Re: GNOME Board of Directors Elections 2013 - Voting Instructions sent

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

2013/5/27 Germán Póo-Caamaño <gpoo gnome org>

On Mon, 2013-05-27 at 20:07 +0200, Andrea Veri wrote:
> 2013/5/27 Germán Póo-Caamaño <gpoo gnome org>
> [...]

>         Anyway, I am going to re-apply again.  But it would be great
>         if we could
>         make the process less error prone.
>
> We did a lot in the past two years to avoid any kind of issues with
> the renewal process (especially after John Palmieri's case) and I'm
> really wondering how you can accuse the process to be faulty when:

It was not my intention to accuse anything, but to open the possibility
to improve the process.  For the tone of your email, it seems you are
upset for my email.  I am sorry, it was not my intention.

That's OK, we've spent a lot of efforts trying to improve the process and I feel I just misunderstood the tone of your e-mail myself too.

 

> 1. we sent you an individual mail stating your membership was going to
> expire soon.

Please, may you check the mail logs and see what was the status?  As I
said, I do not have it in my archives.

The scripts sends a DEBUG log to membership-committee monthly [1] and "Trying to send to gpoo gnome org, Your GNOME Foundation Membership is about to expire" is indeed there, unfortunately I don't have the maillog handy for september 2012, otherwise I would have looked into it to verify the mail was really sent correctly.

 

 

> 2. we sent a monthly report with your name, surname and your last
> renewal date.
> 3. we mailed f-announce suggesting everyone to check their
> membership's status as we usually do every year. [1]

I wonder when the list is updated or, in other words, how long do you
wait until you expire a member? (I guess updating the LDAP server)

Please, do not feel offended by my questions.

The GNOME Foundation membership's duration is currently 2 years. The script runs monthly, so let's say a membership expired on the 2nd, September. The expired membership gets notified on the 1st of the next month. The list at [2] is updated right away within 12 hours after the membership expired.

 

> I don't see any possible improvement on the way renewals are managed
> now and luckily this is really the first case someone reports a
> problem with it since the time we introduced the monthly report +
> individual mails.

Shouldn't I report it then?

I see 3 potential ways:
1. Sort the list of people by name or last name

Agreed, Tobias should take care of that when he gets back from GNOME.Asia.

 

2. Sent the renewal email with CC to membership-committee.  I could
   not find it in the membership-committee list archives.  So, you
   can cross-check the emails were sent and there will a public record
   to check later (and narrow the search).

The renewal mail is sent to membership-committee already with a DEBUG mode [3], so you can actually double-check that the mail was really sent by looking at those e-mails.

 

3. Once the membership expires (i.e. removed the status), notify them
   as well (individually and to the foundation list).

I'm not really sure about sending an extra mail to foundation-list but we can modify our script to send a sort of "Your membership expired today" mail when a specific membership expires. Let's also wait Fabiana and Tobias opinion about this.

  

Until now, I had wrongly assumed that expired membership were
automatically made emeritus.  So, if I was not there, I was also ok.
Stupid assumption, but I am sure I am not the only one.  IMVHO, that
makes (3) valuable.

 Expired memberships are not automatically moved into Emeritus, you can give a look at what the Emeritus status is at [4]. Thanks for your suggestions, I'll make sure we'll discuss them and eventually improve our current process.

Have an awesome day,

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2012-September/msg00023.html

[2] http://www.gnome.org/foundation/membership/

[3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2013-May/msg00007.html

[4] https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/EmeritusMembers

--
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Sysadmin,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av