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Proposal: Bettermeans as Community Governance Platform
Outcome: N/A
Votes:
- Yes: 0
- Abstain: 5
- No: 7
- Block: 0
Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.
While part of me wants to really like BM, the main reason that I’m hesitant to adopt it is that it apes PT heavily. After all the free help Pivotal gave us (a place to work, advisors for D*, code testing, and a vote of confidence), using their competitor would be a masisve slap in the face. 
Sean, I did not know there were politics involved 
How similar are BM (Bettermeans) and PT (Pivotal tracker)? Does PT have a good way to prioritize between proposals/features? Does PT have workflow management?
About Bettermeans:
Our codebase is based largely on an early fork of Redmine.
Redmine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL). All redmine code is Copyright © 2006-2011 Jean-Philippe Lang All non-redmine code is Copyright © Shereef Bishay, and is dual-licensed: you may use either the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL), or the MIT License (see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php).
Better Means on Governance Model:
http://bettermeans.com/front/open_enterprise_governance_model.html
No, PT is more specifically for agile development, but much of the visual designs were aped by BM. However, the issue isn’t merely a political one, it’s more of an issue tracker for accepting and logging tasks. It’s not exactly a great platform for making proposals so much as it is one for assigning people to do things. If BM makes a good issue tracker, I’m not against testing it out in the similar way we’re trying out loomio. Just keep in mind that it’s an issue that might upset a lot of people that gave a lot to help the team from the early days of the project. While we don’t have to use PT (and I don’t think it’s well-suited to community issue tracking). I still think Github Issues is fine for community issue-tracking, and we already have a well-established issue queue. Perhaps a better, more diplomatic solution would be to change how we use GitHub to be more community-inclusive.
Well, maybe the starting point should be github (GH). What do we have in PT that we do not have in GH? Do you want to involve a broad community or only developers?
I am not against testing it, but I have to say I’d rather keep the amount of tools we are goint to use to a minimum with a clear separation of scope/functionality.
I don’t see us moving away from Github anytime soon.
Also, I don’t think we’ve already figured out all the features what exactly we want from the tool we eventually choose.
Florian, good point. As I said, we should have GH as a starting point, define what features we need for community governance. I “proposed” BM NOT because I think it is better than Loomio or GH, rather because it has features that I do not see in Loomio. Features as estimate complexity of each proposal, and prioritize between proposals. So we can have a discussion about just governance model, the workflow and features (in a platform).
To be honest, I like the fact that Loomio is simple. Simple means more people can participate as the learning curve is small. That is why also GH issue management is great. Simple.
I must say I don’t like PT that much but we also need a tool for the actual development tasks so I guess it is needed. Pity GH doesn’t have this stuff.
Jason, simple is beautiful, but lets not forget what my friend Albert once said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Any idea why the BM site gets flagged by Firefox as untrusted?
I dunno, I noticed that the other day though.
altruism: Sorry, I still don’t get it. Lots of sites redirect without becoming “untrusted”.
Brent, that was my best guess I can ask them if you want.
altruism: Yes, please do. They should be aware of it. If they are aware of it, and aren’t doing anything to fix it…that’s just irresponsible.
If they want me to use their site, they should make sure that Firefox isn’t going to pop up a big, fat warning sign when I go there. That just screams “unprofessional”, and makes me wonder how secure they are.