Re: New board roles

[Baris Cicek <baris teamforce name tr>]

On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 05:31 -0300, Mariano Su�z-Alvarez wrote:
> Hi all,
Hi Mariano, thanks for bringing this issue forward.


> 
> On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 08:08 +0200, Quim Gil wrote:
> > [snip]
> > My candidate program was focused on internal board/Foundation
> > improvements, and this is what I will try to push.
> > [snip]
> 
> One thing that appears to need improvement is the handling of foundation
> membership applications. 
> 
> As mentioned today (for an appropriately chosen timezone) on #g-h, every
> so often someone comes into that channel asking for someone from the
> membership committee to ask for news about his/her application after
> having waited X time. Independently of the reasons behind the delay, it
> undoubtedly results in unnecessary frustration. It can be construed as
> an excessively high bar of entry; it can occasionally be, and indeed has
> been, seen as discrimination against specific individuals, &c.
> 
> Part of the problem lies in that applicants are more or less in the dark
> as to what happened to their application, apart from the email that
> (some?) of them get after submitting the application form. From asking
> on line, it appears that most of the delays are due to having to wait
> for contacts to respond to confirmations and so on; having a status page
> where such information can be queried would probably be of much use. It
> has also been reported that some people have had their application
> accepted while not having gotten any notification of the fact.
rt3 should automatically send mails right after they submit their
application provided that they supplied correct e-mail address and/or
they don't get e-mails filtered by spam filter. 

E-mail is our only contact way with members and applicant, and this
somehow put burden of ensuring if their application is received by
membership committee (mc). 

Of course that can't be an excuse. We should express current situation
of application with a  different interface (as a public tracker) and we
should express that clearly on application web page. I don't know if
it's possible but we can even open the rt3 of mc to public to query
their tickets, and clearly see what's been done about their application.
(Not to mention that everything this can be doable checking archives of
mc mailing list, but accessing rt3 might be more convenient for
checking. I'm not quite sure about technical possibility of this but
thinking out loud. 

> 
> 
> I think that the membership committee is doing a great job. I think
> there is some room for improvement, too, in, at least, the public
> perception of their work.
Thanks for nice comments. Though I'm very upset that we could not
function well in processing applications. 


> If help is needed, do let me know, by the way.
Thanks, answer is 'Yes, we need.'. We tried to recruit mc volunteers
using invitation since we want it to be faster but seems like invitation
method is not effective even though you get faster reactions. So if you
want to help, you're welcome. Please send an e-mail about it to
membership-committee mailing list.  



> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- m
> 
> 
>