Re: Membership

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com> writes: 
> An interesting corner case is if a contributor develops a new package
> that we might want to consider part of GNOME once it exists.
>  

I think we're going to have to exclude not-yet-written packages. In
some cases (companies), we can be pretty sure it will get written, but
look how many projects get stuck at 0.1... well, we at least need to
say that packages need to be "pretty far along".
 
> That depends on if we want the criteria to be mechanistic or
> voting/judgement call. One way I think might be good to pick an
> initial membership (though it probably would not be scalable) is to
> pick the set of modules that will be represented, and ask the
> maintainers of each to come up with a list of significant
> contributors, and merge these lists.
>

Right, I think that's correct. What I mean is that "significant
contributor" should basically mean whatever we decide it means
long-term, like 2 months of contributions, or whatever.
 
> The way Apache does it, people are nominated for membership rather
> than requesting it, and the whole membership votes to approve the
> nomination. I think this way might be less likely to lead to hard
> feelings and is less likely to discriminate against shy/unassertive
> people who would feel uncomfortable requesting membership.
>

However I don't think it scales at all. Debian has around 400 members,
with constant turnover. I think gnome-hackers is of similar size.
People just won't vote if there's a vote every week. 

How large is the Apache membership? Is there any way to make this scale?
Maybe increase the membership requirements?
 
> We can get a start on key-exchange action at LWE.
> 

Yep.

Havoc