Meritocracy in The South Bay Community Network

As of a By-Laws amendment that passed on Nov 1, 2006, sbay.org now uses a meritocracy membership system. See the members page for a list of the members of the corporation.

Potential new members may be nominated for membership by any of the following methods:

• the Board of Directors acts to nominate an individual,
• a Special Interest Group of the corporation uses its internal decision-making procedures to nominate an individual, or
• any three members of the corporation state they are nominating an individual.

The entire membership votes on the nomination.

The Special Interest Groups (SIGs) of the corporation which have official membership are encouraged to establish a meritocracy system. Though this may not necessarily apply to every SIG organization under the corporation's umbrella.

Many Open Source and related community projects have developed their own flavor of meritocracy or can-do-ocracy. In general this tends to mean people can gain privileges in a project by the work they contribute to it or that some minimum effort is a hurdle that must be surmounted in order to join.

A Meritocracy Model of Organizational Governance

A "meritocracy" is a system of rule my merit or talent. See the definition at Wiktionary.

As for its use in a 501(c)3 non-profit charitable organization, there is an example of how this is done in the Apache Software Foundation. Their earliest roots came from the model of the volunteers who built the Apache HTTPD server from a bunch of patches ("a patchy server") for the old NCSA HTTPD in 1993 in less than 2 years into the world's leading web server software, a title they continue to hold 11 years later. The Apache Group, as it was then known, allowed new members to prove their ability and then could be voted in as equal members of the team. When they incorporated as the Apache Software Foundation, they continued that model - members of the corporation may join by making accomplishments and being voted in by existing members.

One of sbay.org's Special Interest Groups, the Stratofox Aerospace Tracking Team, independently evolved a somewhat similar system. When the team was formed, all the founding members had tracking experience from the group's prior involvement in JP Aerospace. When considering how to bring new members into the team, there was a concern to make a hurdle so that no one would try to be just a spectator in the harsh desert environment the group usually goes for launch events. It was considered reasonable to expect them to go participate in an event before being voted in. Like in Apache, once a new Stratofox member is voted in, they have an equal voice to the other members. And the group was able to grow beyond its original founders while maintaining a strong technical culture.