Re: foundation application..

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

>> What you are suggesting would be accepting every single intern
>> regardless of this person being really interested and passionate about
>> joining the Foundation. That will probably lead to a wider membership
>> base for sure but how long these people are going to really stay
>> around if their interest of contributing to the project was only
>> tracked by the stipend they received?
>
>
> I don't think that this is necessarily different from other paid
> contributors, except that other paid contributors are more likely to have
> long-term employment working on GNOME. So I don't know why this distinction
> is made. Can you explain the rationale a bit more?

The question I originally made to Magdalen was there for me to find
out whether an intern really had an interest in joining the Foundation
besides from receiving a travel subsidy or participation to Planet
GNOME. The rationale behind introducing a two months extended period
for interns before applying for Foundation membership has been the
unfortunately high number of interns dramatically reducing the number
of their contributions after the final date of their internship. I can
tell you that statistically this hasn't been the case for past
employees of our corporate sponsors as many of them have decided to
stick around (by reducing their involvement to IRC or mailing lists
participation) or apply for the emeritus membership when they weren't
able to contribute to the project anymore.

The module I have been maintaining since last year (the ATK java wrapper), was funded by sun and got completely abandoned as soon as the funding got withdrawn in 2011 and this does not seem to be a totally unique occurrence, but either way this is just anecdotal evidence as much as that is. Personally, I would like to see statistics to see if they support either hypothesis, because at the moment I believe neither actually substantiated by concrete numbers. Without those, we really have no reason to suppose that an intern or a paid contributor have a different probabilities of "cutting and running" the instant that the money is gone to each other.

As things are, all we know is that sponsored contributors are offered the same incentive to contribute to GNOME with their time (i.e. money and perhaps some possibilities of progression, in some cases). We really don't know whether being paid for 3 months means something different to being paid for a longer period of time. The only fair assumption we can make about this issue is that volunteers are not being motivated by money really and the rules in the bylaws prevent us from discriminating against those who are not volunteers on that basis already so that's out, at this point in time.

Why don't we actually analyse the data since this is the only way to really determine with some degree of certainty whether the assumptions which have informed the decision to discriminate against interns are justified? I would be willing to could work with whoever else is interested in solving this problem publish a report of the findings, as long as we could access to the necessary information which would be needed to do that.

Magdalen