Suggestion about providing more value to Foundation members

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Marketing Team:

One thing that I think the GNOME Foundation is not very good about doing
is promoting those people who volunteer their time to the project.  I
think it would help encourage people to participate in the GNOME project
if the GNOME community was better able to promote Foundation members and
make sure that the good work they do is recognized.

To improve this, the GNOME Foundation could do a better job of providing
information about who in the community has what responsibilities and
perhaps some evaluation of each person's work.  This could be useful
to volunteers who have an interest in using such references when seeking
a job, for example.

Perhaps a way to manage this would be to make better use of social
networking sites like LinkedIn.  Perhaps the GNOME community could have
a better process for ensuring that volunteers are recognized in such
sites for the work they do by making sure that people have official
titles for their responsibilities that they can list on such websites.
Some roles in the community, such as that of board members, members of
teams like the release team, and module maintainers have some degree
of an "official title", but I'd think this could be more formalized
and there are probably many roles within the community that haven't
been given any official title.

If we encouraged people in the community, especially people who have
official titles to provide "Recommendations" for others when they do
volunteer work, this would be one way that the community could make
sure that people get such recognition.  But this is just a suggestion,
I'm sure that we could find many ways to do more to ensure that people
involved in our community are recognized for their efforts.  I think
it is especially important to ensure that those who volunteer their
time are recognized in this sort of way.

Thoughts?

Brian