Re: Fwd: Minutes of meeting

["Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay" <sankarshan randomink org>]

On 2/26/07, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> Le jeudi 22 fÃvrier 2007, Ã 12:00, Behdad Esfahbod a Ãcrit :
> > On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 16:10 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > >
> > >  + Sankarshan proposes to require email addresses in the application
> > >
> > > ACTION: someone to update the text on the application form to improve
> > > it
> > >         and make it clearer that providing email addresses as contacts
> > >         is really useful
> >
> > I know membership in the foundation is not a very sensitive position,
> > still, shouldn't the membership committee only contact addresses that
> > they confirm being held by the person they want to contact?  Otherwise I
> > can walk in, ask for membership, and give owen taylor gmail com as my
> > contact...

I agree that the suggestion might not be solving the problem at all.
So I'd try and tell what the issue was in the first place.

I guess the idea I was trying to get across is lesser number of clicks
for the information that might be construed as "should be there". A
small but significant %-age of the applications have as Contacts the
following (only an illustrative example):

* Jeff Waugh
* Quim G
* David Neary
* Harry Lu

Now, the first 3 because they tend to appear numerous times in the
applications (would be a quaint idea to figure out who the "mavens"
are) the email addresses are kind of recalled off the top of the head.
Now the last one might just be occuring only once but in case I was
doing the application processing I'd be required to click the tab for
Mango, do a search figure out if the Harry is a member, then check
whether there is an existing ticket about the address change (it
happened twice on my watch) and finally use the RT to compose the
reply.

The extreme case of the problem is when the applicant says one or both
of the following:

* Check the ChangeLog
* Read the following GNOME Bugzilla entries ...

On the @gnome.org addresses there's no chance of stuff going wrong,
but on any other domain there's a fair bit of risk that we might be
setup however, I'd rather trust the applicant than not :)

I've described what the problem scenario is - so if there are ways and
means of solving it please feel free to suggest.

:Sankarshan

--
From Untruth, lead me to the Truth,
From Darkness, Lead me towards the Light,
From Death, Lead me to Life Eternal