Fellowship elections participation

[Florian Snow]

Hi Daniel,

I appreciate your effort here, but I would advise to perhaps not re-open
this topic again already.  The change away from Fellow to some other
term has been decided twice already to my knowledge.  The first time,
the decision was communicated but afterwards pretty much ingored which
lead to a lot of inconsistensies in written texts.  The second time
around, there was a longer list and while my personal preference
("associate member" which is the term the FSF uses) was not directly on
the list (only by proxy within the term "Member"), I am glad there was a
decision.

I am not generally against re-evaluating previous decisions, but in my
opinion, we need to set up a process to make such decisions first.  Part
of the reason why I ran for a GA seat was because I was frustrated with
how oftentimes, when we needed to make a decision, we would debate for a
very long time, not really reach a concensus, but also have no clear
path to resolve such a situation.  So often, nothing happened which is
also a decision of sorts, but always for the status quo.  So in a way,
we have a super-filibuster here and I think that is not a good
situation.  (I am not trying to imply people tried to filibuster
decisions here on purpose.)

So we need to improve governance here and set a clear policy who gets a
say in what kinds of decisions.  I think the Debian project could serve
as a model here in some respects.  Not everyone needs to be involved in
every decision, but there needs to be a path and a structure to pass on
a decision to a wider community outside of the GA and then actually get
a result back from that wider community.  Right now, legally, the GA has
all the power, so this structure needs to be implemented from within the
GA, but we need a good mechanism to resolve disagreement so we will
still be able to make decisions at all.

Without a clear path to decisions, we will just ask the same questions
over and over again.

Happy hacking!
Florian