Criteria for Change in the Drupal Community
Good Governance is difficult. What does it really mean? How do we achieve it? The pillars of good governance according to the UN are participation, rule of law, consensus oriented, equity and inclusiveness, effectiveness and efficiency, accountability, transparency and responsiveness. So… what does that have to do with anything?
There are many discussions going on about governance in the Drupal Community right now and its great to see. Having been involved in governance in various settings over the years its something that holds great interest for me. I don’t, and nor should I have the answers, but I do have ideas and so I’m going to post one of them here before I go to sleep.
Around 12 years ago I helped lead a process to setup the very first European Commission recognised Euro-Mediterranean International NGO. A group of 12 NGO’s were involved coming from a diverse mix of countries in the region including the UK, Estonia, France, Tunisia, Israel and Palestine. The story is a long one that is for another blog post. Being part of that process meant I spent months researching, calling people and trying to understand the complexity of governance for international, intercultural, diverse organisations working across a wide range of youth issues. If nothing else I learned two things which helped shape a section of my value-base:
- Working across multiple different countries and cultures is really, really difficult and requires time to listen and understand complex needs in order to find common ground.
- In order to cooperate, you need to be able to work with processes and people that you may not agree with, get a long with, or even like. Tolerance is integral.
Coming back to the Drupal community, 12 countries and cultures is just a drop in multiple Oceans. However, like the Drupal community, we were all working towards a common goal, we all had different routes planned to get to that goal and we all had a deep commitment for the goal we passionately sought.
As the organisation we were setting up was based in the UK, when thinking about governance we used the UK voluntary sector guidelines as a framework. Like with most frameworks, it had weaknesses, but also proved very important, helping us to cut across the values of all participants. There has been considerable work done on these guidelines and they are now known as the “Charity Good Governance Code”.
12 years on, the main pillars of this code have evolved but are fairly similar. They are organisational purpose, leadership, integrity, decision-making, risk and control, board effectiveness, diversity, openness and accountability.
So looking back as I did recently, I’m thinking — aren’t those ALL relevant to the recent questions being asked about Drupal Community Governance structures?
Thinking more about the Drupal Community Governance discussions, I recently made a comment about us needing a UN Peace Process for some of the bigger issues that we face — a process focussed on dialogue, sharing, talking and negotiating, vastly preferable over some of the negativity and intolerance I’ve witnessed. But that throw-away comment lead me to the United Nations which is an institution that for me has much stronger correlations with the technology community that I feel so attached to. This is a community made up of representatives from practically every country in the world, each of which has its own set of rules, infrastructure and beliefs. There are a wide range of actors and personas with very different priorities all working toward the same goal. So how does the UN formulate its good governance?
Lets have another look at the pillars I mentioned earlier:
- Participation
- Rule of law
- Consensus oriented
- Equity and inclusiveness
- Effectiveness and efficiency
- Accountability
- Transparency
- Responsiveness
This framework seems very relevant. There are so many aspects of those 8 pillars that have been identified through the discussions, blog posts and ideas lately, and its hard to argue for any one of them to not be a good benchmark of what good governance should look like.
Obviously, the Drupal Community is not of the scale of the UN, and not as localised as a UK charity, but I do think that as a community we could greatly benefit from thinking of governance through these or similar criteria.
I’ll think more about this when I have more time and space (and its not sleeping time!), but I wanted to get it out there and see what people thought as one direction of travel. Could it help (?) to have criteria such as:
- Does this change lead to improved accountability?
- Will we become more effective and efficient?
- Does this action encourage participation?
- Is diversity and inclusion at the heart of this?
- Are we ensuring openness and transparency?
I think its vital that we don’t just think of governance as “rule of law” (read Code of Conduct/CWG), or that it’s how decision making is happening (read BDFL), leadership responsibility (read speakers at DrupalCon) or Diversity and Inclusiveness (read community values) but that these and so many other aspects of our commitments are all integral parts of the whole. These criteria cut across everything we are doing as a community and should be embedded into every aspect of our governance.
When a new person stumbles across our community, I would love it if they are able to see that we are a diverse community that welcomes participation and supports those finding it hard. That has clear leadership structures with strong values. An imperfect community that is open, that admits to and shares its mistakes in order to improve, get better. A community of humans. That should be the instant impression, without having to dig around in website content or find the relevant issue queue.
I believe the impact of governance evolution stretches through every strand of our community, often without us thinking about it. The next few months are vital to ensure we have the foundation that is fundamental to Drupal’s success. That is going to take time and involve complex discussions, but to really work, it needs every one of us to be involved — we need to participate. Find out more about how you can get involved here:
