On 02/16/2012 05:30 PM, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
On Thu, 2012-02-16 at 17:04 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:
I understand, but that's the question at hand and the question that has been raised that we are trying to address and solve.
It appears to me that you would like to see a more "formal" recognition of a contributor such that we would have a 3 tier membership level.
- contributor ~ Formally recognized with e-mail address privileges and maybe some others but non voting. This recognition would follow the current membership application process. - member ~ is a contributor with voting interest and maybe some other "perks" - honorary member ~ people that no longer contribute to the project but have done so in the past, according to the guidelines in the proposal in the first message of this thread. Honorary members are composed of people that were either part of the member or contributor group at some point.
this appears reasonable to me and can certainly be incorporated into the over all "policy".
Later, Robert
I dunno about this. And I'm not sure that's what Nelson was aiming for, but I could have mis-read him. The way I'm reading this revision, Robert, you're saying that somehow a contributor still needs to go through some application process before being recognized as having contributed to openSUSE in some way. I'd like to be very careful about this.
While the application process is a way to formally recognize contribution and allow contributors to have a formal say in the shape and direction of the Project, we should still have a pervasive attitude that we recognize and fully appreciate you as a contributor regardless of whether you decided to apply for membership or not.
In other words, why would someone apply to be in the "Contributor Tier" and not "Member Tier" when Member Tier does not (or rather should not) require you to participate in governance matters? By making a distinction between tiers, we are inherently implying that you *must* participate in governance matters, even if it isn't explicitly stated anywhere.
Creating a membership tier for "Contributor-only" would send a wrong message to people that they aren't part of the community if they haven't contributed enough.
True too, this message should be avoided. We do welcome contributions whether someone goes through an application process or not is immaterial. I have let myself get sucked into the "vote" vs. "no vote" corner, when it is all about contributions, and voting is a loosely connected "side show" to this discussion. Mea culpa Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org