So far, I haven't seen anyone participating in this discussion recognize the root cause of the need for the discussion or the letter: there has been an overloading of the meaning of the English word 'member'.
Those that apply have one understanding of the meaning of 'member' and those that reject that application have another.
Perhaps, if you better labeled the status gained by the granting of certain privileges, people would wait until they felt qualified. Maybe, 'openSUSE elector' could be used for that which must be requested?
Or even something as simple as “openSUSE Member” and “openSUSE Voting Member” which would have the privileges attached to it. I know that we might be “splitting hairs” for many, but it is a possibility at least to have a “membership” level for anyone to feel a part of the community while still keeping decision-making held within the contributors. Sincerely, Bob Martens
On Jun 3, 2015, at 5:40 PM, PatrickD Garvey <patrickdgarveyt@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Robert Schweikert <rjschwei@suse.com> wrote:
On 06/03/2015 10:00 AM, Klaas Freitag wrote:
On 03.06.2015 15:32, Robert Schweikert wrote:
On 06/03/2015 09:04 AM, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
On Tuesday 02 June 2015 14:16:33 Henne Vogelsang wrote:
So you want people who never have done anything "continued and substantial" to our project to join the body that elects our board? I'm pretty sure that this isn't a good idea :-)
I want people who want to contribute feel welcome, even if they haven't done anything yet. I'm pretty sure that is a good idea.
I want the board to be elected by people who express that they want to be part of the community. I want it to be a representation of the people who feel part of the community. I'm pretty sure that is a good idea as well.
I want to operate from a point of view that people mean well when they want to join openSUSE and optimize for getting new contributors on board, not for protecting against potential abuse. I'm pretty sure that this also is a good idea for an open community like openSUSE is.
Please don't confuse being part of the openSUSE project with being a "openSUSE Member".
There is confusion. As Richard said, too many people are applying as members under wrong assumptions. The fact that we need rejection mails, membership committees validating contributions, Wiki pages with red warnings, etc. shows that there is an issue with becoming part of openSUSE.
The big problem is that we will never hear from those people who didn't even try to become part because they were discouraged by how we handle this. We lose these people without even knowing about them.
So to live up to our expectations as open community, to remove a barrier in becoming a contributor, to encourage people to join us, we could get rid of the validation and rejection step and just let everybody become a member who wants to.
This way the board would be the representative of all self-proclaimed members of the openSUSE community, which I think is exactly what it should be.
The work would still be done by those who are active. The decisions would still be taken by those who do the work. We still would have protection mechanisms like the veto power of the chairman of the board or the guiding principles.
But we would have a more open, more welcoming, more inclusive community. That's what I would really like to see.
Then why bother having membership at all?
If everyone who wants to be a member gets to be a member just for filling out the application then we might as well not have it. The board can then be elected by the general population on the internet and everyone can run.
But the general population on the internet is not at all interested in openSUSE. If it was, yes, why not let them vote? Filling out the application means "I am interested in openSUSE and wanna work on and with it" - and that makes the difference...
We are not in the danger that Fedora or Ubuntu will swarm over us and vote their buddy into the board. We are rather in the danger of having very few being interested in openSUSE any more, and thus we should follow Cornelius' wise advice IMO, to simplify and open up.
The debate is really misplaced. It has become so simple to contribute to openSUSE that I proclaim the endless possibilities to contribute are over whelming and scare people off.
A "non-member" contributor has just as many possibilities to contribute and help out as the "member" contributor. The term "member" is a more or less logical consequence of our governance model of the project with an elected board. Somehow the pool of people that vote needs to be defined. A "anyone who is interested" on election day model is probably not the best approach. Those interested on election day will not be involved in the project long enough to notice the effects of their decision.
Again, if the messaging is the problem, which is what jdd originally started out with, lets fix the messaging, lets fix the member page, lets fix the membership such that we have members that actually still contribute on a more or less regular basis. Those that are members but no longer contribute should be recognized for their past contributions, but should not necessarily continue to be able to vote or have @opensuse.org e-mail addresses. Lets fix the confusion about what being a member means. If people really think one has to be a member to contribute lets get that addressed and set the record straight .
Later, Robert
So far, I haven't seen anyone participating in this discussion recognize the root cause of the need for the discussion or the letter: there has been an overloading of the meaning of the English word 'member'.
Those that apply have one understanding of the meaning of 'member' and those that reject that application have another.
Perhaps, if you better labeled the status gained by the granting of certain privileges, people would wait until they felt qualified. Maybe, 'openSUSE elector' could be used for that which must be requested?
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