On 2012-01-26 00:47:39 (+0100), Juergen Weigert <jw@suse.de> wrote:
On Jan 25, 12 16:11:48 -0600, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
On even years of membership anniversary (that would be year 2, 4, 6...) a member gets an automated e-mail.
I'd appreciate this. If there are links in the email, where I could activly confirm that I am still interested in openSUSE, I'd be happy to click on [Confirm]
- If the e-mail bounces and there is no other means to contact the person than the person is removed as a member. A mail can bounce due to an outage or error somewhere. Please don't remove me from the members list, for a technical one-time? glitch.
Yeah, needs repeating on bouncing. OTOH, I'm sure there are a few people who are currently listed as active openSUSE members and who's @opensuse.org alias points to an address that doesn't exist any more.
- If the person does not respond within two weeks, another e-mail is sent. If after 2 additional weeks no response is received the person is removed as a member.
That is 2 reminders, every two year. Assume I have a 50% chance of missing such an email, chances are high that I get kicked every 4 years.
We need to find something practical too. We don't have a dozen people who spend most of their time keeping track.
I think 2 week turnaround time is just too conservative given the nature of open source participation. There are valid reasons why someone may not be checking their email for a month or so.
Why should the alive signal be restricted to email? I am much more active in the build service, than in forums or mailing lists.
If we don't have the email address of a member, who are we supposed to get in touch if needed? Also, if member votes or member-only discussions happen, that will most likely happen on a dedicated mailing-list. (Yes, a mailing-list, let's please not get into the "no it should be a forum" discussion.)
Do we have statistics of activity?
No, we don't have anything. Our tools mostly suck in that regard, and our tooling around them too, what I was referring to in a previous post. It's already really annoying and tedious to just look up the activity of people who request membership: - bugzilla, search is really annoying to use (except for SUSE and Novell employees, they are permitted to see email addresses -- that's a bug that has been filed ages ago and still isn't fixed) - forum search using google is broken, but we can see the number of posts -- the forum software has no API, needs clicking around (and logging in, iirc) - packages by packager: we don't have that query possibility as of now, if I'm not mistaken (partly my fault, no time to finish the replacement for webpin) - openFATE contributions: same as the above, afaik - mailing-list posts/activity: not easy, needs going through google and quickly skim over the hits - wiki edits: can be seen when going a wiki URL, is potentially toolable as mediawiki has an API (but it is turned off afaik) There is no integration between the tools either, so there is no central place where such contributions are visible, or tracked, so let alone usable for computing statistics.
A response to the received e-mail should include a short list of areas in the project where the member was active during the past two years.
Why this? Autodetecting areas of activity would be much more efficient for everybody. Examples below.
I would like to propose that we allow a *waiver* period. Meaning, you are allowed one period of inactivity, as long as you say you still wish to be a member. E.g., you've been active, but you were not active in the last membership period. That's okay. But if the second membership expiration period comes up ...
Huch? "membership expiration periods"? That sounds really negative. How about something positive like:
For a range of activities, I get reminders telling me, that it was 1 year ago that I a) updated my profile on connect b) posted to a forum, c) edited the wiki d) showed up in a mailing list e) checked a package in the build service, f) clicked a 'like' to support the current board. (even if I failed to vote for the guys, I may want to say I am happy.) any such reminder could offer me links to do all of these options each time. Showing me links.
We don't have those metrics. Collecting them is very tedious and has to be made by a human.
That is invitive. And my response would not need to rely one particular medium. Also, (just brainstoming) the various login pages could hold just the same messages for me. So that this communication would not need to rely on email at all.
Requires implementation, won't happen. And we need a valid email address to contact someone. If that's asking too much, sheesh...
Or (uaaah, scary thought) maybe I'd like to sponsor opensuse by sending my 5 EUR every year. Would that confirm membership too?
Not possible as of now anyway. If it was possible, and if we could track that, personally, I wouldn't see that as a membership contribution.
Then, after multiple years, of not doing any of the advertised actions, I'd get warnings, that my membership appears to be dead.
As said above, I don't believe your idea can be implemented. It's either a very tedious manual process for a human (and we barely manage to get the membership committee to be staffed properly). Or it requires a non negligible amount of implementation. Let's try to find something that can be done realistically, even if imperfect. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf