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