Hi, the GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee had an important meeting on 24-10-2011. I am here to report all the changes, news and relevant bits of the meeting. Let's begin: 1. Renewal process. The relevant bits of the overall meeting about this point can be resumed as it follows: - there will be *one* single form both for new members and for people willing to renew their membership. (so in the end, there won't be two different forms) - we will make that single form even simpler than the one we have now. It'll just have two fields. (we agreed to consolidate the "Contributions" and "Contacts" fields into one that will look like this: "please list references to your contributions, i.e. bugzilla, mailing lists, commits or people to vouch for you. If you are a new applicant, it's definitely a great plus putting the name of a few contacts within the community that could vouch for you and your work for the GNOME Foundation. (existing Foundation members preferred) We will also remove the checkbox we have to distinguish people willing to renew from new applicants and we'll require a few words to be added on the second field "Other Comments", that will look like this: "Please tell us whether you were an existing Foundation member or have done someting relevant for the GNOME Foundation in the past (i.e Board Member etc.)". - our get_renewees.py script (it's a script that automatically sends out renewal reminders every month by checking the Foundation DB and going-to-expire memberships) has been broken for several months and we managed to fix it just two months ago. Everything is going great from that side now, we are getting a good bunch of renewal requests every month so that means our mails are not blacklisted or marked as junk by member's mail services anymore. You can see what I am talking about at [1]. And in addition to that we will be sending out an extra mail to foundation-list every month with all the details we grab from the above script in case someone lost, blacklisted or marked as spam his individual mail. We decided to send out an extra mail to foundation-list so that no one can say he wasn't aware of his membership going to expire. The plan is to set up a webpage with all the details or even enable Foundation Members to log in into Mango and grab all the needed informations themselves, but that's the future. And about the renewal policy itself: - the Committee will check for applicant's contributions before renewing. We will try to be as less strict as we can while doing that and we'll require additional informations from the applicant just in exceptional cases whether we shouldn't be able to achieve a single proof of evident contributions. (the rationale here is pretty simple, being a Foundation member means having a say and several benefits we would love giving to people that really deserve them) - we will update our policy at [2] and we will remove time limits for proposing a renewal. An applicant will be free to submit a renewal request even after several years and even if he lost his membership in the meantime. This to prevent people not receiving renewal reminders to be excluded from our Foundation without a valid reason. 2. foundation.g.o REWRITE I got in touch with the Marketing team and found some help there to rewrite the foundation.g.o webspace to make it compliant to how gnome.org is designed. I can now say that we plan to remove the foundation.g.o's area as a subsite of gnome.org and integrate everything into gnome.org. Some interesting mockups can be found at [3]. I actually don't know how long this migration will take but I'll try to do my best to process everything in a timely manner. (that will really depend on my free time though) 3. Should we make election's timelines mandatory or not? (strict interpretation of timeline's rules or not?) References: [4] We decided to determine that on a case by case basis, so whether we will have a rule infringement, we will open up a disciplinary action and vote on that. The results might obviously change from case to case. 5. http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/2011/rules.html RE-Formulation References: [5] The rules.html file will have an update, we will make it simpler, easier to read and understand to everyone. As a side note about [5], we agreed that candidacies should be sent to the following addresses: To: f-announce, f-list, CC: elections, Reply-To: f-list. So, foundation-list should be used for people willing to know more about the candidates, asking questions and discuss relevant topics. 6. Being a Foundation Member takes in several benefits A new doc will be added either on the renewed Foundation area or on the wikis to explain the current benefits connected with membership. Benefits definitely strengthen membership's concept and usually they are an additional drawing power for new contributors willing to join our beloved Foundation. So, in fact, Foundation members will have the following benefits: 1. @gnome.org's mail alias 2. vote rights on Board's elections, so having a say in GNOME's future. 3. access to a personal blog hosted at blogs.g.o 4. people.g.o/~UID's. (this won't happen in the near future since the Infrastructure team needs its time to deploy everything on the GNOME servers, you can follow up on this topic at [6]) 5. jabber access with their @gnome.org alias Well, that's all for now, I'll update our Meeting's Wiki page [7] with logs and any other required information this week. Thanks, Andrea Veri, on behalf of the GNOME Foundation & Elections Committee [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2011-October/msg00001.html [2] https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/RenewalsPolicy [3] http://yuliansu.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/foundation.png [4] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2011-May/msg00132.html [5] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2011-May/msg00139.html [6] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-infrastructure/2011-November/msg00010.html [7] https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/Meetings
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