Various concerns on foundation membership process

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

I want to get the ball rolling on an examination of the foundation
member admittance criteria.

During GUADEC a significant number of people reported having trouble
with foundation membership requests, including:

 * The president of GNOME Hispano, whose membership request has been
awaiting approval for several months
 * The Brazilian organiser of Forum GNOME, who reported that several
people in Brazil had had problems joining
 * Someone who reported that several proposals from local members (was
it perhaps Chile?) were rejected with a stock mail
 * Kristen Nilsen, former GUADEC organiser/volunteer, and attendee at 5
GUADECs, whose membership requests have been repeatedly denied.

It's clear that there are some problems with membership requests, and I
guess that there are two or three reasons:

 * We have no way to evaluate local user group contributions in the
GNOME Foundation
 * GNOME is Euro and US centric, and perhaps we have difficulty
recognising contributions outside Europe
 * The membership committee doesn't have a clear set of guidelines for
admitting GNOME Foundation members (for example, should "GUADEC
volunteer" suffice for foundation membership? How about "member of
GNOME-fr/GNOME Hispano/GNOME Chile"?)

Some suggestions that came out of discussions I had in GUADEC (please
feel free to add others):

 * Empower user groups to award GNOME Foundation membership to local
volunteers (needs good guidelines)
 * Ensure that local user groups are represented on membership-community
 * Change from application-based to invitation-based membership, so that
existing GNOME Foundation members can invite non-foundation members to
join (needs a process)
 * Have a fall-back in the case where a membership sponsor doesn't reply
- perhaps foundation-list?
 * Figure out how to evaluate non-technical contributions (art,
marketing, event organisation, GNOME Love, spreading GNOME)

One thing is for sure - we need to change something, because right now a
fairly significant group of people is feeling disenfranchised.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
David Neary
bolsh gimp org