Re: Various concerns on foundation membership process

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay <sankarshan randomink org>]

Dave Neary wrote:

> I want to get the ball rolling on an examination of the foundation
> member admittance criteria.

At last ...

> During GUADEC a significant number of people reported having trouble
> with foundation membership requests, including:
>
>  * The president of GNOME Hispano, whose membership request has been
> awaiting approval for several months
>  * The Brazilian organiser of Forum GNOME, who reported that several
> people in Brazil had had problems joining
>  * Someone who reported that several proposals from local members (was
> it perhaps Chile?) were rejected with a stock mail
>  * Kristen Nilsen, former GUADEC organiser/volunteer, and attendee at 5
> GUADECs, whose membership requests have been repeatedly denied.

In general the Foundation Membership request is denied/rejected due to
the following reasons:

o Lack of contacts
o Wrong email ID for contacts (whereby contacts cannot be contacted)
o Lack of positives from the contacts
o Lack of sufficient information in the application

All of us don't know all the contributors (or applicants) and I guess
assuming that we will would be foolhardy. Allow me to provide some
examples, recently we have had applications from RaviShankar
Shrivastava, Karunakar G and Jayaradha N. I know (meaning know their
contribs and know them personally) these applicants. Yet, their
applications were unusually bereft of useful information and to top it
all, Ravi had Karunakar as contact and Karunakar had Sayamindu as
contact (again a person I know). Circular loops in contacts among other
things confuse us when you need to send out NEEDINFO/NEEDVOUCHING mails.
And if you look at Christian Rose's reply to Ravi's application one
would be really pressed to take a judgement call - is Christian giving a
green ? Or is he being circumspect ?

Taking on the cases you have listed above. What I can suggest is a quick
(reactive ?) step. Ask them to apply again, either Baris or myself will
pick up the ticket and process it fast track. Right now that is all I
can commit. The changeover from the CVS based to the RT system is taking
time (and I have some misgivings/misunderstanding about the RT configs).
But when the cases listed above do apply, please do realise that the
committee would require minimum information in the application.

As regards members from Chile being repeatedly denied, I would say
unequivocally that the Membership Committee has no mandate or authority
to deny membership to an deserving candidate whose application is by the
book. The MC is in place to facilitate more and more members become part
of the GNOME Foundation and we do try our level best to process as many
applications that come in. For example, during and after GUADEC this
year, the number of applicants rose nicely and exponentially as happens
during election time also. Since process workflow is Applicant -> MC ->
Contacts for Vouching -> MC -> Membership a slight lag in any one of the
places causes a cascading effect.

> 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"?)

I would suggest something a bit more radical. We have local GNOME
Marketing bodies - whose nature of work should put them in touch with
the GNOME contributors (note that I do not only say developers) in the
region. Why not empower them to push a contributor towards a Foundation
Membership ? Right now, I would agree with you that we take a judgement
call (or rather the contacts take it for us) as to who is fit to be a
Foundation Member. I would say why judge ? Invite everybody in the
membership through the local nodal bodies and thus make people feel part
of GNOME.

> 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)

+1

>  * Ensure that local user groups are represented on membership-community

+1

>  * Change from application-based to invitation-based membership, so that
> existing GNOME Foundation members can invite non-foundation members to
> join (needs a process)

If you drive membership to the Foundation through local nodes, then
invitation only (with a chance of a clique) would be removed into being
a more participative nature

>  * Have a fall-back in the case where a membership sponsor doesn't reply
> - perhaps foundation-list?

In the current context of things a fallback would be very hard to put in
place.

>  * Figure out how to evaluate non-technical contributions (art,
> marketing, event organisation, GNOME Love, spreading GNOME)

+1. We *need* this. We *must have* this.

> One thing is for sure - we need to change something, because right now a
> fairly significant group of people is feeling disenfranchised.

And sad to say, that without these groups being there, our existence is
not justified

Warm regards
Sankarshan




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