Do we track who votes during these sessions. I think one way to determine if people care is if they cast a vote. This is the methodology used around the globe in democratic votes. If I don't care about an election, I do not take the time to register or vote. In order to keep a more accurate current count, we could implement a re-registration process. On Tue, 2015-06-02 at 09:12 -0400, Robert Schweikert wrote:
On 06/02/2015 08:24 AM, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,
On 02.06.2015 13:56, Klaas Freitag wrote:
On 02.06.2015 13:30, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
On Monday 01 June 2015 15:06:54 Robert Schweikert wrote:
"Thank you for your contributions so far to the openSUSE Project. All contributions are important and valued. After review of your application for membership, we were unable to verify a contribution level that would warrant us to accept your application at this time. However, this does not preclude you from applying again in the future after you have had a chance to be more involved with the openSUSE projec t."
Where is it defined what a "contribution level to warrant us to accept your application" is? It would be much better, if people would have a concrete idea of what they would have to actually do to become members. No, please do not start thinking about a definition now ;-)
Rather the other way around: Do we _really_ have a problem with too many (even inactive) members? I guess not.
All elections we held have a pretty weak voter turnout. Weak enough that it's debatable that the outcome represents the voters body opinion. Apart from that everything is fine ;-)
As Henne points out, the board election is probably the component where the inactivity is the most glaring. For members there are some "perks", one of which is to be able to vote for and the other is to be elected to the openSUSE Board. So if we have 500 members (numbers are made up because I was too lazy to look them up ;) ) and 125 vote during board elections what does that say about the other 375?
- Are they no longer active? - Are they active contributors but do not care about the board and thus our project governance? - .....
One can probably have a very long list of questions about this state. This happens to be the state we are in, and thus to answer the question. Yes, inactive members are an issue.
The same problem manifests itself for oSC. If we have 500 members and we cannot motivate at least 1/2 of the membership to get their butts off the couch and show up at oSC what does that mean? Maybe it means that the membership number is inflated and of the 500 that are "members" only 100 or so really care and of those 100 we get 50 showing up at oSC. Then we have 50% of members who care show up and that's not a bad number. Problem is we do not know.
It goes back to the discussion we had a couple of years ago, and I still have the same opinion. Those that are active in the project should determine the direction and should have more input than those who were active in the past but are no longer active. This does not imply that the contributions of those that are no longer active should be ignored, give credit where credit is due, but as far as the current status the distinction between active and inactive members is quite important.
So why decline _at_all_? Is it that we need to protect our nice club here?
Yes we do need to protect our nice club to some degree. We need to make sure that the direction we're going and the decisions we're taking are made by people who will suffer the consequences of them.
I'd say "protection" is not quite the way to think about it as there is nothing really to protect. However, it is about the direction of the project and the governance model, and maybe that requires "protection" ;) .
At some point it was decided that an elected board would guide the governance of the project. This decision has consequences, as in limit the number of people that can be elected and that can vote to a certain pool. To establish this pool of people a membership model is a reasonable choice. From this, one can reasonably conclude that some kind of "proof that I care" entry gate to the membership is a reasonable approach. For many organizations "proof that I care" comes from people's (member's) wallets, i.e. you pay and your in. For openSUSE, "proof that I care" means "sustained and substantial contributions". I would claim that the latter is a much better indicator of "proof that I care" than the former. However, the later is much more difficult to keep current. In the "pay for proof" model it is easy, when a member doesn't pay the dues on time they are out as the member "obviously" no longer cares, the wallet as sitting a bit too tight ;) . The problem with the "contribution model as proof" chosen by openSUSE is that because people have to make personal investment, i.e. give something that is much more valuable than money, it is much harder for people to let go. Therefore, the topic of inactivity and possibly "loosing" membership is much more sensitive than in the "pay for membership" model.
**** Excursion **** As people we over value our contributions/investments. Think about the value people place on a bicycle they bought pre-assembled vs. the bicycle that came in a box with "some assembly required" instructions. Even if both bikes cost the same and they look the same, the person that assembled their bike will place a much higher value on that bike than the person that "just" bought it. **** End Excursion ****
Anyway, the chosen model of membership does not appear to be a deterrent to people joining the community and contributing to the project, IMHO.
Later, Robert
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