On 03.06.2015 15:32, Robert Schweikert wrote:
On 06/03/2015 09:04 AM, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
On Tuesday 02 June 2015 14:16:33 Henne Vogelsang wrote:
So you want people who never have done anything "continued and substantial" to our project to join the body that elects our board? I'm pretty sure that this isn't a good idea :-)
I want people who want to contribute feel welcome, even if they haven't done anything yet. I'm pretty sure that is a good idea.
I want the board to be elected by people who express that they want to be part of the community. I want it to be a representation of the people who feel part of the community. I'm pretty sure that is a good idea as well.
I want to operate from a point of view that people mean well when they want to join openSUSE and optimize for getting new contributors on board, not for protecting against potential abuse. I'm pretty sure that this also is a good idea for an open community like openSUSE is.
Please don't confuse being part of the openSUSE project with being a "openSUSE Member".
There is confusion. As Richard said, too many people are applying as members under wrong assumptions. The fact that we need rejection mails, membership committees validating contributions, Wiki pages with red warnings, etc. shows that there is an issue with becoming part of openSUSE.
The big problem is that we will never hear from those people who didn't even try to become part because they were discouraged by how we handle this. We lose these people without even knowing about them.
So to live up to our expectations as open community, to remove a barrier in becoming a contributor, to encourage people to join us, we could get rid of the validation and rejection step and just let everybody become a member who wants to.
This way the board would be the representative of all self-proclaimed members of the openSUSE community, which I think is exactly what it should be.
The work would still be done by those who are active. The decisions would still be taken by those who do the work. We still would have protection mechanisms like the veto power of the chairman of the board or the guiding principles.
But we would have a more open, more welcoming, more inclusive community. That's what I would really like to see.
Then why bother having membership at all?
If everyone who wants to be a member gets to be a member just for filling out the application then we might as well not have it. The board can then be elected by the general population on the internet and everyone can run.
But the general population on the internet is not at all interested in openSUSE. If it was, yes, why not let them vote? Filling out the application means "I am interested in openSUSE and wanna work on and with it" - and that makes the difference... We are not in the danger that Fedora or Ubuntu will swarm over us and vote their buddy into the board. We are rather in the danger of having very few being interested in openSUSE any more, and thus we should follow Cornelius' wise advice IMO, to simplify and open up. Klaas
The other option is to figure out how to collect money and have a "pay for" membership model, i.e. pay and you get to vote or run for the board. Of course this will draw complaints from those that do not have the financial means and are members today because of their contributions .
If there is confusion about membership and being part of the community then lets fix that issue. Rather than abandoning the whole model and re-orchestrating the governance model. In order to move forward we have to eventually stop squabbling about the fundamentals and leave them alone. If there are issue with certain things lets fix the issues rather than questioning the whole concept that has been chosen over and over again.
Later, Robert
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