Last week, the Porto Alegre OSUG proposed and voted a set of ground rules for the group. The need for these rules appeared early on, when the group was still struggling with what to do about meetings, membership and leadership, and became a recurrent topic in meetings. So after last month's meeting an initial set of rules was proposed, modified over the following week and voted and accepted earlier this week.

We posted the rules in our website, but since this might be of interest to other groups around the community, here's the translated version (the translation is a bit rough around the edges, but should be enough to get the point(s) across).

PoaOSUG's ground rules

This set of rules was voted and is valid as of July 31st 2008.

1. Constitution and rules

(a) the Porto Alegre OpenSolaris User Group has as main objective to promote OpenSolaris technologies through events and activities in the southern region of Brazil and similar events at the national and international levels;

(b) the group is affiliated to the OpenSolaris.org community and as such, respects its rules;

(c) this set of rules aims at organizing the different aspects of the group's activities with the intent to promote and encourage its member's commitment to the group and its events;

(d) any decision made by the group must follow the rules described in section 4, including modifications to this set of rules.

2. Meetings

(a) the group holds meetings at every last Thursday of each month. In case of a holiday, the group will decide whether the meeting should take place a week before or after during the previous month's meeting;

(b) each meeting has 70 minutes in duration at the most, being the first 25 minutes for general topics and the remaining 45 for one or more presentations;

(c) the group maintains a calendar of the upcoming meetings, as well as the material used during the previous meetings, available through its website;

(d) in case a member who has a presentation scheduled learns that he/she won't be able to attend the meeting, he/she must notify the group with at least two weeks before the event with a justification. The presentation will be rescheduled to the end of the queue in case the member does not comply with this rule;

(e) any member of the group can propose a talk/presentation on any OpenSolaris related subject of at least 15 minutes;

(f) in case there are no scheduled presentation(s) for a given meeting, the group's leaders are responsible for creating presenting a talk, inviting next month's speaker or to cancel the meeting. Meetings must always have a presentation or talk;

(g) the decision to call a meeting off is entirely up to the leaders, and must be taken with at least a week's notice.

3. Leadership

(a) the group's leaders are elected by the mechanism described in section 4. Any member can propose his/hers nomination as a leader through an email to the alias with the proposal and its justification;

(b) a leader can cease being a leader in case a member of the group propose that leader's loss of leadership through an email to the alias, or in case the leader him/herself decides not to continue to be a leader;

(c) the leaders are responsible for the meetings/events calendar and the organization of such, as well as the distribution of giveaways and creating flyers, posters and others;

(d) it's up to the leaders to set aside a few t-shirts and giveaway items to award the participation of members and encourage them to be more active in the community, etc.

4. Voting

(a) for the approval of a proposal, it must receive two favorable votes (not counting the member who proposed it) e none against (not counting the leader in case it's a proposal to remove him/her);

(b) a proposal must be approved or rejected in exactly seven days after the first proposal;

(c) a rejected proposal can only be re-proposed seven days after its rejection. In Case of a new rejection, the same proposal cannot be re-evaluated before a month;

(d) proposals must be submitted to the alias with the tag '[proposal]' at the beggining of the 'subject' field. Proposals will not be valid if they are not properly identified. This rule tries to guarantee that every member can easily identify the need for a vote;

(e) to elect or remove a leader, two votes in favor and no vote against are necessary (excluding the leader in question in the case of a proposition for removal). Any member can nominate another member for group leadership, as well as a self nomination. In the case of a nomination by a third member, the nominee must accept his/hers nomination prior to a vote.