Le dimanche 04 juillet 2010, à 10:33 +0200, Andreas Jaeger a écrit :
I'd like to do a bit out of the box thinking on this one and see the $member discussion in a broader context as well.
Currently the benefits of membership are: * lizards.opensuse.org blog account * IRC opensuse.org cloak * @opensuse.org mail alias * Right to vote the openSUSE board - and perhaps participate in other votes we do
Do we want to open up all of this and open it up so that everybody can sign up and can get these benefits - or a part of it? This might be good from a marketing perspective since more people would call themselves $member and use their openSUSE org mail alias etc.
Or do we want to continue giving these benefits based on merit?
I'd keep that based on merit for various reasons: + it's a way for the project to thank contributors, and I think this is valuable + anyone with one of the above benefits will be seen as representing openSUSE in some way. And it's a sad truth that it's easy to abuse those benefits if we open them, with "abuse" being something like being highly disrespectful of everything or just being negative towards our project all the time. So it's also a way to have a minimal control on who gets an opensuse.org address/blog/cloak/etc.
Somebody said in the discussion that he felt bad whenever we had to reject a person applying for membership. Why does it happen that people apply that are not active? What can be done here?
I think the fact that it's named "member" is indeed contributing to creating this confusion: a newcomer might want to become a member just because he wants to feel part of the community. So finding a new name for this (which is the goal of this thread) might be worth it.
Btw. how do other projects handle this? What names are Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. doing in this regard? Can anybody register and have these rights or to which is it bound?
Debian: I guess the closest thing is Debian Developers (see http://www.debian.org/devel/join/index.en.html) Fedora: I'd say Fedora Contributors. For example, to get a fedoraproject.org mail address, people have to sign the CLA (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal/Licenses/CLA) and be a member of another group. So the CLA is the minimal stuff. Ubuntu: Ubuntu Members (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership) Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org