On Tuesday 22 June 2010 13:51:20 C wrote:
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 13:30, Pavol Rusnak wrote:
On 06/22/2010 11:08 AM, C wrote:
that group, and I'm sure there are more. I've been active with openSUSE in it's various incantations since 1998 (almost all of that activity on the mailing lists)... but don't do a lot of Wiki editing, and don't do package maintenance etc.. so don't really fit well into the membership criteria... are there those in this group who might now fit better with the criteria and could be encouraged to reapply?
If you are active on the mailinglists (now, not in 90s) you are perfectly valid applicant for membership.
Me personally? I've been active continuously on the various mailing lists since 1998, and have sent many thousands of emails asking questions, and helping people... and even annoying people from time to time as happens on mailing lists.
Why am I not a member? I was told when I applied (back when Membership was first set up) that my contributions on the mailing lists were not considered sufficient for membership, that I should step up my contributions in other places such as the Wiki, and then reapply at a later date. If that criteria has changed, it's not been
Criteria haven't changed. Either there was a misunderstanding, or we didn't manage to track down your contributions on the mailing-lists. Our tools for checking that are quite lame, given that people have lots of different email addresses, like to use nicknames (as you do ;)), and that the email addresses themselves are partly masked on the mailing-list archives to avoid spam. But it really is as simple as sending an email to the board, asking to reconsider or, rather, to double-check again. As Pavol wrote, being active on the mailing-lists (1) is obviously a very good reason for becoming a member :) (1) or the forums, or the wiki, or translating, or packaging, or developing, or on IRC, or marketing, or artwork, or representing openSUSE at events, or ........ The only thing is that we can only consider _verifiable_ contributions. We've had quite a few requests of people telling us that they're pushing openSUSE in their LUG, or that they're doing install parties and such, but we didn't manage to find any proof nor trace of it. Yeah, it's a pity we can only rely on verifiable content and that we (well, the membership team nowadays ;)) have to check everything, but as I wrote previously, there is a non-negligible amount of people who request membership based on contributions that simply do not exist (= they're lying, plain and simple).
well communicated... which leads me back to my original point... how many people (who almost fit the criteria for membership) applied, were rejected for whatever reason, and haven't bothered to re-apply? Are these people a pool of potential members who could be reminded in some way (the openSUSE Weekly for example) that they could reapply?
Not a bad idea. Note that we never "bash" people when we "reject" their application. The typical reply is that, unfortunately, we didn't consider the current contributions to be sufficient yet, but that doesn't prevent from taking part in the project, and please keep on contributing, and ask again later. (along those lines) It's also the main reason why the whole process is not public. Not that any of us "fear" stating our votes on applications in public, but rather for those requests that are not accepted. Please understand that the goal is not to create some sort of "elite club" inside the community but, rather, to thank those who have contributed a significant amount of their time to the project, by various means. It is also a mean to protect the project, e.g. by limiting board election candidates as well as the ability to vote on the board election to those members. But again, it is not meant to be a way to exclude anyone. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser <pascal.bleser@opensuse.org> /\\ http://opensuse.org -- I took the green pill _\_v FOSDEM::6+7 Feb 2010, Brussels, http://fosdem.org