Re: Re: Exceptions to renewals / new memberships processing during elections

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

2013/5/29 Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>

Taking this off the Foundation list for the time being.

I think Andrew raises a very good question. Would it make sense to
modify the policy so that it does not impact renewals of members in
good standing?

As in every democracy or modern society citizens (Foundation members in this specific case) do have a series of benefits [1] and rights (voting). In addition to that there are also a few duties they should accomplish to and one of them is taking care their membership isn't expired. I fully agree that checking your personal membership status is not something you should do every week but adding a little reminder on your phone or your computer when your renewal takes place is something that is worth doing.

I understand that someone may forget when the last renewal happened and the Committee spent some of its effort trying to solve this issue in two ways:

1. sending an individual mail at the beginning of each month announcing members in need of renew

2. sending a mail to foundation-list monthly with a list of members whose membership is going to expire within the same month. (the e-mail is sent at the beginning of the month and lists all the expiration dates within the same month, i.e [2].

German proposed yesterday [3] the introduction of another individual mail to be sent on the very same day when a certain membership expired. That's something we'll probably introduce to improve the current process some more.

About Andrew's case: he received his individual mail on the 3rd of May together with the announcement on f-list listing his name [4] while the current election's last possible date for renewing a membership was set to be 2013-05-26. We received his renewal request yesterday, 2013-05-28 [5]. We also encouraged everyone to look at the status of the membership with an e-mail to f-announce [6] dated 2013-05-06.

What I feel is that people just don't care enough about their Foundation membership until the next Board's election gets closer and they actually realize they aren't members anymore when they don't receive their personal voting ballot. Honestly speaking that's a problem not easily fixable by the Membership Committee.

Also, if the memberships are processed this month as
described below, does that mean those new members will run into this
very same problem every two years?

If they will pay attention to the e-mails that will be sent them as reminders at the beginning of May 2015 there won't be any problem. The problem when renewing a membership during the election run is the impossibility to create new voting tokens without impacting the ones being created already. So while there shouldn't be any problem in processing a renewal in the case there's a specific reason behind it (like the case of GUADEC's travel subsidies), the member whose membership was renewed lately won't be able to vote during that election. The e-mail I sent yesterday to f-list [7] clearly states that in these special cases the Committee can process a renewal or a new membership request. I agree we should probably add a little note on the election's rules for the next years to avoid any misunderstanding.

[1] https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/MembershipBenefits

[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2013-May/msg00026.html

[3] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2013-May/msg00088.html

[4] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2013-May/msg00026.html

[5] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2013-May/msg00090.html

[6] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2013-May/msg00000.html

[7] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2013-May/msg00171.html

--
Cheers,

Andrea

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

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