On 2012-01-25 16:43:02 (-0500), Robert Schweikert <rjschwei@suse.com> wrote: [...]
I am suggesting that the conditions for loss of membership are not sufficient. As briefly discussed in the meeting today we have about 500 or so members. Also in a recent meeting it was suggested that we have a large contingent of non active members. This would then explain why we end up with only 200 and some odd votes of 500 members for the board elections. [...] I realize I am proposing more work for the membership committee, sorry. However, I would hope that this is not too much of a burden. With maybe 300 or fewer active members there would be on average less than 1 verification e-mail per day sent. In addition this is spread out based on anniversary date of membership, thus the additional verification should be small.
Yes, but we should also take more care about the membership committee. It didn't work that great when the board was doing it (was slow), and isn't working that well since there is a specific committee because in the end there are only a _very_ few people who have all the work (to clarify: it does work, but has high latency, is still tedious (lack of tooling, data mining is very difficult because it's just a non integrated bunch of different (web) apps), and causes quite some frustration with the 2 or 3 people who do 99% of the work there (from the feedback I've had over time from those). *But* that's another topic. I don't want to hijack. If someone things she/he can give meaningful input to that topic, please create a new thread. Just wanted to add that here so we keep it in mind as well.
Why would we as a project want to do this? IMHO, it is important that our members are active and contribute to the project. There is nothing gained for us as a project to accumulate a large number of members when the members are not active in the project and do not contribute. Having only members that are active also bestows more meaning on board election results and other votes we might have in the project. This goes back to my earlier comment and leads to a question, what does it mean when the board gets elected with a vote count that is less than 50% of the membership? (I am not implying that I am dissatisfied with the board). No direct answer to this question please. If we have only active project participants I would speculate that we will get participation of 80% or more. Last but not least this should create a perceived draw to become a member, as you can only be a member and remain a member if you contribute to the project.
For the discussion, I'd like to ask that people stick to the topic and not go off on some tangent ;)
Definitely agree with your view on this and your points above. Actually, when we (in the "bootstrap board", which I was part of) developed the concept of membership, we already thought that at some point, we will probably need something like that. We also discussed a bit on how to handle "former members", so lemme just throw one proposition: - former members are listed as former members somewhere (wiki?), - former members _do_ keep their @opensuse.org email address The latter point is a bit debatable: - they are not actively contributing to the project any more, so do they still have the right to speak for the project ? (which is what people are perceived to do when they have an @opensuse.org email address) - OTOH, killing an email address is a massive pain for everyone: needs telling everyone "oh I have a new email address", etc... I believe the pain (the latter point) is worse and would hence propose that the email addresses are kept forever (unless banned, of course, that's a completely different scenario).
I have added this as a topic to the next project meeting (Feb 8, 2012) and will provide a summary of the discussion on the wiki. The board can then make a decision on how to move forward on this proposal based on the summary, and hopefully board members will be following this thread.
Thanks for the email and for tracking this. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf