Hi Pascal, thanks for your swift reply. Since the discussion has already moved on, I will only respond to some core parts of your email. Other things might have already been discussed by other people. Pascal Bleser wrote:
[...] No, that's obviously not what we mean by active contributor. [...]
For people we don't know, we do peek at some statistics (e.g. email posts, skim through a few of those posts, IRC stats, web forum stats, ...). It isn't mathematical nor empirical nor perfect, but that doesn't mean the whole idea of giving away @opensuse.org addresses to active contributors is a bad thing.
Rather think of it that way: if you (or whomever) think it's important to have such an alias (some think it isn't) and you'd like to have one, then it could be an incentive to contribute more. Although it isn't the primary goal (of the "membership") by any means.
"Passive" users and active contributors are equally important to a product such as the openSUSE distribution, but for a community, I personally really do think that contributors are more important, because those contributions but don't produce something that helps others
- without contributors, there's nothing: no distribution, no support, no information, no documentation, no translation, ...
- from my experience, I'd say the ratio from user to contributor is somewhere between 50 to 1 and 500 to 1 -- what I mean is that contributors are a lot less frequent than users who profit [1] from
I think here we come to the point. I am somewhat uneasy with your criteria. By reading your emails, you seem to measure (or at least try to measure) contributions in terms of absolute values (IRC stats, email posts, etc.). This, from my point of view, is not such a good idea in a large and open community project. It's fairly obvious that, say, a Novell employee who's being paid to work on openSUSE for 8h a day can contribute a lot more in terms of absolute value (for instance, number of RPM packages maintained) to the project. It's maybe also not really surprising that a student with lots of spare time (No offence! I've also studied at a university and I know it can be hard work) can maintain/change/create more Wiki pages than others, i.e. his contribution in absolute terms is easily measurable. However, if somebody has a 70h week at work (non Linux-related) but nevertheless is willing and able to spend 4h over the weekend on spreading the word, helping friends with openSUSE, maybe contributing a few good emails on a openSUSE mailing list, I think this contribution to the project is just as valuable and maybe even more impressive in relative terms - you are of course right that the absolute contribution in those 4h over the weekend might only be minor. For me, the membership approach you took disregards these very valuable contributions of many people at the base of the openSUSE community. According to your criteria of absolute values of contribution, those people in principle aren't considered as members. That's what I don't like, and that's the reason why I feel that the current approach sets a wrong sign. I appreciate your work and that the board comes up with ideas. Unfortunately, and that might have been caused by emails from board members on this list, there seem to be a problem in communicating your ideas. When a board member proposes a code of conduct which leads to a diverse discussion with pros and cons, and one week later without having a clear conclusion the code is published as adopted, then it doesn't sound as if the board listened to the community. I can see the same problem now here in the membership discussion. I am sorry if I misunderstand your ideas. I don't think I am against a membership per se, and I am certainly not considering it as evil, but as mentioned above it seems as if my criteria for "member" differ significantly from the board's criteria, and that's why I am not in favour of it at the moment. Regards, Thomas --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org