Re: foundation application..

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

One thing I thought of would be to change the direction of the process
to be an invitation rather than an application.
If you see someone helping, instead of pushing him to apply you could
fill in the form describing his contributions (and possibly the name
of someone else who can support it) and if accepted he would get an
invitation to join the foundation.

That seems highly masonic.

The bylaws state the following[1]

"Any contributor to GNOME shall be eligible for member-ship.

A “contributor” shall be defined as any individual who has contributed to a

non-trivial improvement of the GNOME Project, such as code, documentation, trans-

lations, maintenance of project-wide resources, or other non-trivial activities which

benefit the GNOME Project. Large amounts of advocacy or bug reporting may qual-

ify one as a contributor, provided that such contributions are significantly above the

level expected of an ordinary user. Contributions made in the course of employment

will be considered and will be ascribed to the individuals involved, rather than accruing

to all employees of a “contributing” corporation."

I suggest we just make the rules much clearer to people on the outreach pages by clarifying what "non-trivial" actually means. GSoC/OPW interns are told to make more contributions after their 3 month internship before applying. That suggests that the contributions they make over their 3 month internship of 40 hours per week are trivial. It's no wonder contributors find the process of making a membership application intimidating considering that, isn't it? How could a volunteer compete with an someone who is being paid to work on GNOME full time (even if it is just for 3 months)?

[1] http://www.gnome.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/bylaws.pdf