Re: IMPORTANT: News and changes from the GNOME Foundation Membership Committee

[Ali-Reza Anghaie <ali packetknife com>]

Apologies, meant to send this just to Andrea. Please reject the
request to post. Cheers, -Ali

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 02:19, Ali-Reza Anghaie <ali packetknife com> wrote:
> Thank you for the notice, I'm assuming this is separate from just
> donors and those who were added to the list(s) for the purpose fo
> coverage and the elections? Cheers, -Ali
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 12:54, Andrea Veri <av gnome org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> the GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee had an important
>> meeting on 24-10-2011. I am here to report all the changes, news and
>> relevant bits of the meeting.
>>
>> Let's begin:
>>
>> 1. Renewal process.
>>
>> The relevant bits of the overall meeting about this point can be
>> resumed as it follows:
>>
>> - there will be *one* single form both for new members and for people
>>  willing to renew their membership. (so in the end, there won't be
>>  two different forms)
>>
>> - we will make that single form even simpler than the one we have now.
>>  It'll just have two fields. (we agreed to consolidate the
>>  "Contributions" and "Contacts" fields into one that
>>  will look like this: "please list references to your contributions,
>>  i.e. bugzilla, mailing lists, commits or people to vouch for you. If
>>  you are a new applicant, it's definitely a great plus putting
>>  the name of a few contacts within the community that could vouch for
>>  you and your work for the GNOME Foundation. (existing Foundation
>>  members preferred)
>>
>>  We will also remove the checkbox we have to distinguish
>>  people willing to renew from new applicants and we'll require a few
>>  words to be added on the second field "Other Comments", that will
>>  look like this: "Please tell us whether you were an existing
>>  Foundation member or have done someting relevant for the GNOME
>>  Foundation in the past (i.e Board Member etc.)".
>>
>> - our get_renewees.py script (it's a script that automatically sends
>>  out renewal reminders every month by checking the Foundation DB and
>>  going-to-expire memberships) has been broken for several months and
>>  we managed to fix it just two months ago.
>>
>>  Everything is going great from that side now, we are getting a good
>>  bunch of renewal requests every month so that means our mails are
>>  not blacklisted or marked as junk by member's mail services anymore.
>>
>>  You can see what I am talking about at [1].
>>
>>  And in addition to that we will be sending out an extra mail to
>>  foundation-list every month with all the details we grab from the
>>  above script in case someone lost, blacklisted or marked as spam
>>  his individual mail. We decided to send out an extra mail to
>>  foundation-list so that no one can say he wasn't aware of his
>>  membership going to expire.
>>
>>  The plan is to set up a webpage with all the details or even enable
>>  Foundation Members to log in into Mango and grab all the needed
>>  informations themselves, but that's the future.
>>
>> And about the renewal policy itself:
>>
>> - the Committee will check for applicant's contributions before
>>  renewing. We will try to be as less strict as we can while doing
>>  that and we'll require additional informations from the applicant
>>  just in exceptional cases whether we shouldn't be able to achieve
>>  a single proof of evident contributions. (the rationale here is
>>  pretty simple, being a Foundation member means having a say and
>>  several benefits we would love giving to people that really deserve
>>  them)
>>
>> - we will update our policy at [2] and we will remove time limits for
>>  proposing a renewal. An applicant will be free to submit a renewal
>>  request even after several years and even if he lost his membership
>>  in the meantime. This to prevent people not receiving renewal
>>  reminders to be excluded from our Foundation without a valid reason.
>>
>> 2. foundation.g.o REWRITE
>>
>> I got in touch with the Marketing team and found some help there to
>> rewrite the foundation.g.o webspace to make it compliant to how
>> gnome.org is designed.
>>
>> I can now say that we plan to remove the foundation.g.o's area as a
>> subsite of gnome.org and integrate everything into gnome.org. Some
>> interesting mockups can be found at [3].
>>
>> I actually don't know how long this migration will take but I'll try
>> to do my best to process everything in a timely manner. (that will
>> really depend on my free time though)
>>
>> 3. Should we make election's timelines mandatory or not? (strict
>>   interpretation of timeline's rules or not?)
>>
>> References: [4]
>>
>> We decided to determine that on a case by case basis, so whether we
>> will have a rule infringement, we will open up a disciplinary action
>> and vote on that. The results might obviously change from case to
>> case.
>>
>> 5. http://foundation.gnome.org/vote/2011/rules.html RE-Formulation
>>
>> References: [5]
>>
>> The rules.html file will have an update, we will make it simpler,
>> easier to read and understand to everyone. As a side note about [5],
>> we agreed that candidacies should be sent to the following addresses:
>>
>> To: f-announce, f-list, CC: elections, Reply-To: f-list.
>>
>> So, foundation-list should be used for people willing to know more
>> about the candidates, asking questions and discuss relevant topics.
>>
>> 6. Being a Foundation Member takes in several benefits
>>
>> A new doc will be added either on the renewed Foundation area or on
>> the wikis to explain the current benefits connected with membership.
>>
>> Benefits definitely strengthen membership's concept and usually they
>> are an additional drawing power for new contributors willing to join
>> our beloved Foundation.
>>
>> So, in fact, Foundation members will have the following benefits:
>>
>> 1. @gnome.org's mail alias
>> 2. vote rights on Board's elections, so having a say in GNOME's
>>   future.
>> 3. access to a personal blog hosted at blogs.g.o
>> 4. people.g.o/~UID's. (this won't happen in the near future since
>>   the Infrastructure team needs its time to deploy everything on
>>   the GNOME servers, you can follow up on this topic at [6])
>> 5. jabber access with their @gnome.org alias
>>
>> Well, that's all for now, I'll update our Meeting's Wiki page [7] with
>> logs and any other required information this week.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Andrea Veri,
>> on behalf of the GNOME Foundation & Elections Committee
>>
>>
>> [1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2011-October/msg00001.html
>> [2] https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/RenewalsPolicy
>> [3] http://yuliansu.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/foundation.png
>> [4] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2011-May/msg00132.html
>> [5] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/membership-committee/2011-May/msg00139.html
>> [6] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-infrastructure/2011-November/msg00010.html
>> [7] https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/Meetings
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