Revision of Writing a new charter from Mon, 28/02/2005 - 10:20

Motivation

I never liked the current charter, and to my surprise it did not receive any criticism.

• Most people don't care about principles
• Most people take it for granted they don't like the rules, and don't bother trying to change them

I think principals are important, I think the process of developing or reaching (consensus over) a principals is probably more important than the principals itself.

I don't see how one can care about the charter if he don't have an opinion about principals.

I liked that this group wants to have a charter, but I don't like how it is treated

I would have loved to see more debates and discussions about the charter.

I want as many people as possible to have a mark in the charter.

But to motivate people to participate in something we must first explain why it is important.

Which I believe is hard because it's subjective, but I will try anyway.

This wiki page will be refactored a lot, I expecting that writing down my ideas, and organizing them will consume a lot of time.

First we need to answer this, which turned out to be more complicated than I expected.

What is the charter?

EGLUG is a thing, and this thing, needed rules to be controled and managed, and the rules needed a place to stay, and this place was called the charter.

The charter can all be the place to state the principals that guided to creation of those rules

The charter can be the statement of the direction, of our activities.

Regardless of who we are, or what we do, or why we do it, our efforts have a direction, to lead our efforts in a better direction we need a statement of this direction!

What makes this hard is,

1. in many cases you can effectively perform the activity, without, having a direction and
2. many people who have well defined and different directions can have interest in the same activity.

From this we can argue, that the charter should not point to a direction, that the activity is our focal point, and that the charter elaborate of the resources gathered for an activity.

So we can say, that EGLUG provides an activity environment, for all activities related to FOSS

And the charter should elaborate on the attributes of this environment.

Again, the most imporant things is not to create better rules, but to create more interest in them, and better understand in them.

The wording will be very imporant, I want to use, simple and intriguing words. For one, I believe using the word charter was a mistake, I didn't know its meaning, and think most people did not.

Even the arabic word "دستور" is still a bad choice.

What is EGLUG?

FOSS is a useful product.
EGLUG exist help more people in Egypt to take advantage of FOSS.
EGLUG is a group of volunteers
EGLUG have resources provided by volunteers to help them achieve this objective
EGLUG have a charter (rules) to help volunteers work together better
EGLUG is transparent, everything about eglug is subject for discussion, change and audit.
EGLUG saves money, because EGLUG is free
EGLUG is free

I kind of failed to find one single true category to typify EGLUG, the moral is, I think it's useful to open the discussion of what is EGLUG and the related issue of what is it's objective, this definition should not be written by a single person, I think a wiki interface where any visitor can add his reflexion is optimal, please contribute your opinion!

Questions I believe needs a better answer or an answer.

• Who controls EGLUG
• Why EGLUG need rules?
• Why EGLUG needs principals?
• Why do we need to write all this stuff down?