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Constitution #3

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krampus merged 21 commits from constitution-init into main 2024-07-16 00:54:54 +00:00
Conversation 5 Commits 21 Files Changed 11 +856 -129
krampus commented 2024-07-08 00:53:41 +00:00
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This pull request establishes a constitution for the Intrusive Thoughts Creative Collective. This constitution will become active as soon as this PR is accepted, subject to the terms of Article X Section 2 "Ratification".

I'd like unanimous approval before accepting this. I'll talk more about this in our next meeting.

This pull request establishes a constitution for the Intrusive Thoughts Creative Collective. This constitution will become active as soon as this PR is accepted, subject to the terms of Article X Section 2 "Ratification". I'd like unanimous approval before accepting this. I'll talk more about this in our next meeting.
krampus self-assigned this 2024-07-08 00:53:41 +00:00
krampus added 4 commits 2024-07-08 00:53:42 +00:00
krampus requested review from niamh 2024-07-08 00:53:51 +00:00
krampus requested review from baer 2024-07-08 00:53:51 +00:00
krampus requested review from Rissa 2024-07-08 00:53:51 +00:00
krampus requested review from mulleceps 2024-07-08 00:53:51 +00:00
krampus changed title from WIP: Consitution to WIP: Constitution 2024-07-08 01:05:23 +00:00
krampus added 1 commit 2024-07-08 03:19:05 +00:00
baer commented 2024-07-10 01:14:49 +00:00
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Niamh's comments:

  • Enforcement of democratic centralism
  • We should not allow anti-communism
  • Procedures for more than 50% majority for certain motions
  • What policies must be amendments to the constitution?
  • Explicitly allow two weeks notice, but it is not required
  • Do we want to define procedures for severance, health care, layoffs, and time off? What about longer-term illness and disability?
  • To make our collective more accessible, we should put procedures in place to reduce the spread of infectious disease, especially for in-person work. In-person work should never be mandatory.
  • Constitution should include diverse hiring practices (affirmative action?)
  • Procedures for collectively funding procurement of means of production / services necessary for the collective while we are poor
  • Termination procedures may not be airtight given that we always give cause for termination.
  • Infrastructure committee should be responsible for defining opsec, authentication, and security practices.
  • Especially people who have control of funds must be trained for prevention of phishing attacks. If they fail a phishing drill they should lose access to funds and a snap election should be held to find their replacement.
  • Does this constitution confer sufficient capability for even powerful people in the collective to be disciplined, censured or removed?
  • We should be more specific about what the business committee does.
Niamh's comments: * Enforcement of democratic centralism * We should not allow anti-communism * Procedures for more than 50% majority for certain motions * What policies must be amendments to the constitution? * Explicitly allow two weeks notice, but it is not required * Do we want to define procedures for severance, health care, layoffs, and time off? What about longer-term illness and disability? * To make our collective more accessible, we should put procedures in place to reduce the spread of infectious disease, especially for in-person work. In-person work should never be mandatory. * Constitution should include diverse hiring practices (affirmative action?) * Procedures for collectively funding procurement of means of production / services necessary for the collective while we are poor * Termination procedures may not be airtight given that we always give cause for termination. * Infrastructure committee should be responsible for defining opsec, authentication, and security practices. * Especially people who have control of funds must be trained for prevention of phishing attacks. If they fail a phishing drill they should lose access to funds and a snap election should be held to find their replacement. * Does this constitution confer sufficient capability for even powerful people in the collective to be disciplined, censured or removed? * We should be more specific about what the business committee does.
krampus added 5 commits 2024-07-10 03:18:02 +00:00
krampus commented 2024-07-10 04:16:46 +00:00
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My responses, point-by-point:

  • Enforcement of democratic centralism

I feel this is sufficiently covered by "undemocratic, disruptive behavior" being grounds for expulsion. If you have a better way this could be stated, please suggest it.

  • We should not allow anti-communism

As discussed, we'd like more information on what this would specifically entail and the rationale behind it.

  • Procedures for more than 50% majority for certain motions

Would be great to have a procedure in place to dynamically determine the proportional vote required for a given decision, but how we would do that is beyond me. For now, I think committees including such cases in their charters is the way to go.

  • What policies must be amendments to the constitution?

Anything that we think should require a two-thirds decision of the voting body to overturn. (Unless I'm misunderstanding the question?)

  • Explicitly allow two weeks notice, but it is not required

👍 Added in 584f7eff2e

  • Do we want to define procedures for severance, health care, layoffs, and time off? What about longer-term illness and disability?

This a (very prescient!) business concern which should be addressed if and when we incorporate as a business. The specifics will depend upon legal requirements.

  • To make our collective more accessible, we should put procedures in place to reduce the spread of infectious disease, especially for in-person work. In-person work should never be mandatory.

Agreed 100% but as above this is a business concern and therefore out of scope for this document at this time.

  • Constitution should include diverse hiring practices (affirmative action?)

👍 Agreed 100% but I want to discuss the specifics of this as a group.

  • Procedures for collectively funding procurement of means of production / services necessary for the collective while we are poor

This is implicitly a responsibility of the Treasurer and shouldn't be included in the constitution. The Core Infrastructure document lists the basic means of production required to operate as a collective and in principle we can function on $0 indefinitely by using free services (e.g. discord, gitlab). The requirements for practical operation are more complicated. It's the Infrastructure Committee's explicit responsibility to provision these & the Treasurer's explicit responsibility to fund, and therefore the joint responsibility of the IC & Treasurer to negotiate provisioning & procurement. Explicit procedure to do so is out of scope for this document.

  • Termination procedures may not be airtight given that we always give cause for termination.

We should always give cause for termination! Nothing in the expulsion criteria is unlawful grounds for termination in the state of New Mexico. When we get to the point of incorporating as a business, we'll write up an employment contract form-letter and I'd imagine treat the constitution as an effective employee handbook, and we'll get a lawyer to tell us if we need to make any constitutional amendments as prerequisite for incorporation.

  • Infrastructure committee should be responsible for defining opsec, authentication, and security practices.

👍 Added in 9c21bf1041

  • Especially people who have control of funds must be trained for prevention of phishing attacks. If they fail a phishing drill they should lose access to funds and a snap election should be held to find their replacement.

👍 100% agreed. The exact nature of how the Infrastructure Committee should handle red-team exercises should be determined as a policy of the Infrastructure Committee, so I've added an IC charter document in be6e6b0a1b

  • Does this constitution confer sufficient capability for even powerful people in the collective to be disciplined, censured or removed?

👍 As discussed, we've expanded recall policy to include appointed positions (e.g. Personnel & Infrastructure Committee members) in 2de0ce1f69.

  • We should be more specific about what the business committee does.

Perhaps, but not here. Engineering, Creative, and Business committees are kept deliberately vague. The purpose of all three is to broadly define a body to address shared concerns at a discipline level. There will always be many many gray areas of overlap within a project (Is the creation of marketing materials Creative or Business? Is level design Engineering or Creative?) to the extent that I believe explicitly defining responsibilities within the constitution would do more harm than good. Such situations where a shared concern overlapping multiple committees must be addressed at the committee level can and should be addressed on a case-by-case basis.

In the interest of getting us all on the same page, let me paint you a very high-level picture of how all three discipline-level committees work together:

  • The Creative Committee brings together all the pieces of a game.
  • The Engineering Committee assembles those pieces together into a game that people can play.
  • The Business Committee makes sure that game gets to the people who want to play it.

To give you a (non-exhaustive!) list of specific jobs handled by the Business Committee:

  • Marketing, so the people who want to play the game know it exists.
  • Sales, so the people who want to play the game can acquire it (e.g. over Steam or the app store or whatever).
  • Project Management, so that the other teams can get the game out in time for the people who want to play it.
  • Market Research, so that the game we make is one people will want to play in the first place!

But like I said, this list is non-exhaustive, and frankly, I am CERTAIN there are real tangible concerns of operating a game studio as a business that I am not personally capable of imagining, nor is anybody else here. Explicitly laying out a definition of what is or is not a "business concern" in the constitution would provide no benefit and will only be a problem down the road.

My responses, point-by-point: > - Enforcement of democratic centralism I feel this is sufficiently covered by "undemocratic, disruptive behavior" being grounds for expulsion. If you have a better way this could be stated, please suggest it. > - We should not allow anti-communism As discussed, we'd like more information on what this would specifically entail and the rationale behind it. > - Procedures for more than 50% majority for certain motions Would be great to have a procedure in place to dynamically determine the proportional vote required for a given decision, but how we would do that is beyond me. For now, I think committees including such cases in their charters is the way to go. > - What policies must be amendments to the constitution? Anything that we think should require a two-thirds decision of the voting body to overturn. (Unless I'm misunderstanding the question?) > - Explicitly allow two weeks notice, but it is not required :+1: Added in 584f7eff2e > - Do we want to define procedures for severance, health care, layoffs, and time off? What about longer-term illness and disability? This a (very prescient!) business concern which should be addressed if and when we incorporate as a business. The specifics will depend upon legal requirements. > - To make our collective more accessible, we should put procedures in place to reduce the spread of infectious disease, especially for in-person work. In-person work should never be mandatory. Agreed 100% but as above this is a business concern and therefore out of scope for this document at this time. > - Constitution should include diverse hiring practices (affirmative action?) :+1: Agreed 100% but I want to discuss the specifics of this as a group. > - Procedures for collectively funding procurement of means of production / services necessary for the collective while we are poor This is implicitly a responsibility of the Treasurer and shouldn't be included in the constitution. The Core Infrastructure document lists the basic means of production required to operate as a collective and in principle we can function on $0 indefinitely by using free services (e.g. discord, gitlab). The requirements for practical operation are more complicated. It's the Infrastructure Committee's explicit responsibility to provision these & the Treasurer's explicit responsibility to fund, and therefore the joint responsibility of the IC & Treasurer to negotiate provisioning & procurement. Explicit procedure to do so is out of scope for this document. > - Termination procedures may not be airtight given that we always give cause for termination. We _should_ always give cause for termination! Nothing in the expulsion criteria is unlawful grounds for termination in the state of New Mexico. When we get to the point of incorporating as a business, we'll write up an employment contract form-letter and I'd imagine treat the constitution as an effective employee handbook, and we'll get a lawyer to tell us if we need to make any constitutional amendments as prerequisite for incorporation. > - Infrastructure committee should be responsible for defining opsec, authentication, and security practices. :+1: Added in 9c21bf1041 > - Especially people who have control of funds must be trained for prevention of phishing attacks. If they fail a phishing drill they should lose access to funds and a snap election should be held to find their replacement. :+1: 100% agreed. The exact nature of how the Infrastructure Committee should handle red-team exercises should be determined as a policy of the Infrastructure Committee, so I've added an IC charter document in be6e6b0a1b > - Does this constitution confer sufficient capability for even powerful people in the collective to be disciplined, censured or removed? :+1: As discussed, we've expanded recall policy to include appointed positions (e.g. Personnel & Infrastructure Committee members) in 2de0ce1f69. > - We should be more specific about what the business committee does. Perhaps, but not here. Engineering, Creative, and Business committees are kept deliberately vague. The purpose of all three is to broadly define a body to address shared concerns at a discipline level. There will always be many many gray areas of overlap within a project (Is the creation of marketing materials Creative or Business? Is level design Engineering or Creative?) to the extent that I believe explicitly defining responsibilities within the constitution would do more harm than good. Such situations where a shared concern overlapping multiple committees must be addressed at the committee level can and should be addressed on a case-by-case basis. In the interest of getting us all on the same page, let me paint you a very high-level picture of how all three discipline-level committees work together: - The Creative Committee brings together all the pieces of a game. - The Engineering Committee assembles those pieces together into a game that people can play. - The Business Committee makes sure that game gets to the people who want to play it. To give you a (*non-exhaustive!*) list of specific jobs handled by the Business Committee: - Marketing, so the people who want to play the game know it exists. - Sales, so the people who want to play the game can acquire it (e.g. over Steam or the app store or whatever). - Project Management, so that the other teams can get the game out in time for the people who want to play it. - Market Research, so that the game we make is one people will want to play in the first place! But like I said, this list is non-exhaustive, and frankly, I am CERTAIN there are real tangible concerns of operating a game studio as a business that I am not personally capable of imagining, nor is anybody else here. Explicitly laying out a definition of what is or is not a "business concern" in the constitution would provide no benefit and will only be a problem down the road.
krampus added 3 commits 2024-07-11 22:18:07 +00:00
7ad9825d57 Added Code of Conduct. 
This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant version
2.1, available at
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_conduct/
880990b4f3 Minor changes to adapt Code of Conduct for the Collective. 
This includes explicitly naming the Personnel Committee as responsible
for the enforcement of the CoC, rephrasing "temporary ban" and
"permanent ban" as suspension and expulsion respectively, and making
the Personnel Committee explicitly responsible for maintaining the CoC
itself.
krampus added 1 commit 2024-07-11 22:23:22 +00:00
krampus added 2 commits 2024-07-11 23:03:52 +00:00
Rissa reviewed 2024-07-12 18:42:55 +00:00
constitution.md Outdated
@ -0,0 +441,4 @@
## Article VIII. Collective Ownership
### Sec 1. Collective Property
Rissa commented 2024-07-12 18:35:29 +00:00
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I'm a little concerned about maintaining a division between personal IP and collective IP; I'm not suggesting that I want to retain rights to something used by the collective, but I don't want to accidentally, implicitly, transfer rights by offering an anecdote from a personal project during a brainstorming session. I'm not sure, however, that there's any cleaner way to deal with the issue than not to share such an anecdote.

I'm a little concerned about maintaining a division between personal IP and collective IP; I'm not suggesting that I want to retain rights to something used by the collective, but I don't want to accidentally, implicitly, transfer rights by offering an anecdote from a personal project during a brainstorming session. I'm not sure, however, that there's any cleaner way to deal with the issue than not to share such an anecdote.
krampus commented 2024-07-12 22:17:32 +00:00
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I agree. I really hate the typical software company IP agreements -- y'know, where you get five lines to list every idea you've ever had, and everything else now legally belongs to your employer. I want to embed a policy of respecting individual members' lives outside the collective into the constitution, and that includes rights to personal IP. The idea with the Collective Property section is to establish a very permissive IP policy right from the start. To that end, I wouldn't be terribly opposed to making it more permissive -- I'll follow up with some ideas on that in the chat.

That said, the collective needs to own its own intellectual property, because we need to prepare the collective to exist as a legal entity within a legal system that believes in and enforces private ownership of intellectual property. That's why I think we need to assert in clear terms from the start that "something is owned by the Collective" and "something is collectively owned by the members of the collective body" are equivalent terms. Whenever we incorporate, we'll want an IP lawyer to look over this and tell me that I'm an idiot and all of this means nothing, then tell us how to actually write it.

(yes, I still think the entire idea of "intellectual property" is deeply puerile and idiotic. unfortunately we live in a world that is also puerile and idiotic and thinks ideas can be owned by people.)

I agree. I really hate the typical software company IP agreements -- y'know, where you get five lines to list every idea you've ever had, and everything else now legally belongs to your employer. I want to embed a policy of respecting individual members' lives outside the collective into the constitution, and that includes rights to personal IP. The idea with the _Collective Property_ section is to establish a very permissive IP policy right from the start. To that end, I wouldn't be terribly opposed to making it _more_ permissive -- I'll follow up with some ideas on that in the chat. That said, the collective needs to own its own intellectual property, because we need to prepare the collective to exist as a legal entity within a legal system that believes in and enforces private ownership of intellectual property. That's why I think we need to assert in clear terms from the start that "something is owned by the Collective" and "something is collectively owned by the members of the collective body" are equivalent terms. Whenever we incorporate, we'll want an IP lawyer to look over this and tell me that I'm an idiot and all of this means nothing, then tell us how to _actually_ write it. (yes, I still think the entire idea of "intellectual property" is deeply puerile and idiotic. unfortunately we live in a world that is also puerile and idiotic and thinks ideas can be owned by people.)
krampus commented 2024-07-13 01:45:53 +00:00
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How do you feel about the updated version as of 8ccb8ceb9b ?

How do you feel about the updated version as of 8ccb8ceb9b ?
Rissa commented 2024-07-13 03:36:10 +00:00
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I suppose I should say something in addition to marking the conversation resolved. I think we've worked out my concerns; basically we're now asking to explicitly assign rights to the collective at the outset of related work.

I suppose I should say something in addition to marking the conversation resolved. I think we've worked out my concerns; basically we're now asking to explicitly assign rights to the collective at the outset of related work.
Rissa marked this conversation as resolved
krampus added 1 commit 2024-07-13 01:43:56 +00:00
baer commented 2024-07-13 03:15:06 +00:00
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I think the "IP agreement is structured around projects" looks good for now. I still think it would be nice long term to have some kind of policy or best practice down the line of when someone decides that an idea they have "thrown out there" is actually something they want to exclusively keep; That they inform the collective so we can remove it from our idea pool.

I think the "IP agreement is structured around projects" looks good for now. I still think it would be nice long term to have some kind of policy or best practice down the line of when someone decides that an idea they have "thrown out there" is actually something they want to exclusively keep; That they inform the collective so we can remove it from our idea pool.
baer commented 2024-07-14 23:33:08 +00:00
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I know we talked about it last meeting, and this might be a later issue, but just wanted bring up the idea of minimum time off.

I know we talked about it last meeting, and this might be a later issue, but just wanted bring up the idea of minimum time off.
krampus commented 2024-07-14 23:50:52 +00:00
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@baer While I share your opinions on a minimum time off policy, I’m going to push for delaying discussion of time off policy & most other issues that would fall under the category of “employee policy” until we consider legal incorporation as a business. After all, how can we institute a time off policy when we don’t even have a time on policy?

@baer While I share your opinions on a minimum time off policy, I’m going to push for delaying discussion of time off policy & most other issues that would fall under the category of “employee policy” until we consider legal incorporation as a business. After all, how can we institute a time off policy when we don’t even have a _time on_ policy?
krampus added 4 commits 2024-07-15 03:06:08 +00:00
154c1866a9 Removed rules for integrating Charter of Directorship 
Since the Charter was never actually adopted, I see no reason to include it.
krampus changed title from WIP: Constitution to Constitution 2024-07-15 03:06:33 +00:00
Rissa approved these changes 2024-07-15 03:54:02 +00:00
baer approved these changes 2024-07-15 04:52:28 +00:00
mulleceps approved these changes 2024-07-16 00:00:04 +00:00
niamh approved these changes 2024-07-16 00:10:46 +00:00
krampus merged commit 1f22dce7e1 into main 2024-07-16 00:54:54 +00:00
krampus deleted branch constitution-init 2024-07-16 00:54:54 +00:00
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