On 2012-01-25 16:11:48 (-0600), Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 16:43 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

During today's project meeting a discussion about openSUSE membership started, see earlier posts to the list for meeting minutes.

...

While we have documented procedures (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Members) on how to become a member, we do not have any guidelines about what it means to be a member in good standing. Additionally, the only way to get pruned from the list of members is to repeatedly violate the guiding principals or actively request removal.

...

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 think one thing we do need to be concerned about is that in the beginning, we often stated there is no expiration for membership. While I think, upon reflection, we should have set expiration dates, we do need to recognize that expectation existed when many of our members became members.

That raises whether we should willingly redefine existing memberships or grandfather them in and only set expirations on new memberships.

I disagree (kinda), that sounds very bureaucratic. From an engineering point of view: we tried something, started with a proposition, a first idea. Then we have noticed that it doesn't work as well as it should (supposing here that most agree with Robert's proposal -- if not, then this discussion is moot :)). So we fix it. Why can't it be that simple? Because a for "membership 1.0" we said that there would be no expiration? Would anyone sue us? I mean, if that would be the reason for not improving it, then I personally believe we'd just be standing in our own way.

...

As probably anyone who is a member of some club or association knows, there is always some condition, often a fee, that assures continued membership in said club or association. No I am NOT proposing a membership fee for openSUSE. However, I am proposing that we come up with a mechanism to prune our list of members and that there is no such thing as a "free" (as in I don't contribute) life time membership.

I do agree we need to do *some* pruning because it lends credibility to our membership. "500 members, WOW!" becomes meaningless if it is seen as inactive. However, I'd like to suggest we also consider approaching these members who are inactive and see if we can coax them to come back into the fold. This is definitely more work, but we should actively engage rather than a simple form "Do you wanna stick around or not?" which seems so impersonal.

In a perfect world, yes. Would anyone have time to do that? If so, then yes, sure, it would be highly interesting to hear why people who have been active are not any more. I suspect personal reasons (time, family, another job, etc...) to be the most prominent set, but still, there might be a few concerns and disappointments etc... we should at least hear about. But if there aren't 1, 2, 3 people who stand up for it and own the task, an automated email is still better than nothing at all.

Definitely we'll lose at least *some* inactive members and that's fine.

We will lose 100% of them. No, we already "lost" 100% of the inactive members. They are not active any more, period :) "Hey, do you want to get back to contribute to the project ?" when, for most (which is what I would assume, but only reality will tell), they simply don't have enough time any more, well that won't change a thing.

But we really should consider outreach as the very point of membership is to celebrate contributions which is the core of what makes a project successful. If they contributed once before, then they obviously have the tools to contribute again. Thus are low-hanging fruit for jump-starting again.

I think that's overly optimistic, but if someone has the time, sure, we should at the very least try.

...

I propose the following guideline: " On even years of membership anniversary (that would be year 2, 4, 6...) a member gets an automated e-mail. - If the e-mail bounces and there is no other means to contact the person than the person is removed as a member. - If the person does not respond within two weeks, another e-mail is sent. If after 2 additional weeks no response is received the person is removed as a member.

The way its done at GNOME is to reach out to those who have expiring memberships about 2-3 months in advance. I think 2 week turnaround time is just too conservative given the nature of open source participation. There are valid reasons why someone may not be checking their email for a month or so.

Agreed, a month would be more appropriate. Also, most of them have been inactive for over a year, and 2 weeks won't change anything ;)

...

A response to the received e-mail should include a short list of areas in the project where the member was active during the past two years. This can be verified by the membership team. With the response and verification membership continues. "

I would like to propose that we allow a *waiver* period. Meaning, you are allowed one period of inactivity, as long as you say you still wish to be a member. E.g., you've been active, but you were not active in the last membership period. That's okay. But if the second membership expiration period comes up and you're still seen as inactive, then you get the disqualification. Again, reason for this is because of external extenuating circumstances. I've seen a lot of people who were highly active then go quiet for a period of time (due to family illnesses or stopping to focus on their Uni studies, or etc.) This scenario is just simply not that uncommon and why penalize someone who contributed for 5+ years who needed to take a temporary break from giving his free time to the community? I just feel that if you've contributed significantly in the past, you deserve to have one waiver period. Out of fairness. And it shows we still care and want them to come back when it is possible for them.

Sounds quite complicated. As an alternative: - keep a list of former members somewhere, because we still value the contributions they made in the past - when they contribute again, they can simply re-apply for membership

...

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.

Currently, the membership committee's function is simply to review and process membership applications. If we make any kind of change that reflects membership expiry periods, then there will be some technical considerations that have to be made, including setting up a database that will maintain current membership qualification statuses.

Why? We only need to have the date at which their membership was granted (I hope that's in the database...). [...] cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

Hello, On Wed, 25 Jan 2012, Pascal Bleser wrote:

...

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 16:43 -0500, Robert Schweikert wrote: [..] But if there aren't 1, 2, 3 people who stand up for it and own

On 2012-01-25 16:11:48 (-0600), Bryen M Yunashko wrote: the task, an automated email is still better than nothing at all.

Well, on thing to do could be to ask around those who "approved" the membership. Basically: members know members. There should always be some that know what might be up and/or how one can be reached. In my case, it'd be (at least) some @suse.de people that I keep in touch with and who I suspect the "validated" my request for membership. [..]

...

...

I propose the following guideline: " On even years of membership anniversary (that would be year 2, 4, 6...) a member gets an automated e-mail. - If the e-mail bounces and there is no other means to contact the person than the person is removed as a member. - If the person does not respond within two weeks, another e-mail is sent. If after 2 additional weeks no response is received the person is removed as a member.

Out of personal experience: that is much too little time. I've been on 3 month holidays. I was sick + recuperating + moving and generally offline for over 6 weeks a few years back -- after 8 years or so of continuous support on the -de ML. I think we should have something like - a 3 month warning and grace period or whatchamacallit (2 mails?) - another 2 - 4 weeks "last chance" period (another 2 mails?) That should cover most cases where someone is willing but unable. Also, there should be the possibility to suspend / go on a sabbatical for a given time, if for whatever reason one does not want or cannot "be active" for some time. Remember: there's a real world out there in the big blue room with the open burning fusion... One might want to visit that, extensively even ;) Oh, and if mail bounces one should ask around on the MLs/Fora/IRC-# etc. where the member last was active. Remember: members know a lot of other members and users usually! Actually, it's a requirement: to become a member, you have to contribute and if you contribute, you get to know and get known to people.

...

The way its done at GNOME is to reach out to those who have expiring memberships about 2-3 months in advance. I think 2 week turnaround time is just too conservative given the nature of open source participation. There are valid reasons why someone may not be checking their email for a month or so.

Agreed, a month would be more appropriate. Also, most of them have been inactive for over a year, and 2 weeks won't change anything ;)

What is "inactive"? [..]

...

I would like to propose that we allow a *waiver* period. Meaning, you are allowed one period of inactivity, as long as you say you still wish to be a member. E.g., you've been active, but you were not active in the last membership period. That's okay. But if the second membership expiration period comes up and you're still seen as inactive, then you get the disqualification.

that + the "sabbatical" ;)

...

Again, reason for this is because of external extenuating circumstances. I've seen a lot of people who were highly active then go quiet for a period of time (due to family illnesses or stopping to focus on their Uni studies, or etc.) This scenario is just simply not that uncommon and why penalize someone who contributed for 5+ years who needed to take a temporary break from giving his free time to the community? I just feel that if you've contributed significantly in the past, you deserve to have one waiver period. Out of fairness. And it shows we still care and want them to come back when it is possible for them.

Sounds quite complicated.

See above. I think it is absolutely neccessary. Poking the community if anyone knows what's up with e.g. you or me should yield some results. One could put that member as "gone sabbatical" for about as long as she/he's contributed before (there'll be only few with 10+ years, esp. if you don't count suse/novell/opensuse employees ;)

As an alternative: - keep a list of former members somewhere, because we still value the contributions they made in the past - when they contribute again, they can simply re-apply for membership

Aye. And see above. -dnh -- "Powered-up hardware and sweat do not mix." -- Simon Cozens -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 23:50 +0100, jdd wrote:

Le 25/01/2012 23:11, Bryen M Yunashko a écrit :

...

I do know a number of people out there chose to "strike" against voting,

may be a simple way should be to say "voting is mandatory", and adding two options in the vote: "Blank vote" and "I don't like the way the vote is made" or something similar, allowing people that now don't vote for a reason a way to show they advice.

The people not voting could then be approached to know what happen and after that I agree for nearly all what was said is the initial post

jdd

I would not be in favor of a mandatory vote, especially as a reason to disqualify their membership. There are 1,000,001 reasons why someone might not or could not vote even though they were already eligible to. Let's not get into that level of requirement for our existing members. I can hear the cries of foul already. :-) Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 09:16, Per Jessen wrote:

Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

...

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 23:50 +0100, jdd wrote:

...

Le 25/01/2012 23:11, Bryen M Yunashko a écrit :

...

I do know a number of people out there chose to "strike" against voting,

may be a simple way should be to say "voting is mandatory", and adding two options in the vote: "Blank vote" and "I don't like the way the vote is made" or something similar, allowing people that now don't vote for a reason a way to show they advice.

The people not voting could then be approached to know what happen and after that I agree for nearly all what was said is the initial post

jdd

I would not be in favor of a mandatory vote, especially as a reason to disqualify their membership.  There are 1,000,001 reasons why someone might not or could not vote even though they were already eligible to.

Hmm, I think jdd has got something here.  We are already discussing which contributions qualify for membership. A vote is a pretty minimal contribution, so asking active members to participate can't be too much.  Also, there aren't really that many votes, it's hardly a major hassle.

What is the value in an oS membership? I've got one... many in this discussion have one. Why have one if you don't participate? What's the point? You don't receive any swag for being a member... it's supposed to be in recognition of contributions. I look on voting as a requirement of my membership... something I do in return. Mandatory voting (with an option to abstain) is the least I think that we should ask of members. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, January 26, 2012 9:16 am, Per Jessen wrote:

Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

...

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 23:50 +0100, jdd wrote:

...

Le 25/01/2012 23:11, Bryen M Yunashko a écrit :

...

I do know a number of people out there chose to "strike" against voting,

may be a simple way should be to say "voting is mandatory", and adding two options in the vote: "Blank vote" and "I don't like the way the vote is made" or something similar, allowing people that now don't vote for a reason a way to show they advice.

The people not voting could then be approached to know what happen and after that I agree for nearly all what was said is the initial post

jdd

I would not be in favor of a mandatory vote, especially as a reason to disqualify their membership. There are 1,000,001 reasons why someone might not or could not vote even though they were already eligible to.

Hmm, I think jdd has got something here. We are already discussing which contributions qualify for membership. A vote is a pretty minimal contribution, so asking active members to participate can't be too much. Also, there aren't really that many votes, it's hardly a major hassle.

Following this discussion i get the feeling that voting is the most important thing a member can do. I think a member that does a lot if contributions in the form of packages, wiki, support, ambassador, board member etc is more important than just voting. I'm not at all in favor of mandatory vote. For the following reasons. 1) The member doesn't know the people running for the board, and chooses for this reason not to vote. 2) The member is only interested in the technical aspect of the distro and doesn't want to be a part of the "bureaucratic" part of openSUSE. I think these are valid reasons. I think it's better that someone votes that wants to vote and takes the time checkout for whom he/she votes, then someone who just votes in random.

-- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.6°C)

--

Regards, Joop. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 23:15 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:11:48 -0600, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

...

I think one thing we do need to be concerned about is that in the beginning, we often stated there is no expiration for membership. While I think, upon reflection, we should have set expiration dates, we do need to recognize that expectation existed when many of our members became members.

That raises whether we should willingly redefine existing memberships or grandfather them in and only set expirations on new memberships.

Maybe this is something we can look to the certification world for some precedent.

CompTIA had a similar issue with their Network+ and other certifications - they originally said they were good forever, with no retest requirement.

But obviously computer hardware changes quite rapdily, and the value of the certification was dramatically reduced.

Their solution to the problem was to not expire those with the older certification, but the new ones are branded in a different way so it's clear that someone is current.

Those who got the original cert can keep it forever. But if (and I don't remember the exact details of what the difference looks like) they have Network+ and someone else has Network+ 2011, it's *really clear* that the one with Network+ is 'grandfathered'.

So out of 500 people who are currently members, there could be "members" and "2012 members", and the former becomes really clear.

So maybe, for example, legacy "member" votes count for 50% of a vote. They still have a voice, but their voice counts only 50% of those actively participating in the project. That would provide incentive to remain active rather than being active for a short period of time and then going inactive and still voting every time there's a vote for something.

Jim

-- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits

That's similar to my thinking, even though I think Pascal fairly points out the complexities of a grandfather-clause. I should point out, to answer Pascal's post and this post simultaneously, my mention of granfathering was simply to point out that some people *might* object to being pruned. What I do think is that we should see how this thread evolves and see if grandfathering really is an issue or not. If it's not, then let's drop it. But if it is, then what Jim points to is a valid example of how we can resolve a grandfather issue. Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:30:58 -0500, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

?? So, the "grandfathered" members would only get 50% voting status.

Yes, that's my proposal.

I believe "grandfathered" needs much more definition. Grandfathered members that have remained or are currently active are definitely entitled to a full voice at voting time, not 50%.

Certainly. Grandfathered status would be for those who were contacted and did not respond. Currently active members would be added to the "2012 Member" status. Though as I thought about this a bit more driving home yesterday, it occurred to me that it may make more sense to tie this to the release schedule. If someone was active in the release of 11.4, for example, then their status stays active until 11.4 becomes EOL - unless they contributed to 12.1, in which case the status would roll forward to EOL of 12.1 (and so on).

Other than this particular, I agree that membership is not just something to have and hold! It must first be entitled and then maintained via *some* activities.

That helps bring value to membership, and I think that's something that is missing from the current membership strategy. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Jan 25, 12 16:11:48 -0600, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

...

On even years of membership anniversary (that would be year 2, 4, 6...) a member gets an automated e-mail.

I'd appreciate this. If there are links in the email, where I could activly confirm that I am still interested in openSUSE, I'd be happy to click on [Confirm]

...

- If the e-mail bounces and there is no other means to contact the person than the person is removed as a member. A mail can bounce due to an outage or error somewhere. Please don't remove me from the members list, for a technical one-time? glitch.

...

- If the person does not respond within two weeks, another e-mail is sent. If after 2 additional weeks no response is received the person is removed as a member.

That is 2 reminders, every two year. Assume I have a 50% chance of missing such an email, chances are high that I get kicked every 4 years.

I think 2 week turnaround time is just too conservative given the nature of open source participation. There are valid reasons why someone may not be checking their email for a month or so.

Why should the alive signal be restricted to email? I am much more active in the build service, than in forums or mailing lists. Do we have statistics of activity?

...

A response to the received e-mail should include a short list of areas in the project where the member was active during the past two years.

Why this? Autodetecting areas of activity would be much more efficient for everybody. Examples below.

I would like to propose that we allow a *waiver* period. Meaning, you are allowed one period of inactivity, as long as you say you still wish to be a member. E.g., you've been active, but you were not active in the last membership period. That's okay. But if the second membership expiration period comes up ...

Huch? "membership expiration periods"? That sounds really negative. How about something positive like: For a range of activities, I get reminders telling me, that it was 1 year ago that I a) updated my profile on connect b) posted to a forum, c) edited the wiki d) showed up in a mailing list e) checked a package in the build service, f) clicked a 'like' to support the current board. (even if I failed to vote for the guys, I may want to say I am happy.) any such reminder could offer me links to do all of these options each time. Showing me links. That is invitive. And my response would not need to rely one particular medium. Also, (just brainstoming) the various login pages could hold just the same messages for me. So that this communication would not need to rely on email at all. Or (uaaah, scary thought) maybe I'd like to sponsor opensuse by sending my 5 EUR every year. Would that confirm membership too? Then, after multiple years, of not doing any of the advertised actions, I'd get warnings, that my membership appears to be dead. cheers, JW- -- o \ Juergen Weigert paint it green! __/ _=======.=======_ <V> | jw@suse.de back to ascii! __/ _---|____________\/ \ | 0911 74053-508 say #263A!__/ (____/ /\ (/) | _____________________________/ _/ \_ vim:set sw=2 wm=8 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, J.Guild, F.Imendoerffer, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg), Maxfeldstrasse 5, 90409 Nuernberg, Germany SuSE. Supporting Linux since 1992. ☺ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wednesday, January 25, 2012 05:54:06 PM Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

The most significant benefit to membership is, in my opinion, the right to vote on matters that affect the Project.

That is also good way to solve membership status: * voting member - people with current investment in a project. * honorable member - people with past or one time contributions that we must reward in some way, to show the rest of the world that we value people. * member - someone that comes and goes, not much stake in a project, nor interest to change that, but still above occasional contributions. -- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, 2012-01-25 at 21:33 -0500, Chuck Payne wrote:

How are you going to define active? I can't get the chat room at work, but I am doing things? It would be nice for people let me to know what is active? -- Terror PUP a.k.a Chuck "PUP" Payne

Active is most certainly not defined by IRC participation alone or we wouldn't have 500 members so far. :-) The definition of active would be the same as what is currently used by the membership committee to vet a candidate for membership. The only difference is that you would have to contribute during the specified time of your existing membership. In the case of this thread, the proposal is leaning towards two years as the period of time. The only thing this proposal really attempts to redefine is the "sustaining" contributions. That is, you have to sustain your contributions every two years in order to stay a member. Bryen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 2012-01-26 00:47:39 (+0100), Juergen Weigert wrote:

On Jan 25, 12 16:11:48 -0600, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

...

...

On even years of membership anniversary (that would be year 2, 4, 6...) a member gets an automated e-mail.

I'd appreciate this. If there are links in the email, where I could activly confirm that I am still interested in openSUSE, I'd be happy to click on [Confirm]

...

...

- If the e-mail bounces and there is no other means to contact the person than the person is removed as a member. A mail can bounce due to an outage or error somewhere. Please don't remove me from the members list, for a technical one-time? glitch.

Yeah, needs repeating on bouncing. OTOH, I'm sure there are a few people who are currently listed as active openSUSE members and who's @opensuse.org alias points to an address that doesn't exist any more.

...

...

- If the person does not respond within two weeks, another e-mail is sent. If after 2 additional weeks no response is received the person is removed as a member.

That is 2 reminders, every two year. Assume I have a 50% chance of missing such an email, chances are high that I get kicked every 4 years.

We need to find something practical too. We don't have a dozen people who spend most of their time keeping track.

...

I think 2 week turnaround time is just too conservative given the nature of open source participation. There are valid reasons why someone may not be checking their email for a month or so.

Why should the alive signal be restricted to email? I am much more active in the build service, than in forums or mailing lists.

If we don't have the email address of a member, who are we supposed to get in touch if needed? Also, if member votes or member-only discussions happen, that will most likely happen on a dedicated mailing-list. (Yes, a mailing-list, let's please not get into the "no it should be a forum" discussion.)

Do we have statistics of activity?

No, we don't have anything. Our tools mostly suck in that regard, and our tooling around them too, what I was referring to in a previous post. It's already really annoying and tedious to just look up the activity of people who request membership: - bugzilla, search is really annoying to use (except for SUSE and Novell employees, they are permitted to see email addresses -- that's a bug that has been filed ages ago and still isn't fixed) - forum search using google is broken, but we can see the number of posts -- the forum software has no API, needs clicking around (and logging in, iirc) - packages by packager: we don't have that query possibility as of now, if I'm not mistaken (partly my fault, no time to finish the replacement for webpin) - openFATE contributions: same as the above, afaik - mailing-list posts/activity: not easy, needs going through google and quickly skim over the hits - wiki edits: can be seen when going a wiki URL, is potentially toolable as mediawiki has an API (but it is turned off afaik) There is no integration between the tools either, so there is no central place where such contributions are visible, or tracked, so let alone usable for computing statistics.

...

...

A response to the received e-mail should include a short list of areas in the project where the member was active during the past two years.

Why this? Autodetecting areas of activity would be much more efficient for everybody. Examples below.

...

I would like to propose that we allow a *waiver* period. Meaning, you are allowed one period of inactivity, as long as you say you still wish to be a member. E.g., you've been active, but you were not active in the last membership period. That's okay. But if the second membership expiration period comes up ...

Huch? "membership expiration periods"? That sounds really negative. How about something positive like:

For a range of activities, I get reminders telling me, that it was 1 year ago that I a) updated my profile on connect b) posted to a forum, c) edited the wiki d) showed up in a mailing list e) checked a package in the build service, f) clicked a 'like' to support the current board. (even if I failed to vote for the guys, I may want to say I am happy.) any such reminder could offer me links to do all of these options each time. Showing me links.

We don't have those metrics. Collecting them is very tedious and has to be made by a human.

That is invitive. And my response would not need to rely one particular medium. Also, (just brainstoming) the various login pages could hold just the same messages for me. So that this communication would not need to rely on email at all.

Requires implementation, won't happen. And we need a valid email address to contact someone. If that's asking too much, sheesh...

Or (uaaah, scary thought) maybe I'd like to sponsor opensuse by sending my 5 EUR every year. Would that confirm membership too?

Not possible as of now anyway. If it was possible, and if we could track that, personally, I wouldn't see that as a membership contribution.

Then, after multiple years, of not doing any of the advertised actions, I'd get warnings, that my membership appears to be dead.

As said above, I don't believe your idea can be implemented. It's either a very tedious manual process for a human (and we barely manage to get the membership committee to be staffed properly). Or it requires a non negligible amount of implementation. Let's try to find something that can be done realistically, even if imperfect. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 02:00 +0100, Juergen Weigert wrote:

On Jan 26, 12 01:05:40 +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:

...

...

That is 2 reminders, every two year. Assume I have a 50% chance of missing such an email, chances are high that I get kicked every 4 years.

We need to find something practical too. We don't have a dozen people who spend most of their time keeping track.

You got me wrong here. I am only venturing in the direction of automation to reduce manual work.

...

[Buildservice activity] If we don't have the email address of a member, who are we supposed to get in touch if needed?

Pardon? We ponder about mailings, and cannot make address listings?

...

...

Do we have statistics of activity?

No, we don't have anything. Our tools mostly suck in that regard, and our tooling around them too, what I was referring to in a previous post.

Ouch. I did not expect it was that bad.

...

It's already really annoying and tedious to just look up the activity of people who request membership: [...]

Wow. We *really* need tooling here. How should we ever appreciate a thousand members, if a few hundereds are perceived as a pain already?

[...]

...

We don't have those metrics. Collecting them is very tedious and has to be made by a human.

No, humans should explicitly not be allowed to collect any metrics. error prone, subjective, tedious.

...

Requires implementation, won't happen. Have you asked around?

...

And we need a valid email address to contact someone. YES!

...

...

Or (uaaah, scary thought) maybe I'd like to sponsor opensuse by sending my 5 EUR every year. Would that confirm membership too?

Not possible as of now anyway. If it was possible, and if we could track that, personally, I wouldn't see that as a membership contribution.

I guess, I agree with that last one :-)

cheers, JW-

Honestly, while I think technical considerations are valid, we're getting quickly bogged down on that end for a thread that is literally less than four hours old thus far. The intent of Robert's original posting was not "how do we implement" but rather "how do we want to redefine our membership." Let's give that question its fair debate and then we can move on to feasibility which includes technical considerations. Bryen M Yunashko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 26/01/2012 01:05, Pascal Bleser a écrit :

Yeah, needs repeating on bouncing. OTOH, I'm sure there are a few people who are currently listed as active openSUSE members and who's @opensuse.org alias points to an address that doesn't exist any more.

Simple ways of seeing personal activity are not that a number. If you think that paying $5 is making too much money (I really wonder why - nobody say it's the only requirement) and that voting is not a membership duty, I don't see really how you can have any result. The bare minimum, very easy to acheive, could be to setup a closed subscription member only mailing list. Like this, having a "member letter once in a while" we could know right away what members have a valid email adress... and have member only discussion. for it's right than membership do not give a lot of goods :-)) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Pascal Bleser wrote:

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).

The opensuse.org address is forwarded anyway, so people would only lose an alias. I think the email address goes with active membership (if we decide that is a condition), and is lost when one leaves the project. It might be helpful to activate an auto-responder for former members: "this address is no longer active, please contact somebody@example.com". Not sure if this causes a privacy issue though. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.6°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 26/01/12 12:21, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:

On Thu, 2012-01-26 at 11:32 +1100, Basil Chupin wrote:

...

I think that you are putting the cart before the horse.

Get rid of the Board, and the membership committee, and your problem is solved.

Furthermore, what benefits does "membership" bestows on you? The ability to vote for the Board? Woo-hoo.

BC

While primarily the voting has been for board candidates, there are other applications as well. We had a vote by the membership for strategy and we will perceivably require some membership voting when the Foundation is to be established, presumably this year.

Membership is also an issue regarding the Foundation and legal requirements for defining its membership in order to qualify for NFP status.

Bryen M Yunashko

Right - and here lies the crux of the "problem": there is no legal entity in existence and so there is really no Board since there is nothing to "board", so to speak. Which is what I was indicating by stating "putting the cart before the horse". When the Foundation is established it will have to be registered and such a registration needs to be done under some Law of the country where this Foundation is being formed (here in Australia it is the Associations Incorporation Act). Such a law spells out all the requirements required to form such an Association/Foundation including members of the Committee/Board, elections, rights of members, financial control and books of accounts, etc etc etc. I remember all this being already discussed a few years ago. So, nothing has really been done about it in all this time - but then Novell is no longer the owner of openSUSE so the goal posts have been moved yet again :-) . BC -- But when you take arms from people, then you start to upset them, you show you do not trust them because you are frightened or cagey. Niccolo Machiavelli -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Basil Chupin wrote:

I think that you are putting the cart before the horse.

Get rid of the Board, and the membership committee, and your problem is solved.

Furthermore, what benefits does "membership" bestows on you? The ability to vote for the Board? Woo-hoo.

Yeah, if we are talking about when to revoke membership privileges, it's probably not a bad idea to start by listing them. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (2.8°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Lots of good points, Mike. On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:57:02 -0600, Mike McCallister wrote:

* I have a recurring task on my to-do list to visit the forums weekly, but in practice it's a good month when I get there. When I do get there, often the issues I think I can contribute to are already solved, or I ask followup questions that don't get answered. Still classified as a "puzzled penguin."

An idea that we've kicked around in the forums staff area is a way of identifying project members in the forums. We have done custom titles for a few people that we recognized as contributors - Greg K-H comes to mind because he stops by fairly regularly and helps people out in the tumbleweed forum. We've got a couple package maintainers who we've also done that for. The lack of a comprehensive single sign on solution across the different project areas makes it a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process to identify members in a consistent manner (much less automating the process). It's something I'd still like to pursue. Drop me a PM on the forums or an e-mail off-list and let's chat about ways we might better recognize those who are members/contributors so they don't come in and come across as a 'puzzled penguin'. Just like with Greg and the other contributors we know of in the forums, it didn't seem right to classify him as a 'puzzled penguin'. Those titles are coded into the software with thresholds based on message counts - nothing more. But admin staff have the ability to assign custom titles, and I'm happy to take such requests to staff.

Perhaps now that the Project has a strategy, we should define a strategy for the community.

I think that's an excellent idea. We have a fairly significantly-sized community, but it's also fairly disconnected. I think more coordination between the various venues would be good - but at the same time, community standards in the different venues vary, and that's (IMHO) as it should be.

One more idea: we should look at how users expect to get help, and direct those who want to help/contribute toward those venues. There must be some traffic analytics that can help us figure these things out! Then we can ask members to help.

Agreed. We do occasionally have end-users who wonder how they can contribute - they don't code (often) and are unaware that they can contribute in other ways. There are even those who occasionally ask where they can make donations, and are surprised that the project has no mechanism to accept them. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:04:31 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:

Greetings,

some might have noticed that I'm quite pissed about this topic! Don't you have better things on your todo lists? E.g. how do we get more members? Shame on you to have such a topic at all!

Sorry, but it's actually an important topic. I went through this when I was tasked several years ago with managing an instructor program for a software company. The number of inactive members of the program was detracting from the value of the program for those who were active, so we decided to institute an expiration policy that had a very simple way to get back into the program. So for my part, I'm speaking from direct experience about increasing the value to the active part of the membership of a program or group.

...

I propose the following guideline: On even years of membership anniversary (that would be year 2, 4, 6...) a member gets an automated e-mail.

Automated mails will end up in a spam folder an will be ignored!

This more or less demonstrates *why* membership needs to have a perceived value. If there isn't a perceived value, then the member has no incentive to take steps to ensure they remain a member. Which also feeds into people feeling (a) that voting for the board is an important responsibility of membership, and (b) that there is a reason to become a member and to support the project's guiding principles in a concrete way.

...

If the e-mail bounces and there is no other means to contact the person than the person is removed as a member.

So ... if there is a problem with the users host then you don't care and revoke!

Again, that's a problem that ties back to perceived value. If the member perceives value in the membership, then they'll make sure they're contactable and their contact information is up to date. It sounds like you want the status, but why? What value do YOU see in membership? And why is that value insufficient for you to make sure your contact information is current?

Let me quote the "examples" for becoming a member:

--8<-- Contributions include (but are not limited to) the following:

Code and packaging Wiki editing Bug reporting and triaging Translation Continued user support on any communication medium Giving openSUSE Talks/Presentation and/or promoting openSUSE Help openSUSE as an Ambassador -->8--

And this is only the "example"!

IMHO this also includes: wearing openSUSE merchandise (payed with hard money) and convincing other people to use openSUSE! How the hell do you want to check this? Do I have to send you pictures of me every day?

Those activities contribute to community growth, certainly - being in the community doesn't necessarily translate to being a member involved in shaping the distribution and the project. OSS is and always has been about merit (it is a meritocracy). If I wanted to contribute to the Linux kernel, I have to prove that I know what I'm doing by submitting patches. I don't just automatically get an equal voice to what someone like Greg K-H has when it comes to kernel enhancements. The same is true for the openSUSE project. One has to earn their voice through contributions. One isn't *granted* a voice in project decisions because they *use* the distribution. They have to start with something small - reporting problems, using pre-release versions and submitting bugs, etc. *Nobody* starts at the top in a meritocracy. Project membership is a step on the meritocracy ladder, and the project leadership absolutely has the authority and ability to decide what constitutes a valuable contribution. They've earned it. That's also why voting for the board is important. While that's not *entirely* merit-based, those who achieve the most credibility in the community may not want that responsibility for a variety of reasons.

And what about all my contacts which only know my opensuse mail address? Ever thought about that? My so nicely offered help and support via this mail would end up in a mail: "No such user"! This may create a very bad reputation for opensuse!

If you use your opensuse.org e-mail address, then chances are you're contactable. Problem solved.

...

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.

Your speculation is wrong. You still didn't ask why some of us didn't participate in some of the votings. What if I'm not happy with any of the candidates? Where was/is the option to tell that we/I do not wan't to participate because of a given reason?

Valid point, and maybe something you should bring up to the election committee for the next election. But that you have something that I consider a valid point to be raised doesn't mean the election is or should be invalidated. You (presumably) saw the same e-mails everyone else did about the election committee and had the opportunity to raise that issue (or volunteer for the committee if you had the time - perhaps you didn't, though, I don't know) so it could be dealt with rather than coming in after the fact and criticizing what was done. (And perhaps you did raise the issue and I didn't see it - after all, I'm also a busy guy, and I don't read every message on all the lists)

...

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.

No - definitely not! Why should I become a member of such a exclusive club if they can revoke my membership for any reason.

You should become a member because you perceive value in membership. If you don't perceive value in membership, then please leave membership for those of us who *do* value it and either think it has meaning or would like to see it have an increased value. It would be far better rather than just being pissed off that the discussion was raised if you contributed something to the solution. IMHO, that also plays into the 'merit' discussion - pissy rants have little merit. Contributing something (even if it's constructive negative criticism that can be used to improve things to some degree) rates more merit. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:35:32 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:

Aloha,

...

Sorry, but it's actually an important topic.

No it is not!

Respectfully, I disagree. Fortunately, we're not required to agree on all things. That would be awfully boring.

[bunch of ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks]

You know, I *could* respond point-by-point, but to be perfectly frank it's not worth my time. Clearly you've made up your mind and aren't interested in changing it. You appear to be just interested in shouting and swearing at people. Quite honestly, I don't care if you *founded* S.u.S.E. *Nothing* gives you the right to treat others like that. Community is based on people having some degree of mutual respect for each other, and being able to disagree without being disagreeable. If you want to actually *discuss* something, I'm happy to have a discussion with you on how to improve the project. But I'm not willing to participate in a "discussion" with any individual that takes a tone of "f*ck you if you don't agree with me". For what it's worth....I've been participating in leadership roles in online communities for almost 30 years. So yes, I actually do know what I'm talking about. I could act like an egotistical bastard about it, but as actions go - those aren't things that I would respect *myself* for. I don't like to make a "thing" out of it, because my years of experience in online communities don't make me worthy of respect. But I certainly hope my *actions* do. I also accept that I'm not going to get universal respect for what I do. <shrug> Nobody can please everyone. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 06:38, Marco Michna wrote: [even more ranting, raving, swearing and trolling removed] Membership is a privilege, NOT a right. You had to apply to gain the membership, and your contributions had to be verified. What is the issue with thinking that that privilege should be maintained? You don't need to bother answering if it'll just be more hate filled ranting. My question was more just to point out that you earn the right to membership. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 08:28, Marco Michna wrote:

Maybe by simply deleting the former posts you missed that I/we are already members and did/do contribute!

No one said you, I or anyone else didn't contribute. You ranted and raved about being forced into a select group.... no one is forcing you. and yes, membership IS a privilege. You, I and everyone else who is a "member" had to apply and prove their contributions to the project.

Not reading the previous posts does not help!

What? You really are stretching here.

Keep on with your opinion and show that you can't stand if there are other people with a different mind. Such a behaviour simply shows that some of you still don't understand what this is about!

There is a HUGE difference between a differing opinion and ranting/trolling. You have basically invalidated any potentially valid points you may have by your behavior. No one will listen to someone who behaves in this manner regardless of how valid your points may or may not be. You're welcome to your anger... I don't have time for it. I'm done with replies on this particular tangent. I shouldn't have said anything to begin with. Sorry guys for prolonging this pointless tangent. C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Marco, Le vendredi 27 janvier 2012, à 08:28 +0100, Marco Michna a écrit :

Keep on with your opinion and show that you can't stand if there are other people with a different mind. Such a behaviour simply shows that some of you still don't understand what this is about!

You might have good and valid points, but I feel (and apparently others feel the same too) that your tone just destroys any message that could be in your mails. I think everyone would benefit from it if you could consider making your points another way. Cheers, Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:06:46 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:

Aloha,

...

You might have good and valid points, but I feel (and apparently others feel the same too) that your tone just destroys any message that could be in your mails.

think everyone would benefit from it if you could consider making your points another way.

Wake up!

You shook the daemon!

NO. Fear and intimidation are not going to work here. I respect your contributions, Marco, I do, but that doesn't give you the right to stomp around like Godzilla and say "You shook the daemon, I will rain down fire and death on those who oppose me." I'm trying to understand your points and trying to incorporate them into my thinking. I'll admit that it's pretty damned hard when I have to wade through a tone that is not conducive to constructive conversation. But I respect your contributions enough to take time out of my spare time to try to understand. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Actually, Marco and I discussed this on IRC, and apparently there is quite some room for misunderstandings (which is inherent to communication ;)). So, I would like to clarify a few things, at least from my personal perspective and the position I will have on the board regarding this matter: - it would be quite helpful for a few things to have such a mechanism ("non voting members", or maybe a better term) in order to have meaningful numbers and stats about elections, as well as a potential preparation for a potential foundation (in which case a mechanism like that will be absolutely necessary, but I won't go into the details of why right now) - it is _not_ "absolutely critical" that we change something, at least for as long as we don't have a foundation; it would be useful if we do it, but we're not going to fall into oblivion if we don't - no rights nor anything alike should be removed from "non voting members" (that includes the email address and the IRC cloak), except for voting, quite obviously, which isn't exactly removing anything as they're not voting in the first place... eh... obvious... I hope :) - a simple email to the membership team must be sufficient to be able to vote again, to "reactivate" the access to the voting platform, so to say Also, I believe that we have mixed two different things in the discussion: - members who have not been active in the project any more since quite some time (e.g. 2 years), and by "active" we don't mean "voting" only -- that is actually what Robert was talking about in the original post of the thread - members who are active but don't want to vote at all, for whatever reasons I don't believe it is in anyone's intentions to demote non voting members. If it is, I can only say that it's definitely not _my_ intention :) We just want to find a better way to run the elections and have more meaningful numbers in terms of "active and sustained contributors". Sorry if that caused any confusion or misunderstandings, and I hope the above clarifies a few things if needed. Of course, everyone is free to disagree -- or prove me wrong, but that will require very compelling arguments :) I'm merely talking about my personal understanding and opinion, although I believe it is also what most (if not all) other people who participated on this thread believe. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

* jdd [01-31-12 17:49]:

Le 31/01/2012 23:38, Pascal Bleser a écrit :

...

mechanism ("non voting members", or maybe a better term) in

why is this necessary at all? can't we simply have a mark near the member name on the wiki (or elsewhere) "have voted on the last two years".

easy to have the count, then, and all this is automatic

+1... -- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA HOG # US1244711 http://wahoo.no-ip.org Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery2 http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member Registered Linux User #207535 @ http://linuxcounter.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 2012-01-31 23:48:21 (+0100), jdd wrote:

Le 31/01/2012 23:38, Pascal Bleser a écrit :

...

mechanism ("non voting members", or maybe a better term) in

why is this necessary at all? can't we simply have a mark near the member name on the wiki (or elsewhere) "have voted on the last two years".

easy to have the count, then, and all this is automatic

Then you don't know how many people decided not to vote at all. Apparently, at least from the feedback of some, it is not acceptable to them to vote "none of the above", as they want to not vote at all and not even have to click an option on a webform. We're just trying to accomodate that. Question is whether we consider those who didn't vote - as "non voting members" implicitly (no time, don't care, ...), - or as "I don't like the options" That's one of the advantages of obligatory voting, you can have a fair chance at making that distinction, provided there is a "non of the above" ;) But I'm _not_ saying that I want to make voting obligatory, just discussing possible mechanisms. But, do we want and need to make that distinction ? I think it would surely be an useful metric: a board that is elected by only 60% of the active members should at least try to find out why this is happening. Right now, we have absolutely no idea whether the members who did not vote - didn't vote because they don't care - didn't vote because they're not involved with openSUSE any more - didn't vote because they didn't like any of the candidates Do we want to be able to make that distinction ? If we're talking democracy, I believe we should, at least if we care about the health of our community. <side-note> As said a few times, for a foundation though, one absolutely has to have a mechanism like that or you're not going anywhere: legal regulations for non for profit organisations oblige you to make elections and votes on a regular basis (for the board of the foundation, for approving the financial report, etc...). And you are also required to have a certain percentage of your (foundation) members to take that vote or it is seen as invalid and you have to do it again, and again, or you can't move forward nor do anything else. KDE, as an example, but only citing discussions with Cornelius from memory, has had to move to such a concept of non voting members in order to be able to get anything done on that level (hope I'm not confusing KDE e.V. with another foundation here :)). </side-note> cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

jdd wrote:

Le 01/02/2012 07:15, Pascal Bleser a écrit :

...

And you are also required to have a certain percentage of your (foundation) members to take that vote or it is seen as invalid and you have to do it again, and again, or you can't move forward nor do anything else.

in France there is no such limitation. Only bylaws decide what is mandatory (only having at least 3 people in the board is legally mandatory).

Same in Switzerland. The "foundation" status is a tax matter, not a legal. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (-4.9°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 01/31/2012 04:51 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:38:31 +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:

...

- a simple email to the membership team must be sufficient to be able to vote again, to "reactivate" the access to the voting platform, so to say

It is probably fair to say (and obvious, for that matter) that in order for this to work, the membership team does need to have a certain level of responsiveness. From what Chuck said (as a part of the membership team IIRC), there is something that isn't working properly there, and that needs to be sorted out.

Jim

And to add to an already long thread, we do know we have a tooling issue. One of the topics to discuss when the board meets face to face in a few weeks. Thanks, Peter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Pascal Bleser wrote:

Actually, Marco and I discussed this on IRC, and apparently there is quite some room for misunderstandings (which is inherent to communication ;)).

So, I would like to clarify a few things, at least from my personal perspective and the position I will have on the board regarding this matter:

- it would be quite helpful for a few things to have such a mechanism ("non voting members", or maybe a better term) in order to have meaningful numbers and stats about elections,

Don't we already have that? I could be wrong, but it seems we can just count who voted and who didn't?

- a simple email to the membership team must be sufficient to be able to vote again, to "reactivate" the access to the voting platform, so to say

When I saw that proposal it sounded a little odd - "when you don't vote, we'll take your right to vote away". I don't think there is anything gained here at all - if anything, we might well lose some people who would be peed off having to re-apply for voting status.

We just want to find a better way to run the elections and have more meaningful numbers in terms of "active and sustained contributors".

The latter is an altogether different topic, really. Such numbers would no doubt be useful for PR, gauging the quality or strength of the community etcetera, but are they also key to managing our membership database? -- Per Jessen, Zürich (-5.0°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:38:57 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:

Aloha,

...

Respectfully, I disagree. Fortunately, we're not required to agree on all things. That would be awfully boring.

[bunch of ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks]

Nice that you put it that way ... shows how much respect you have!

Well, when someone writes to me things like: "Hah ... maybe you killed Klaas already because he didn't contribute in the way of your simple minded ideas!" and "Yeeeeeehaaaw ... just because I'm not that know as Greg makes me less important. Nice statement!" and "More howling ... Are you actually sure what you are talking about?" and so on....then yes, I tend to tune out. It's a character flaw of mine. And yeah, let's make no bones about the fact that the difference between "fsck" and "f*ck" is that you used 's' and I used '*' to replace a 'u'. We both know that. So when someone says 'fsck U', we both know *exactly* what is meant.

...

Clearly you've made up your mind and aren't interested in changing it. You appear to be just interested in shouting and swearing at people.

Your opinion ... good to know as well.

I'm happy to be proven wrong about that by having an actual discussion.

...

Quite honestly, I don't care if you *founded* S.u.S.E. *Nothing* gives you the right to treat others like that. Community is based on people having some degree of mutual respect for each other, and being able to disagree without being disagreeable.

But you have the right to piss us off ... you have the right that people call me late at night and ask me "What the fsck is going on there!" You have the right to call me names. You have the right to talk shit!

No, I don't. What's more, I didn't. I was very careful not to, and if you took something that I said as calling you names, talking shit, or asking you to 'check in' or provide me with some sort of status update, then my apologies. I actually do not operate under the misapprehension that my voice is anything but another voice in the room. I don't see myself as having any authority in the project (in the forums, yeah, I do - I'm one of the administrators).

And I don't mind if you actually invented the internet.

Which is why I don't like to make a big deal about my experience in online communities. I've been around online communities long enough to recognise that for the purposes of a discussion like this, that actually doesn't have any relevance.

When I read your name I think about the muppets ...

Yeah, I get that a lot. For over 40 years, actually. I once worked for a guy named Steven King. When he hired me, I suggested that we produce a muppet version of Cujo - it was something neither of us had heard before. :) Most people's first reaction is "Aren't you the muppet guy?" to which my tired response often is to check my pulse and say "Nope, I'm still alive. Henson ain't.".

show me just a single line of code where you contributed!

While I can read and understand code (having been a CompSci major at university and having taught myself from a fairly young age), coding isn't my strong suit. Here's the thing, though. The current membership rules - as imperfect as they are - are intended to recognise that people contribute in different ways. My contribution, for example, is through participation in the openSUSE forums as staff, with some visible and some not-so visible aspects (which recently has involved occasionally fixing PHP code in the NNTP gateway for the forums that's been broken by an update). I think we can agree that contribution is important. We may differ on what constitutes contribution or what contributions are more valuable than others (though I think we'd agree that coding is the *key* contribution), but contribution is the important thing. Reading over what you've written so far, here's what I see behind what I originally ascribed (perhaps mistakenly and/or unfairly) as "ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks" as your primary issues and concerns: 1. You've been around for a long time and have written a fair amount of code that's in the modern openSUSE distribution. You've also written books, articles, and other stuff. You feel that should be recognized and acknowledged, and are concerned that changes to the already imperfect system may lose that. 2. You very strongly feel that not voting in board elections or whatever the project decides to vote for should not be a criteria for continued membership. 3. You are concerned by the idea that "having an opensuse.org e-mail address" is tied specifically to "being a member" and that "being a member" is tied to a set of criteria that you feel may at some point would cause you to lose your "member" status, and thus your opensuse.org e-mail address. That's a means of contact for your professional network, and that's important to you not just personally but professionally. Losing that address would cause you pain and problems. How am I doing so far? Continuing... 4. You don't want to feel like you're 'accountable' to anyone - this is a hobby, not a job. As such, you strongly feel that the idea of "membership" really doesn't have a lot of meaning; you don't value it, and you maybe even don't want to value it. You just want to get on with writing code and not be bothered by "project politics". 5. You don't want your fate in the project being decided by people you don't know and who don't know you. You've been there, done that, and it caused you pain (and possibly some hardship). 6. You don't want an automated system to remove anyone with no recourse because they failed to complete some stupid trivial administrative task (for whatever reason) that says "Yes, I was actually active on this last release, just in case you didn't notice". 7. Discussing changes to what constitutes a 'member' upsets you, possibly because the status quo is more or less working for you and you don't want that to break - you would, however, like to see some things fixed about it (like difficulty in resetting the e-mail address the opensuse.org address forwards to - a tangible issue that's perhaps been neglected and probably has a simple solution). I'd guess you probably also see it as a 'fake' contribution to discuss because it's not about the code, which is where your focus is. Now, based on that interpretation of what you've written, a few comments on each from my perspective: 1. First and foremost, *thank you*. Really, I sincerely mean it. I have used SUSE since SUSE Professional 9.2 or thereabouts (since 2003; like you, I was employed by Novell, and I switched from using RedHat in 2003). I was happy on RedHat, but switching to SUSE Pro was like night and day. I don't know what software you've written, but that you've written code that I use and am happy and prefer to use is something I certainly appreciate. As a fellow author (I've got a couple of co-authorship and contributing author credits myself), I know what goes into writing. I've often said that "I love having written, but I dislike the actual writing process", because even with a subject one knows very well, taking that knowledge and translating it into something that can be sold in written form takes talent. Douglas Adams had it right - the process of writing involves sitting down in front of a computer and staring intently at the screen until your forehead bleeds (well, he said 'typewriter', but you get the idea). To be able to code *and* write to publication quality? That's a rare gift indeed. I think it's reasonably fair and accurate to assert that those who actually write the openSUSE software are key contributors and their contributions absolutely, positively, without question *should not be overlooked*. Without the developers, *nothing* in this project could happen. No developers = No openSUSE project. Period, end of story. 2. I absolutely agree. Voting or not voting in the election of the board should not be a criteria for continued membership. I perhaps was unclear by saying voting was a 'responsibility' of membership - that wasn't intended to imply that members *must* vote. Part of any legitimate voting process includes the idea that one can abstain, either explicitly (by voting "none of the above" if there is such an option on the ballot) or implicitly (by just not voting). I don't think that anyone actually proposed that members *must* vote. I think, though, it's important to discern between those who abstain and those who don't vote out of apathy, lack of interest, or because they're no longer actually involved in the project. Identifying the difference between the two is important to recognising that your abstention has value, and the intent of your abstention is easier to note as a result of knowing who's active and who's inactive. If you have a 10 person pool voting for something, but don't know who's active and who's not, if you have a vote of 3-2 with 5 non-votes, if all 5 of those non-votes are treated as abstentions, then one may fix a problem that doesn't exist (that of why there wasn't participation). If you find out that 4 of those non-votes are due to people having moved on to something else, then you can more accurately decide what to do with an effective 3-3 deadlock (arguably not the *best* example, but it's almost 1:30 AM here and I have to get up in about 4 hours). Of course, with a voting option of "decline to vote", that becomes less of an issue. 3. This is a reasonable concern. It's something that went through my mind as I suggested that perhaps the original "member" status be retained for those who joined the project in the early days. I'd even go a step further to say that the opensuse.org e-mail address' tie to membership should be one solely of "granted when one becomes a member". Never removed, as long as the domain is active - for that very reason. 4. It strikes me that if my first three interpretations are accurate, that the solution to your situation basically is encapsulated in the above paragraph. That should be doable, I would think. I would also go so far as to say that those who do make the decision about what membership means ultimately should strongly weight that input, because that *is* an important part of the discussion. 5. Who *would* want to relive an unpleasant memory? Without going into a lot of detail, I understand - I once raised concerns about my own boss' competence once, and I got burned for it. I was essentially told as a result of calling attention to the fact that the boss was unqualified to do the job and was destroying the team "there's the door; you can go through it, or we can push you through it." Bottom line, I can see why you're concerned, especially when combined with the prospect of your professional network knowing to contact you through an e-mail address that you perceive could go away as a result of some bureaucrat deciding your contributions weren't "worthy" of continued membership. That is a legitimate concern. In retrospect, I probably would have reacted as strongly as you had if that had been my interpretation of what was happening. "Here we go again....", right? And what's more, you care about this not just for yourself, but for others who make contributions similar to your own. You don't want them to be nameless/faceless/ignored because you value their contributions very highly. 6. I don't believe a *fully* automated system has even been proposed. In fact, proposals have explicitly said "removal should/must be a manual process". In my own experience in expiring instructors from an instructor program for inactivity, there was a *lot* of manual work because what I inherited was not maintained well (I didn't actually take over from my predecessor - there was a multi-year gap when nobody managed the program - so some similarity to the current situation here, based on what Chuck wrote about the membership situation earlier). That's why the bar for re-entry needs to be lower than the initial bar for entry (and yes, I'd argue that there *should* be requirements for entry into membership, not just for the reasons Bryen said with regards to the foundation, there are other reasons as well.) 7. As I said, contributions come in different forms from different people. We probably agree that contribution is important, but will differ on what constitutes a valued contribution. As long as your 'status quo' needs are understood and met at the outcome (so there's no significant effect on your ability to continue doing what you do best), I don't see that this should be an issue for you. I understand you not wanting to waste a lot of your time on something you don't see as important, but at the same time not wanting to have a change in the current status of your membership affect your ability to contribute to the project in the way you see as most important - writing code. That's fair. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Friday, January 27, 2012 08:29:30 Jim Henderson wrote:

...

On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:38:57 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:

...

Aloha,

...

Respectfully, I disagree.  Fortunately, we're not required to agree on all things.  That would be awfully boring.

[bunch of ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks]

Nice that you put it that way ... shows how much respect you have!

Well, when someone writes to me things like:

You don't have to defend yourself. Marco acts like a 6 year old and should be treated as such - ignore. It's not a character flaw to tune out at that point. Actually I respect you greatly for responding the way you did to him, I would've put his mail on ignore (as I bet many others already have done). There's no excuse for the rudeness he displayed.

More on topic.

Yes, becoming openSUSE Member is something you got because you contributed. That contribution doesn't go away, hence you shouldn't be kicked out. Yet the problem is real - some don't care about participating as member. That is, they don't vote, which is the major thing a member does. There is nothing else a member can do that a non-member can not.

So, I propose that those who don't care about the vote for 2 years become non- voting members. I think it respects their wishes. Of course they keep their mail address (the only perk of being member) and nothing else changes. They just don't count in the statistic and don't vote. If they want to change their status they can ask the membership committee to re-instate them as voting members.

This makes clear what members are interested in the governance of openSUSE. Others are members just as much and through contributions they influence openSUSE on a technical level. But the voting procedure is about governance - things like the conference and travel money and sponsorship. I get it completely if you don't care about that but you should still be able to be member. But that membership should count as part of those who vote. If and when we transition to a Foundation we need to have this procedure in any case - you can't make certain decisions lawfully if you have only 30% of your members vote... So having 'non-voting' members solves that problem.

And if you don't vote out of protest, I'm sure we can add a "I don't like anything" as option to votes to solve that part. At least then we know who doesn't vote for a reason (protest) or because he/she doesn't care and it'll be actually meaningful.

All in all I think this way we can have our cake and eat it too: we know who regularly votes; it's clear who doesn't care or protests; our numbers are actually meaningful; yet we don't take anything from anyone (membership depends on contributions, yet if you don't want to be bothered by the voting stuff that's fine).

Acceptable compromise?

By far the best solution I've seen to the issue. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

+1!

Let's add that as a TODO for the board, to refine the election process to include a "none of the above" option, as well as to arrange a "non-voting member" status. Or at least to discuss it :)

I shouldn't have voted for this. Why do you also agree on segregation ? Why can't people who have earned membership by contributions need to be forced to vote? Please give me a reasonable explanation and feel free to explain what you believe by democracy and freedom of choice.

It has been discussed at length here, but not always in a very productive manner thanks to some ... erm ...

Not me this time.

So let's pick it up soon, try to summarize and try to find something that works.

Hopefully not this segregation/prejudice kind of thing.

(I won't start it right now because I'm still in FOSDEM mode ;))

(And, of course, it doesn't have to be the board, except for actually changing the election or membership process, but anyone can take on the job of summarizing and proposal of a concise decision to the list.)

cheers --  -o) Pascal Bleser  /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green  _\_v http://fosdem.org   -- we haz conf -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 01/31/2012 12:12 PM, Pascal Bleser wrote:

On 2012-01-31 17:40:08 (+0100), Jos Poortvliet wrote:

...

On Friday, January 27, 2012 08:29:30 Jim Henderson wrote:

...

On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:38:57 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:

...

Aloha,

...

...

...

...

Respectfully, I disagree. Fortunately, we're not required to agree on all things. That would be awfully boring.

...

...

...

...

[bunch of ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks]

...

...

...

Nice that you put it that way ... shows how much respect you have!

...

...

Well, when someone writes to me things like:

...

You don't have to defend yourself. Marco acts like a 6 year old and should be treated as such - ignore. It's not a character flaw to tune out at that point. Actually I respect you greatly for responding the way you did to him, I would've put his mail on ignore (as I bet many others already have done). There's no excuse for the rudeness he displayed.

...

More on topic.

...

Yes, becoming openSUSE Member is something you got because you contributed. That contribution doesn't go away, hence you shouldn't be kicked out. Yet the problem is real - some don't care about participating as member. That is, they don't vote, which is the major thing a member does. There is nothing else a member can do that a non-member can not.

...

So, I propose that those who don't care about the vote for 2 years become non- voting members. I think it respects their wishes. Of course they keep their mail address (the only perk of being member) and nothing else changes. They just don't count in the statistic and don't vote. If they want to change their status they can ask the membership committee to re-instate them as voting members.

...

This makes clear what members are interested in the governance of openSUSE. Others are members just as much and through contributions they influence openSUSE on a technical level. But the voting procedure is about governance - things like the conference and travel money and sponsorship. I get it completely if you don't care about that but you should still be able to be member. But that membership should count as part of those who vote. If and when we transition to a Foundation we need to have this procedure in any case - you can't make certain decisions lawfully if you have only 30% of your members vote... So having 'non-voting' members solves that problem.

...

And if you don't vote out of protest, I'm sure we can add a "I don't like anything" as option to votes to solve that part. At least then we know who doesn't vote for a reason (protest) or because he/she doesn't care and it'll be actually meaningful.

...

All in all I think this way we can have our cake and eat it too: we know who regularly votes; it's clear who doesn't care or protests; our numbers are actually meaningful; yet we don't take anything from anyone (membership depends on contributions, yet if you don't want to be bothered by the voting stuff that's fine).

...

Acceptable compromise?

+1!

Let's add that as a TODO for the board, to refine the election process to include a "none of the above" option, as well as to arrange a "non-voting member" status. Or at least to discuss it :)

It has been discussed at length here, but not always in a very productive manner thanks to some ... erm ...

So let's pick it up soon, try to summarize and try to find something that works.

There's a summary of the discussion here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Membership_lapse_summary#High_level_summary_... It does not yet include this train of thought.

(I won't start it right now because I'm still in FOSDEM mode ;))

(And, of course, it doesn't have to be the board, except for actually changing the election or membership process, but anyone can take on the job of summarizing and proposal of a concise decision to the list.)

cheers

-- 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

On 2012-01-31 17:14:34 (+0000), Nelson Marques wrote:

<snip>

...

Yes, becoming openSUSE Member is something you got because you contributed. That contribution doesn't go away, hence you shouldn't be kicked out. Yet the problem is real - some don't care about participating as member. That is, they don't vote, which is the major thing a member does. There is nothing else a member can do that a non-member can not.

#1 - You established that the only thing that a member can do that non-members can't is to 'vote'. You also establish that some might not want to participate as members (don't vote).

...

So, I propose that those who don't care about the vote for 2 years become non- voting members. I think it respects their wishes. Of course they keep their mail address (the only perk of being member) and nothing else changes. They just don't count in the statistic and don't vote. If they want to change their status they can ask the membership committee to re-instate them as voting members.

Now, everything you state on this paragraph is against #1. So if the only thing a member can do that others can't is to vote we don't need middle terms. People are either Members or Non-Members. What's the confusion ?

Members also get an @opensuse.org email alias because they have contributed enough to be trusted to be representative of the project (that's the very short version or the idea behind giving an alias to members).

What you describe here is simple, you are trying to enforce a way that members are forced to vote... Dude, look at the real world... Do you loose your dutch citizenship because you don't vote ?

I think that's quite a stretch, no one said anything like that. Quite explicitly, Jos proposed that you become a "non-voting member", precisely in order to _keep_ your membership (for everything else, as you then don't care about voting).

Having the choice to vote and not to vote is a part of the democratic process, what you are proposing is pretty much self-prejudice.

Arguable, and a few countries disagree (see below).

...

This makes clear what members are interested in the governance of openSUSE.

Sure they are, or might not be... or might be more commited to fixing their packages and their projects than just following the elections hype. Either way, why should non-SUSE members even care about the voting? SUSE members by themselves can elect any board and that's way to easy to manipulate and hide from the world. So yeah... it makes all sense that members might not want to vote or be involved in governance because their vote is worthless in most cases.

Look at the last boards and take your own conclusions.

Sorry, but could you please be a bit more precise (maybe in another thread) ? If you are criticizing people who have been and are on the openSUSE board for their work, I would highly appreciate if it was based on actual items and not just a random "they're all crap" as you just did.

...

Others are members just as much and through contributions they inbfluence openSUSE on a technical level. But the voting procedure is about governance - things like the conference and travel money and sponsorship. I get it completely if you don't care about that but you should still be able to be member. But that membership should count as part of those who vote. If and when we transition to a Foundation we need to have this procedure in any case - you can't make certain decisions lawfully if you have only 30% of your members vote... So having 'non-voting' members solves that problem.

No it doesn't, you are discriminating and forcing members to vote. Having the option not to vote is something pretty much accepted in Democracy (maybe not in Brazil and the Netherlands), but in the rest of the civilized world people have that option. Why do you want to segregate the community?

Um, sorry: obligatory voting is not undemocratic. Both have pros and cons, and some believe that forcing people to vote is more democratic because democracy is not just rights, but also obligations. But we don't even need to argue about this in an endless side discussion: no one said there is an obligation to vote. If you don't want to vote, that's fine. You'll simply be marked as "non-voting member" in order for our statistics to be meaningful as well as to be able to run a foundation, if and when we'll have one.

...

And if you don't vote out of protest, I'm sure we can add a "I don't like anything" as option to votes to solve that part. At least then we know who doesn't vote for a reason (protest) or because he/she doesn't care and it'll be actually meaningful.

When you go to vote on real elections do you have that option ? :) Not voting by protest, mistrust, etc is a normal option for people. You are complicating stuff...

That highly depends on the country. Some do have a "none of the above" option, and others have tricks to invalidate a vote, especially in countries where voting is obligatory.

...

All in all I think this way we can have our cake and eat it too: we know who regularly votes; it's clear who doesn't care or protests; our numbers are actually meaningful; yet we don't take anything from anyone (membership depends on contributions, yet if you don't want to be bothered by the voting stuff that's fine).

...

Acceptable compromise?

Hell, NO... I don't see why people should be segregated. If a member is someone who contributes (in many potential forms), there is no need for segregation... People should have the choice to vote or not without having the 'community police' trying to enforce stupid things.

None of this solves your problem... it's just fireworks.

No, in your response, you are simply completely ignoring the issue this is all about: - some members are not active any more, which means they are not contributing to the project, and not voting either - this is an issue for two reasons: 1. our "number of members" is meaningless right now, including for statistics on the board elections, and they're quite useful to also evaluate the legitimacy of a board, it's not just numbers for the sake of numbers and pie charts ;) 2. if and when we'll have a foundation, we will _have_ to have something like "non-voting members", at any rate, so why not tackle the issue right now You can have a look at other projects, especially those with a foundation, it's a pretty common practice. So, in your implicit counter-proposal (by calling Jos a totalitarian, and everyone who has been a board a worthless liar) to keep the status quo, how do we solve the points above? cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

And if someone sees this feel free to revoke my membership, I am asking for it for quite some time... I just can't tag along with this kind of crap. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 2012-02-01 00:49:54 (+0100), Philipp Thomas wrote:

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:30:18 +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:

...

Um, sorry: obligatory voting is not undemocratic. Both have pros and cons, and some believe that forcing people to vote is more democratic because democracy is not just rights, but also obligations.

And if you make voting mandatory there are so many ways to make a vote invalid. So what do you gain? The moment opensuse makes voting

There wouldn't be any possibility of making the vote invalid with the simple rules that we have (as opposed to the rather complex mechanics most countries have), but with obligatory voting we would obviously have to have an option for "none of the above". What one would gain is the differenciation between - I don't want to vote, for whatever reasons, and - I don't like the options If we have 100 members and 10 say "I don't want to vote", then, IMHO, we can simply ignore those 10 when it comes to computing the relevance of the election (provided there is a "non of the above" that would give anyone the possibility to say: I don't like any of the options). What we don't have in the election process is a way for someone to say "I don't want a board in the first place". If that is the case, I'd love to hear and discuss why, and maybe clarify a few things.

mandatory I'm out out, even if there would be something like a non-voting membership.

I never said that I wanted the voting to be obligatory, I was merely disagreeing with Nelson that "optional voting" was the only democratic way. I'm a bit surprised by the very harsh reactions from some regarding voting in the first place. What is so bad with voting to decide who are your representatives on the board ? Is it philisophical or out of principle because of an analogy with the politics in your country ? Is it because you don't want to be "tracked" ? Is it because you don't have any trust in the board and/or believe it's useless (or even a bad thing) ? Because you are allergic to "power" and believe that the board is in any way a position of "power" ? (it definitely isn't in my book, it's a position of service to the community) Because you don't like some or all of the people who have been (and are) on the board so far ? Because the board hasn't been very active, at least in a visible manner, in the past ? Is it because you don't care about the non technical aspects of the community/project ? (I'm not criticizing! :), just wondering what the reasons could be, and I'm probably missing more obvious ones :)) Would there be any mechanism where you would - pick some option on a form - and reflect your opinion that would be acceptable ? (apparently not, but maybe we're missing a simpler way to handle this because most of us don't know the reasons for not wanting to vote at all) cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf

On 01/31/2012 11:40 AM, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

On Friday, January 27, 2012 08:29:30 Jim Henderson wrote:

...

On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:38:57 +0100, Marco Michna wrote:

...

Aloha,

...

Respectfully, I disagree. Fortunately, we're not required to agree on all things. That would be awfully boring.

[bunch of ranting, raving, swearing, and ad-hominem attacks]

Nice that you put it that way ... shows how much respect you have!

Well, when someone writes to me things like:

You don't have to defend yourself. Marco acts like a 6 year old and should be treated as such - ignore. It's not a character flaw to tune out at that point. Actually I respect you greatly for responding the way you did to him, I would've put his mail on ignore (as I bet many others already have done). There's no excuse for the rudeness he displayed.

More on topic.

Yes, becoming openSUSE Member is something you got because you contributed. That contribution doesn't go away, hence you shouldn't be kicked out. Yet the problem is real - some don't care about participating as member. That is, they don't vote, which is the major thing a member does. There is nothing else a member can do that a non-member can not.

So, I propose that those who don't care about the vote for 2 years become non- voting members. I think it respects their wishes. Of course they keep their mail address (the only perk of being member) and nothing else changes. They just don't count in the statistic and don't vote. If they want to change their status they can ask the membership committee to re-instate them as voting members.

This makes clear what members are interested in the governance of openSUSE. Others are members just as much and through contributions they influence openSUSE on a technical level. But the voting procedure is about governance - things like the conference and travel money and sponsorship. I get it completely if you don't care about that but you should still be able to be member. But that membership should count as part of those who vote. If and when we transition to a Foundation we need to have this procedure in any case - you can't make certain decisions lawfully if you have only 30% of your members vote... So having 'non-voting' members solves that problem.

And if you don't vote out of protest, I'm sure we can add a "I don't like anything" as option to votes to solve that part. At least then we know who doesn't vote for a reason (protest) or because he/she doesn't care and it'll be actually meaningful.

All in all I think this way we can have our cake and eat it too: we know who regularly votes; it's clear who doesn't care or protests; our numbers are actually meaningful; yet we don't take anything from anyone (membership depends on contributions, yet if you don't want to be bothered by the voting stuff that's fine).

Acceptable compromise?

I think we are focusing too much on the voting process here. While I used voting as an example in my original post, the bottom line is that it should be about contributions to the project. Members cannot and should not be forced to vote! Those who do not vote out of protest loose their voice if we have a large block of non active members. Non voters will just get shoved into the "non active" bucket. Thus, especially those that contribute but do not vote out of protest gain a voice that they do not have today. If we have only current project contributors as members we have to make the assumption that they are interested in the project as a whole and it's governance. Therefore, if voting participation is low, this will speak about the governance of project and some soul searching would be in order. This expression of choice is currently not possible. But enough about the voting, again, I think the voting topic has become too much of a focus in the discussion. I would refrain from creating a "graded" membership model as I think it takes away from the "flair" of being a member. Everyone that is a member had to show that they contributed to the project in some, more or less regular fashion, and in a way that is meaningful to the project. The recognition of this contribution is the "member badge" (for lack of a better term). This also implies that those who are members cared enough about the status of being a member, for whatever personal reasons, that they followed the "member application process". There is no intention not to recognize those who contributed to the project but no longer do. Everyone who stopped contributing will have their own reasons. This recognition can be addressed via a web page or other means. But does not have to include being a member forever more. If one is a current member the contributions should also be current, where current based on previous discussions appears to lie around a 2 year time frame. For now those who contribute could check some check-boxes on a web page to indicate what areas they contribute to. Hopefully over time we can make some progress in "contribution tracking" (this is not intended to check up on anybody) as suggested earlier in the thread. At that point the web page checking could go away and "renewal" is fully automated. If everyone that ever contributed to the project and no longer does, is retained as a member it takes away from the "status" of those that currently do contribute to the project and it robs those that contribute but voice their opinion by not voting of their voice. The member list should reflect those that currently contribute and care sufficiently enough to have gone through the membership process. Once a member all one has to do is keep contributing and check a couple of boxes on a web page every once in a while, as a sign of live, so to speak. Once we can figure out the "sign of live" automatically the web page checking goes away. Seems rather simple to me, but maybe I am over simplifying things. Later, 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

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:40:08 +0100, Jos Poortvliet wrote:

Actually I respect you greatly for responding the way you did to him, I would've put his mail on ignore (as I bet many others already have done). There's no excuse for the rudeness he displayed.

I agree there's no excuse for it, but I find often that there is a reason for it, and after some consideration, I thought there would be value in trying to understand what was unlocking such a passionate response.

Yes, becoming openSUSE Member is something you got because you contributed. That contribution doesn't go away, hence you shouldn't be kicked out. Yet the problem is real - some don't care about participating as member. That is, they don't vote, which is the major thing a member does. There is nothing else a member can do that a non-member can not.

So, I propose that those who don't care about the vote for 2 years become non- voting members. I think it respects their wishes. Of course they keep their mail address (the only perk of being member) and nothing else changes. They just don't count in the statistic and don't vote. If they want to change their status they can ask the membership committee to re-instate them as voting members.

There is a marked difference between someone who doesn't vote and someone who doesn't care to vote. Also, the IRC cloak is a perk of being a member, for those that use IRC.

This makes clear what members are interested in the governance of openSUSE. Others are members just as much and through contributions they influence openSUSE on a technical level. But the voting procedure is about governance - things like the conference and travel money and sponsorship. I get it completely if you don't care about that but you should still be able to be member. But that membership should count as part of those who vote. If and when we transition to a Foundation we need to have this procedure in any case - you can't make certain decisions lawfully if you have only 30% of your members vote... So having 'non-voting' members solves that problem.

Part of me thinks that it's good to look forward to if/when the foundation is set up, but part of me also thinks that we need to focus on the need we have now. Of course both are true, and there needs to be a migration path from one to the other. I think something that the project needs as well is a clear definition of what 'governance' is. What you've described here is the first time I can recall seeing that this is what voting for the board is specifically about. I also thought that that included things like overall direction for the project, but the recent 'steering committee' discussions made me question that understanding.

And if you don't vote out of protest, I'm sure we can add a "I don't like anything" as option to votes to solve that part. At least then we know who doesn't vote for a reason (protest) or because he/she doesn't care and it'll be actually meaningful.

There probably isn't an ideal solution for the "no vote as a protest" option. The Pareto principle probably applies here.

All in all I think this way we can have our cake and eat it too: we know who regularly votes; it's clear who doesn't care or protests; our numbers are actually meaningful; yet we don't take anything from anyone (membership depends on contributions, yet if you don't want to be bothered by the voting stuff that's fine).

Acceptable compromise?

Overall, yes, I think it is, with the caveats I've listed above. I do think it's important to the project to try to be as inclusive of the concerns as possible. Obviously we can't get to a 100% solution for resolving everyone's concerns (as some will undoubtedly conflict), but I do think it's important not to dismiss concerns that are poorly expressed. That's not to say it isn't incumbent upon those expressing concerns to do their best to express them in a way that's constructive. We're all here because we want the project to succeed (at least I certainly hope that's what those who have taken the time to contribute and become project members want), so we have a common goal we're starting from. As a group, let's not lose sight of that. Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 10:35 PM, Marco Michna wrote:

Aloha,

...

Sorry, but it's actually an important topic.

No it is not!

...

I went through this when I was tasked several years ago with managing an instructor program for a software company.  The number of inactive members of the program was detracting from the value of the program for those who were active, so we decided to institute an expiration policy that had a very simple way to get back into the program.

So for my part, I'm speaking from direct experience about increasing the value to the active part of the membership of a program or group.

You still don't get it ... I do ... we do ... they do! And just because there has been no vote someone decides that being a member also means that you have to vote! If I decide not to vote then I do not vote. EOD! You can't force me to do stuff I do not wan't ... if you try to force me then fsck yourself and think about what you did wrong!

...

This more or less demonstrates *why* membership needs to have a perceived value.  If there isn't a perceived value, then the member has no incentive to take steps to ensure they remain a member.

You didn't get the point! If there will be autmated mails they will end up in some spam rules ... I'm not responsible for your configuration but if I get a mail from a unknow sender it will end in my spam folder. This folder might be checked when I have time to do so. It may be that it will take months to check this because I have a lot of things to do and even if I'm bored to death, I would rather play a funny game than to look trough spam.

...

Which also feeds into people feeling (a) that voting for the board is an important responsibility of membership, and (b) that there is a reason to become a member and to support the project's guiding principles in a concrete way.

Back to square one. What does my contribution to the project have to do with my opinion to vote or not? Did I ver got asked why I didn't vote? Has there been a possibility to say "I don't vote because ..."

...

Again, that's a problem that ties back to perceived value.  If the member perceives value in the membership, then they'll make sure they're contactable and their contact information is up to date.

As I said before ... never travel, never be in a hospital, never go to a country where you are not sure to recieve mails at all.

And if youre hoster has a technical problem ... sue em! Because it's their fault that you lost all your rights to be a fscking openSUSE member.

...

It sounds like you want the status, but why?

You don't get it - do you? I seriously give a shit about being a member or not!

I definitely do not have to be a member of a exclusive club to do what I do.

...

 What value do YOU see in  membership?

Back in the times where we did this there was a reason! First thing was: on IRC you will be seen as promoter/supporter of openSUSE Second: either if it is cool to have such an address or not - it made a statement to have a valid opensuse mail address.

...

 And why is that value insufficient for you to make sure your contact information is current?

Why should it have changed? If it had/has changed then it would be my responsibility to change the information! Sure ... as we could see today - even people employed there have not been able to get their shit done

--8<-- 22:10 -!- dragotin [~kf@pD9E52351.dip0.t-ipconnect.de] has joined #opensuse-project 22:11 < dragotin> hi 22:11 < dragotin> can somebody help me with the mail settings in connect? My opensuse.org address is not longer working -->8--

Hah ... maybe you killed Klaas already because he didn't contribute in the way of your simple minded ideas!

...

Those activities contribute to community growth, certainly - being in the community doesn't necessarily translate to being a member involved in shaping the distribution and the project.

Something you just made up! Being a member never had anything to do with "shaping" anything! I don't force or as you call it "shape" to anyone!

...

OSS is and always has been about merit (it is a meritocracy).  If I wanted to contribute to the Linux kernel, I have to prove that I know what I'm doing by submitting patches.  I don't just automatically get an equal voice to what someone like Greg K-H has when it comes to kernel enhancements.

Yeeeeeehaaaw ... just because I'm not that know as Greg makes me less important. Nice statement! Do a little research an you might find out that I have been involved in S.u.S.E., SuSE, openSUSE. You find my name in books and on many articles ... But hell yeah ... I only wrote code if the community wanted me to! I stepped back from being a operator on all IRC channels when I had been told that I am to agressive with enforcing the rules.

...

The same is true for the openSUSE project.  One has to earn their voice through contributions.  One isn't *granted* a voice in project decisions because they *use* the distribution.  They have to start with something small - reporting problems, using pre-release versions and submitting bugs, etc.

More howling ... Are you actually sure what you are talking about? Do a little research an you might find out that I have been involved in S.u.S.E., SuSE and openSUSE. Please - do a little research before you blame someone!

...

*Nobody* starts at the top in a meritocracy.  Project membership is a step on the meritocracy ladder, and the project leadership absolutely has the authority and ability to decide what constitutes a valuable contribution.  They've earned it.

They have not! There have been "examples" and if you start to change the "rules" then simply fsck U. And beside of that - talking about "earned" - none of em earned it! At the last OsC I met only one person who earned a little respect!

...

That's also why voting for the board is important.  While that's not *entirely* merit-based, those who achieve the most credibility in the community may not want that responsibility for a variety of reasons.

I repeat my answer. Have I been asked if I'm happy with the board or the candidates? Did you check that I voted? If you checked that I voted - I would blame you for changing the results!

...

If you use your opensuse.org e-mail address, then chances are you're contactable.  Problem solved.

You don't get it? I don't use it ... on trades/fairs and other events I hand it to people to have a contact! If ... should be any of the "new" rules be applied ... this will be deleted! So if one of my (old) contacts want to send me a mail - it won't work! Just because you decided that I have to "contribute"!

...

Valid point, and maybe something you should bring up to the election committee for the next election.

Been there, done that, bored with doing it again! Maybe thats one reason why I don't want to vote for them?

...

But that you have something that I consider a valid point to be raised doesn't mean the election is or should be invalidated.  You (presumably) saw the same e-mails everyone else did about the election committee and had the opportunity to raise that issue (or volunteer for the committee if you had the time - perhaps you didn't, though, I don't know) so it could be dealt with rather than coming in after the fact and criticizing what was done.

This topic has nothing to do with the election of any board! Except that some people think that subscribed members should vote. In every constitution it is granted also not to vote! So leave me alone!

Critizising is different topic! I have been working for SuSE for almost 10 years and they tried to kick me out of the company because I raised my voice against a crappy community manager. Joe "Zonker" Brokmeier was the worst thing that could happen to openSUSE - some of things that he did are still in place and still hurt us! Novell lost ... I got a shitload of money.

So please ... never, never ever tell me about criticizing in public!

...

You should become a member because you perceive value in membership.  If you don't perceive value in membership, then please leave membership for those of us who *do* value it and either think it has meaning or would like to see it have an increased value.

You still don't get it ... we are members already! We don't want to be bothered with stupid mails about "renew you subscription" You are not our bosses and we won't send you work reports! If we decide not to vote for anything - it is our decission! You can't force us to vote!

...

It would be far better rather than just being pissed off that the discussion was raised if you contributed something to the solution. IMHO, that also plays into the 'merit' discussion - pissy rants have little merit.  Contributing something (even if it's constructive negative criticism that can be used to improve things to some degree) rates more merit.

Yeah - as I said before ... instead of having this stupid discussions I would offer help on e.g. get more members So lets stop this stupid discussion and focus on more important things!

Give me one "PING" but only one, daemon criticizing -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

I think this is a topic that going to only cause a lot of pain for everyone. There are a lot people that might be busy with life, want to contribute but can't. Have personal conflict with other members and don't contribute, because what work they have contribute is only stole by others without as much a thank you, or they have idea they present, to stole or jumped on by others who want to be in the spot light all the time take and try to make it their. Volunteer to help but get kicked to the side. Try take care of events by only to have fight now stop with everyone because they think they are the one that should be taking care of it. I know a few people like this, they aren't active because they feel that what they do, doesn't count because there are going to be a group of members to chime and make or try to take over, and leaving them behind. It might be nice to also to talk to some people in the community to see why they are not active. You would probably see that some of the stuff I have talked will be there. I have notice, it make me a bit mad, that why I keep harping on this, but there is a group of members that think that you are only active if you are in the chat room. I have seen it first hand. They will not reach out to see if another members are active and working on things. There are another means to reach members, chat, message, e-mail. What was the point of putting all wiki/connect if not ones going to use it. I think agree that it would be nice to clean up a list, but be careful, reach out to everyone ask them to chirp in before they get removed. Just as many inactive members we have listed, we have just that many ambassadors. I can't see on the project/marketing/art list, because I am not very active on those. I can only speak that, I am still very active, I am trying to take care of sites I was asked to help with, tweeting when I can, and doing other stuff that can't be seen. Before this because so long e-mail with the same group of people that always have 2 cents to give when it not need. Send a mass e-mail to every member. Ask them to update they wiki page. If they don't do say by May 30th, they get dropped, end of story. They come back after that, have them re-apply. No need to drag this out. Because it always seems to be the same people take about put stuff into place or doing things without checking. This shouldn't be for everyone to talk about, it should be for the people that were ask to work on the membership team and the board. All this e-mail going to do, which it has get opinions from other and upset a lot people. Good example, I am suppose to be on the membership team. I have asked about 5 times in the last years, where to go, what to do, never got an answer. But if I am saying I am working on event, sudden I got 10 people behind me working on the same thing without once e-mail, im'ing me to see what I have done. I value my membership and openSUSE and would love it, if people would reach out to check on things, instead just talking on irc. You might be suprise, you might find that a lot of those inactive members, are really active. -- Terror PUP a.k.a Chuck "PUP" Payne (678) 636-9678 ----------------------------------------- Discover it! Enjoy it! Share it! openSUSE Linux. ----------------------------------------- openSUSE -- en.opensuse.org/User:Terrorpup openSUSE Ambassador/openSUSE Member skype,twiiter,identica,friendfeed -- terrorpup freenode(irc) --terrorpup/lupinstein Register Linux Userid: 155363 Have you tried SUSE Studio? Need to create a Live CD,  an app you want to package and distribute , or create your own linux distro. Give SUSE Studio a try. www.susestudio.com. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 27/01/2012 03:01, Jim Henderson a écrit :

...

Where was/is the option to tell that we/I do not wan't to participate because of a given reason?

Valid point, and maybe something you should bring up to the election committee for the next election.

It's me (I think) that proposed to make the vote mandatory, and in my post I said that in that case an "I don't like this vote" option have to be added. I see the mandatory vot as a way to at least as a minimum activity. And (for Bryan), I think than having a duty it's mandatory. Being removed from openSUSE member is not something that will kill somebody, and we can relax, that is may be say than *two* consecutive non-voting will start the removing procedure. This way have a great advantage: it's completely automated (of course only in the selection process, we need to personnally try to contact people before removing) jdd -- http://www.dodin.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org