Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
On Tuesday 18 March 2008 02:15:58 Francis Giannaros wrote:
At the moment I prefer the membership only method because it's the simplest and is only really problematic in theory if the board is corrupt and unfairly give out membership in order to further their cause. In fact, this is pretty much the last premise I would ever accept as a possibility in the argument. Perhaps making the membership process even more transparent could help here, and I'd be willing to listen to any ideas about that.
If we are going this route I think it's mandatory that the process of giving out membership status is transferred to a committee which is not the board itself. This would also help to free the board to do the tasks which it's primarily meant to do.
The other main problem with members-only is that there are many (including myself) in a grey area where we are long time committed SuSE / OpenSuSE users but don't have the skills / time / whatever to make the huge contribution that most of those so far approved as members do. Are our views really not relevant? Conversely, opening to all certainly leads to problems balancing prevention of multiple votes whilst ensuring free access for e.g. those behind small business NATs. No voting system ever gets this 100% - in the UK we've had some real scandals recently with postal voting being (allegedly) rigged, when the full force of the law is there to protect it. Someone determined to cheat *will* succeed, though they may be found out eventually. So I think the solution is broadly as suggested above - to have a wider definition of 'membership', supported by a specialist committee, and to allow all these members to vote. The cream of the membership maybe get special status (though not for voting) - such as @opensuse.org email aliases. When people apply for membership they maybe need to supply some minimal evidence of identity to minimise the risk of bot applications, plus maybe some evidence of contribution (e.g. to lists / fora / source code...) but beyond this I think we have to go on trust. The hassle required to create more than a few cheat duplicates will mean that most wouldn't bother, and there is only a small risk of it affecting any results. Also perhaps memberships expire after ? a year ? if nothing is done to use them (such as voting / contributing to relevant fora, wikis...) Just my half a groat's worth. -- Richard (MQ) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org