Re: Astonishment

[Martin Baulig <martin gnome org>]

Hi,

it's really nice that people on this list still know my name :-)

I was also very astonished that my application was rejected.  Sure, I'm not actively
contributing to GNOME at the moment, but my understanding was that membership expires
after two years and not after one year.  So basically I thought that I don't even need to
list any recent contributions in this form since my membership cannot be denied this year,
but will exire next year if I do not renew it.

Sure the membership committee has a lot of stress and cannot know everyone by name, but
isn't it the committee's task to actually "approve" an individual's contribution rather
than just having a quick look at their application form ?  So IMHO if they do not know
someone, it's their job to ask.

The other thing which astonishes me is that IMHO their way of "expiring" members is very
rude and may get them pissed off:  why do former contributors get the same form letter
than any "newscomers" ?

If I remember correctly, this is the first renewal in the foundation's history and the
guidelines are really not clear about who's eligible and who's not.  So I think it'd be a
lot more polite and not even more work to inform such people that their application is
incomplete and that they need to list recent GNOME contributions rather than just sending
them a form letter with "No recent contributions to GNOME" as the one reason given.

I'm also very astonished that my application was rejected because I wrote in it:

    Summary:
    Mono developer - MCS, Mono Debugger

    Detailed description:
    After taking a longer leave from GNOME due to university I became a Mono developer
    this spring and I'm now working on MCS and the new Mono Debugger.  This summer, I'm
    doing an internship at Ximian and helping Miguel with MCS and the new Mono debugger.

So is hacking on Mono not a contribution to GNOME, I thought we were the same community ?
Even if not, does the committee really want to get people the impression that taking a
leave for six months and then hacking on Mono for another six month will get them kicked
off the foundation ?

However, my reaction to this rejection was that I asked the committee to clarify what is
needed to become a foundation member, whether hacking on an application which has a GNOME
UI is enough or not.  If not, I'm probably out of luck, but in this case can we please
change the membership policy to state that you must hack continuously on GNOME during the
two years, "exires after two years" means for me that someone will get kicked off if he
completely disappears for that time and does nothing at all.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org