[Fsatom-comm] II. Computations vs Simulations ; demand for joining the committee

[Xavier Gonze]

Dear all,

Coming back to the organisation  and membership
of the steering committee.
There have been comments by Konrad and Gilles :

Gilles Zerah wrote:
 >I think the process of construction of the project should be by 
 >iterations. From the workshop
 >we should set up concrete actions defined at that time  (and this has 
 >already started), and contact
 >the workshop participants, and then other people.
 >A further iteration would be to define a more formal organization (if 
 >necessary) , including a steering comitee, the
 >present one can be considered as provisional.

Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> Let's start by what we (FSAtom) are not: we are not a legal entity of
> any kind, we have no money, no power, in fact nothing but good
> intentions. So why do we have a steering committee if there isn't
> even anything to steer at the moment?
> 
> I see the role of this committee as being a smaller group of people
> (smaller than the current or potential FSAtom community) that can take
> initiatives and discuss ideas quickly. For the composition of the
> committee that means that we should have as few members as possible
> while still covering a wide range of expertise. I do not think that it
> is necessary or even desirable to have a representative of each
> project in the committee. The committee is not a parliament. If we
> follow that road, we will soon need to elect an executive board of the
> steering committee, and that's the first step to bureaucracy.
> 
> I think that people should join and leave the board as a function of
> their activity, projects, available time, etc. Most importantly, I
> think we should not start to waste too much time discussing
> formalities at this time, before any real activity has started. In
> other words, I propose to postpone any detailed discussion of changing
> the composition of the committee until we all have gained some
> experience with what we can and can't do.
> 
> What we should however do is create the status of a "member" of the
> FSAtom community. Membership should be open to anyone related to any
> free-software project in our domain, even if it is only in the
> planning stage (that probably translates to "anyone who wants to
> become a member"). Members would be listed on the Web site, and be
> able to participate in a member mailing list. It should be clear that
> one can be involved in FSAtom without being in the committee, and it
> should in fact be clear that most work is not done by the committee.
> 
> I see no problem in answering that we prefer to postpone that
> question, exactly because there are more urgent things to do than
> formalizing politics.


I mostly agree with Konrad and Gilles, and in any case, I think it is
wise to postpone any change in the present committee until we have
the first "General" meeting of the FSAtom (that might either be virtual,
or organized after a planned CECAM workshop, as discussed in one of my 
mails of today). Before I transmit this to Stefano and Paolo,
I would like to hear from you about the following idea...

The committee might be the image of the FSAtom activities, that is,
it might be the union of :
- people responsible of a FSAtom workgroup ;
- people organizing a workshop or a tutorial for the FSAtom ;
- the person responsible of the FSAtom Web site ;
- the person in charge of linking all these people, and linking
  to the Free Software Foundation (who would be the chairman).
This would have the advantages that
- the committee membership is well-defined and associated to a duty ;
- one avoids the present problem that Mark Tuckermann,
  who is responible of a workgroup
  (according to the "Minutes" established by Konrad) is not part of
  our discussions !
The committee might be renewed once per year, one people might
be renewed at most once for a given responsibility
(may be I am already too bureaucratic).

Please, could you comment before the end of this week, so that
I can transmit to Stefano and Paolo without too much delay ?

Best regards,
Xavier