It's clear that there are some problems with membership requests, and I guess that there are two or three reasons: * We have no way to evaluate local user group contributions in the GNOME Foundation * GNOME is Euro and US centric, and perhaps we have difficulty recognising contributions outside Europe * The membership committee doesn't have a clear set of guidelines for admitting GNOME Foundation members (for example, should "GUADEC volunteer" suffice for foundation membership? How about "member of GNOME-fr/GNOME Hispano/GNOME Chile"?) Some suggestions that came out of discussions I had in GUADEC (please feel free to add others): * Empower user groups to award GNOME Foundation membership to local volunteers (needs good guidelines)
Actually, when someone from a local group apply for membership, and if s/he supply reference name for local group responsible people, we directly ask them and rely on his/her comments. That's almost same with delegating local groups to do the job. The major problem for evaluation still holds, even with such a situation. If local responsible (Translation coordinator or even organizer) is not member of foundation, should it be suffice to decide applicants contributions? In past we did not check if reference name is foundation member or not, but to be honest, we should have.
* Ensure that local user groups are represented on membership-community
I think it's better to prepare some kind of proposals about why any contributor should be member of foundation. It should be clear and convincing. Lots of people from local groups (I know from mine) do not know even if GNOME Foundation exists as an entity. Because we have no translated information for those things, and on gnome.org it's not easy to see related links. Membership should be more valuable than having @gnome.org alias for people. Since then, we can increase collaboration with local people.
* Change from application-based to invitation-based membership, so that existing GNOME Foundation members can invite non-foundation members to join (needs a process)
That would be cure for lots of problems. Because lots of applications do not have references, and that's the reason that they are rejected somehow. It would be easy to process applications which is invitation based, in which we would know at least one reference. Bad side of this is to let lobbying in a long period. So I think direct applications should be available as well.
* Have a fall-back in the case where a membership sponsor doesn't reply - perhaps foundation-list?
Should be in guidelines.
* Figure out how to evaluate non-technical contributions (art, marketing, event organisation, GNOME Love, spreading GNOME)
References up to now, was the only way that we were trying to understand if contribution is trivial.
One thing is for sure - we need to change something, because right now a fairly significant group of people is feeling disenfranchised.
I agree. For late applications, I put the blame on me, totally. We had to change the system for easy tracking and reliable storing of membership database. Those waiting applications will get their 'Accepted' mails as soon as sysadmin team setup the scripts. (I sent my recent changes yesterday). After setting up the membership management related stuff, we should actually call new volunteers to membership committee, as today only me and Sankarshan is working. But the plan was to finish things so new volunteers meet with the new system, not the old confusing cvs based processing system. Hopefully in a week we'll have all the things handy with documentations.
Cheers, Dave.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part