Hi Andreas, thanks for your email. Since you addressed me directly, I'll have to write another email in this thread although I wanted to stay out ;-) Andreas Jaeger wrote:
Thomas Hertweck <Thomas.Hertweck@web.de> writes:
[...] What I'd like to see is regular contribution - and not 4 hours and then disappearing for three years.
Absolutely. I fully agree with you here.
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.
Is the above really the problem for you?
As mentioned in other emails, I can see several problems: the somewhat "exclusive" membership in itself, the criteria for membership, and the wording (these problems might be related, of course). To answer your question above: yes, I think in an open community it's not such a good idea to exclude people that provide a perhaps small (in absolute terms) but (see above) regular contribution. That's not my understanding of welcoming everybody and motivating people. Everybody usually starts with small contributions. A fourth problem, I mentioned in the course of the discussion: I think there has been a problem in communicating the ideas behind the approach the board took. It's similar to the situation when infos about the Novell-MS deal were published - in the beginning, the situation was not clear and the explanations were somewhat confuse, therefore some people were pretty upset about the deal. It's very difficult to correct these things later on. I think a fifth problem was mentioned by Roger and Cornelius, the voting process (board has to approve members, members elect board -> closed cycle). I would like to suggest that official emails from the board should really be drafted very carefully, and it would be good if people could also understand from these emails the reasons why the board took certain decisions in the way they did. If you only see the final results but not the story in the background and the way that led to the final result, it often is quite difficult to follow, at least for those who try to look at it in more detail (others might take things for granted though). Regards, Th. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org