Fwd: Proposal.
- From: Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>
- To: membership-committee gnome org
- Subject: Fwd: Proposal.
- Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 16:39:22 +0100
This is the proposal Nat wrote and mailed to board-list earlier
this week. We haven't actually achieved a consensus on this yet :)
It looks like we'll have (yet) another meeting where we want to
have a resolution at the end of it. This is likely to be early
next week.
If you have comments on the implementability (is this a word?)
of either the current guidelines for looking at applications or
this proposal of guidelines, please do respond in as much detail
as you want.
One thing which might be particularly helpful is specific
examples of problems you've met already and what the result
was. (Whether the result would have differed with these would
also be worth noting.)
Telsa
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Subject: Proposal.
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Date: 08 Oct 2002 15:04:30 -0400
Proposal for GNOME Foundation Membership Guidelines
Definition
----------
For the purposes of this proposal, I am talking about the
membership as defined by the GNOME Foundation charter. The
charter (http://foundation.gnome.org/charter.html) defines a
member as a person who can run for the GNOME Foundation board,
vote in board elections, and issue or endorse a referendum.
This definition is to distinguish what I'm talking about from the
various ideas people have put forth for several classes of
membership, e.g. "membership," "lifetime membership," "gnome
friend," etc. I'm not proposing or discussing a multiclass
system, only talking about the voting membership as defined by the
charter (not including the guidelines for membership defined in
the charter, since those are the things we are discussing and
trying to agree on).
Proposal
--------
1. Definitions
A member of the GNOME Foundation is someone who can run for the
GNOME Foundation board, vote in board elections and issue or
endorse a popular referendum.
Membership in the GNOME Foundation is controlled by a Membership
Committee who process applications from individuals who wish to
become members. This committee is responsible for accepting and
rejecting applications based on membership guidelines set by the
Foundation board.
2. Guidelines for Membership
Any person who has made non-trivial contributions to the GNOME
project and who submits a proper application to the Membership
Committee will be approved for membership. A non-trivial
contribution is any activity which contributes to the development
of the project at a level significantly above that expected of a
normal user or fan of GNOME.
Examples of non-trivial contributions include hacking, bugfixing,
extensive testing, design, documentation, translation,
administration or maintenance of project-wide resources, giving
GNOME talks at conferences and community coordination such as
bugzilla or release management. Any activity, such as advocacy or
submitting bug reports, must substantially exceed the level of
contribution expected of an ordinary user or fan of the project to
qualify an individual for membership in the Foundation.
3. Membership Duration and Renewal
Membership in the Foundation is lifetime. However, in order for a
membership to be valid, it must be renewed every year. The intent
of this renewal process is to ensure that the membership roster is
not filled with people who no longer have any interest in the
project, and to verify and keep up-to-date membership contact
information.
To renew his membership, an individual must submit a new
application for membership. If the application is well-formed and
the individual has previously been a member of the Foundation, his
membership will be automatically approved. All renewals will take
place at once, every year.
Rationale
---------
* Intent and Effect of Membership
- Intent: govern the Foundation.
The intent of the membership is to provide a governing
body for the GNOME Foundation that has ultimate
responsibility for directing the Foundation's resources.
The powers of this governing body are to elect the board,
run for the board, and to issue and endorse referenda.
- Effect: sense of inclusion in the GNOME project.
The membership intent, stated above, is the only explicit
reason for the membership's existence. But membership in
the Foundation, and the candidacy and voting rights it
entails, has another effect which is important to this
discussion.
Specifically, non-membership in the Foundation, in the
form of a rejected application, can create a sense of
alienation or exclusion from GNOME. People will always
approximately equate the rights of membership with
membership in the GNOME project, not just the foundation.
* Guidelines for membership.
The membership guidelines outlined above are intended to be as
open as possible, to include everyone who has contributed in a
non-trivial way before and everyone who is contributing now.
The general idea of inclusiveness is something I talked about
a lot (and in retrospect, in embarrassingly florid ways) in
the Foundation charter. You should go back and read the
charter (http://foundation.gnome.org/charter.html) if you
haven't read it recently, since I articulated a lot of the
ideas behind the openness of the foundation there. Back then,
some of the motivation was figuring out how to deal with
corporate entities getting involved in GNOME, and I think
those arguments are still somewhat valid, but there are
broader reasons too.
I would also remind everyone, as a backdrop to listing the
Pros and Cons of the proposed policy, of the relative costs
and benefits of a "false positive" versus a "false negative"
in the application approval process.
A false positive means that we have people in the voting body
who have not contributed significantly to GNOME. In the worst
case, these people will vote for the wrong board members, or
be annoying in other ways. We should have a mechanism for
handling truly egregious members (though I can't think of
anything really awful an individual member can do right now),
but in general the ill effect of allowing someone into the
foundation who has not contributed is that they might vote in
an uninformed way.
We should do our best not to have members who have done
nothing for GNOME, but the relative ill effects of refusing
someone who has never been very involved in the project is
that they might vote spuriously in the lection. On the other
hand, there is a positive effect of accepting "borderline"
applications, which is that the applicant will feel more
involved in the project overall, and might contribute more.
A false negative means that a person who is a substantial
present or past contributor to GNOME and who has expressed an
interest in being a member of the foundation through his
application was rejected by the membership committee.
Rejecting this person doesn't just mean that a contributor who
was eligible for membership will not be in the membership: it
means a contributor who was eligible for membership and who
*wanted to be a member* was rejected.
The cost of this is high: it creates bad feelings in the
project, it creates a sense of elitism, and it alienates a
contributor whose lack of voice in the foundation affairs will
frustrate him.
* Pros and Cons of being inclusive.
Below, I discuss the Pros and Cons of a policy which embraces
inclusiveness. For the Pros, I outline various arguments for
this inclusiveness. For the Cons, I articulate the arguments
(that I have heard) against inclusiveness and respond to them.
Pros of Inclusiveness
---------------------
- Rejecting contributors is bad.
The current crisis of the membership committee began
because the current membership guidelines caused the
membership committee to reject people who had
contributed or who were contributing to the project.
The cost of these rejections is that the rejected
contributors feel alienated from GNOME, they feel that
their contributions are not valued, and they are less
likely to contribute in the future. This also creates
tension, a sense of elitism or cliquishness in GNOME,
and feelings of ill will and hostility.
- Recognizing the contributions of contributors.
Most people who get involved in GNOME start off with
small contributions of bugfixes, code, translations or
documentation. Recognizing the contributions of these
people can give them a sense of inclusion in the project
and can encourage them to continue to work on GNOME, and
to grow into large contributors to the project.
- GNOME is a cumulative project, and the membership should
be cumulative too.
When a person puts a lot of time and energy into
contributing to the project, the project should
recognize this time and energy by giving that person the
rights of a Foundation member.
If a person is a past contributor, but not a present
one, and still wants to be active and involved in the
project and demonstrates this by applying for a renewal
of his membership, then he should continue to be a
member of the foundation.
The GNOME contributor base is always changing, as new
people become active and involved and older long-time
contributors move on to do other things. However,
having a membership which is just made up of the new,
fresh contributors and a few long-time hackers who
continue to be involved silences the voices of those
people who have accumulated experience, knowledge and
understanding through their involvement with the
project.
We should not ignore or exclude the voices of those
people who have helped us in the past. The GNOME
project is continually building on past work to create
something better, and the membership should build
accordingly.
- Continued membership encourages people to stay involved.
Just because someone has dropped out of the project for
a little while does not mean that they will never come
back and help again. And particularly, if someone has
dropped out for a while, but *still applies for a
renewal of his membership*, then he is clearly someone
who wants to stay involved and may begin to contribute
in the future. People who don't want to be involved
again will not apply for renewal.
Rejecting the renewal application of a past contributor
is an effective way of telling them that they are no
longer considered a part of the foundation and the
project, even though they want to be.
Cons of Inclusiveness
---------------------
- Past contributors will outweigh present contributors in
the foundation elections and vote for the wrong people.
There are two misapprehensions in this argument.
Misapprehension #1: there will be more past contributors
than present contributors.
First, we already have two mechanisms for culling the
voting membership: (1) an annual renewal which a member
uses to express his interest in continuing to belong to
the foundation, and in demonstrating that he is keeping
up with the project on an ongoing basis; (2) a voting
process which does not require that 100% of the
membership vote.
Many past contributors who are no longer interested and
involved, and who do not take the time to keep up with
the project, will either not renew their applications or
will not vote in the elections. This will effectively
weed out the people who are not keeping up with the
project, and the effect of their membership on the
voting process will be minimalized.
Second, if GNOME is successful, it is growing fast
enough that new contributors will be significantly and
proportionally recognized in the membership. As new
large projects like Galeon, GStreamer, Gaim and Anjuta
join the GNOME effort, the contributors to those
projects will be eligible for membership in GNOME and
will add substantially[1] to the membership.
Misapprehension #2: Past contributors will vote for the
wrong people, and upset current contributors.
Past contributors have the benefits of their experience,
and this experience will inform the election process,
lending acquired knowledge and wisdom, as well as
continuity, to the governance of the GNOME Foundation.
It is not at all clear that a group of past contributors
will vote for the wrong people, even if they had 100%
control over the voting process.
- The membership list will get too big to handle.
Not committing the time to process the applications of
people who want their voice heard in the GNOME
foundation, and who want to feel included in the
project, is a terrible reason to add further controls
and constraints to the membership criteria. We should
be accepting or rejecting people based on whether or not
they should be members of the foundation, not based on
whether we have the time to deal with them and their
applications.
If the membership committee is overwhelmed, then we
should take steps to find the resources to help them.
- A smaller percentage of the total membership will vote
in the foundation elections each year.
Remember that the only people eligible to vote each year
are the people who took the time to renew their
applications. This may still lead to a less-than-80%
voting population (no doubt it will), but this is
actually useful, because it serves to cull from the
voting body the people who are not, at that particular
time, tracking the project and the foundation.
- Inactive past contributors don't deserve to vote, since
they're not contributing anymore.
Think of a person's contribution to GNOME as an
investment in the project. If GNOME is succesful, then
we will find ways to encourage and welcome many many
different investments into the project. In recognition
of these investments, and to encourage them, we will
give people membership in the foundation. As new
members come on board, the relative weight of each
member vote will be decreased. That is, past
contributors will have their vote diluted by new
members.
A group of old members will be able to represent their
opinions, based on their experiences and the things
they've learned working with the project, with a voting
power proportional to their overall contribution to
GNOME. And the project will benefit from not making the
same mistakes again and again, because the older, wiser
voices will be there to guide us.
Wrap-up
-------
The proposede guidelines above probably could be tweaked a bit,
but the main thing I am trying to get across is the importance of
(a) inclusiveness in the application review process, and (b)
lifetime memberships.
At least, I don't know of any compelling arguments against these
things, and we have seen firsthand negative effects when you try
to be too exclusive or to time-limit memberships.
When you reply to this mail, please try to reply to the individual
issues separately. For reference, these issues are:
1) Membership process and mechanism (application, renewal, ...)
2) Inclusiveness of membership guidelines vs exclusiveness of
membership guidelines.
3) Lifetime vs time-limited membership.
Hopefully everyone will just say "this is great, I agree." :-)
[1] If we're lucky we'll grow exponentially, like the human
population. If so, then at a certain point there will be many more
people contributing at any given time than ever contributed before.
See http://nat.org/population for more information ;-).
----- End forwarded message -----
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