On 02/17/2012 07:55 PM, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
I'm a bit puzzled by this discussion, as it seems to focus on the wrong side of matters, i.e. how to move people away from the project, not on how to win people to contribute to openSUSE.
From my point of view the rules should be very simple:
* Everybody who identifies with the guiding principles of openSUSE is welcome to join the project. * People showing sustained contribution become official members of openSUSE. * If a member doesn't vote for let's say two years the member becomes an inactive member. * The only difference of an inactive to an active member is that inactive members don't have voting rights * An inactive member can become an active member again by an informal request to the membership officials team
I don't see the need to introduce additional mechanisms or the need for people to repeatedly justify that they earn member status. Remember, we want to be an inclusive community. So let's just keep things simple.
If you really see a need to clean the number of people eligible to vote from inactive members, I would suggest to go with a simple process like described above.
But on the other hand it also would be worth to think, if this is needed at all. The only case where it's really relevant is if a quorum needs to be met for a vote. The only quorum amongst members we have is for a forced reelection of the board. So this might be more difficult, if there are a lot of inactive members. This might be or or not be worth the effort to "inactivate" members.
But in any case, please keep it simple and inviting.
Yes, whatever we do needs to be reasonably straight forward and inviting. However, this approach ties sustained membership to voting only. In essence you are saying that once someone is a member we do not care about their contributions, we care only that they vote. From my point of view membership should be about contribution first, everything else is second. You contribute and apply for membership and you earn the privilege of voting in project matters if accepted. We have set up a "hurdle" of contributions to become a member, why would we not have the same expectation of someone who is a member? 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