Re: Caroline Henrikson's foundation membership

[Tobias Mueller <tobiasmue gnome org>]

Hi Sri,

On Fri, 2018-09-21 at 15:26 -0600, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> I understand that Caroline's application for GNOME Foundation
> membership was rejected?  Could we revisit this decision?
Sure. Given that we are humans, we make mistakes. The process currently
requires the applicant to appeal.  Alternatively, the Board is free to
make whatever decision it likes.  Another common procedure is to re-
apply.

> I think everyone on this list can vouch for Caroline's application.
> She has produced all the illustrations and graphics for GUADEC 2018
> and Libre Application Summit and has spent long hours working on the
> designs for both these conferences.  She also designed stickers as
> well.
The application didn't make that as clear as it could have done, I
guess.  Generally, we require the applicant to provide the evidence of
"non-trivial" contributions rather than hinting at it and us chasing it
down ourselves.
Also, we tend to wait for the applicant to be somewhat stable in their
contributions.  In this case, it was stated that the contribution
started with "helping out with the engagement team for a little over a
month".  That itself seemed like an exaggeration to me after I've
searched the mailing list archives.

> I'm quite puzzled as to why her application was rejected considering
> the all the work she has produced.  I'd love to understand why this
> happened and what the membership committee's concerns were for her
> application that lead to her rejection.  In general, the membership
> team has been quite generous in accepting memberships in the past and
> arguably Caroline's candidacy is very strong in our estimation.
The way applications are processed is written in the wiki. Whether this
is generous is left up to interpretation.  And whether it should be
generous would need to be discussed.

> The engagement and conference teams has a very very strong desire to
> have a designer.  It's very rare to attract the interest of one.
> Caroline has capabilities that are highly desirable and we will be
> relying on her skills for a number of things that engagement and
> conference teams will be needing.  Some of the tasks will rely on the
> benefits of GNOME foundation membership (eg access to Nextcloud, going
> to conferences etc)
Given that it is possible, and has happened in the past, that someone
simply doesn't want to become a member and still wants to contribute, we
should work on making that possible.


Cheers,
  Tobi