times), I perfectly agree that the
members that pay a fee and add a half dozen contributors to
the project have the right to more power than a single (or a
handful of) individual contributor. I find that to be both
fair and conductive to a project's advancement.
But just having a promise of one seat minimum, and maybe
more if things go well, is not enough.
I can perfectly agree with something similar to Guillermo's
percentage idea. I still consider 10% to be a very low ratio,
but I can agree that 20% is too big if we follow the idea to a
higher number.
We're also forgetting that all these power-shift details do
affect everybody else.
Right now, strategic members get one seat each, while
everybody else just elects a minimum of 1 to 2 seats (with the
hopeful promise of more seats if needed).
We're also forgetting that, for the three non-committer
elected seats, strategic members still have a chance of
getting a second (or more) seats.
All the numbers, together, skewe the power too much to one
side.
For example, if you remove strategic members from any
eligible seat (since they already get one just from being
strategic members), you'd leave the influencer seats to
enterprise members, and participant seats to enterprise and
solutions members.
That way, you'd ensure at least 4 seats to be in the hands
on non-strategic members.
To expand on Guillermo's numbers, how about we assign a
percentage of the seats to each non-strategic membership
category?
That would mean something like (feel free to adjust
numbers):
- Strategic Members: 1 seat each (for a total of 45% of the
seats)
- Influencers: 25% of the seats,
to a minimum of 2
- Participants: 15% of the seats, to a minimum of 1
- Committers: 15% of the seats,
to a minimum of 1
To follow on your 4 strategic members projection (I was
working with the assumption of 6, so we're close there):
- 4 Strategic Member seats
- 2 Influencer Member seats (25% = 2.2)
-
1 Participant Member seat (15% = 1.3)
-
1 Committer Member seat (15% = 1.3)
If
we expand to 6 strategic members:
-
6 Strategic Member seats
-
3 Influencer Member seat (20% = 3.3)
-
2 Participant Member seat (15% = 2.0)
-
2 Committer Member seat (15% = 2.0)
These percentages would follow the original charter numbers
(if we started from the assumption we'd have around 4
strategic members), but scale up as we get more strategic
members.