Membership

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Some thoughts on the membership.

First: Debian has a huge backlog of people who want to be members, and
they just don't have time to approve people. IMHO one problem is that
you can become a member _before_ doing any work.

So, I think we should require that members have been contributing
significant code, docs, translations, webmastering, or whatever on a
regular basis for some period of time (2 months?). Defining
"significant" and "regular basis" could be tricky. Also, we need to
define what it is they have to contribute to - I guess we are going to
have to bite the bullet and actually define GNOME as some set of
packages. Anyway.

One maybe-problem here is that persons at companies such as Eazel
couldn't get membership for the 2-month period. Maybe that's bad, or
maybe it isn't (I'm not sure one knows enough to be voting on things
before spending a couple months keeping track of what's going on).

To select the initial membership, we should take whatever criteria we
plan to use for future members, and simply apply them to everyone we
know about now.

We need a fairly simple process for making people members, since
someone will have to do the work. How about: members write down what
they've contributed and when, they send it to a particular email
address (new-members@gnome.org or something), and we basically just
check CVS or SourceForge to be sure it's remotely credible and then
approve them. Alternatively, we batch up the requests-for-membership
and the steering committee approves the list every couple weeks at its
meetings.

Unfortunately, we almost certainly need a member database with GPG
public keys such as the one Debian has. This is the only way I know of
to do secure voting. This leads to some unpleasantness; basically you
have to meet all members in person or call them on the phone and do
the fingerprint-exchange deal to get their key signed, and people have
to not lose their secret keys.

Havoc