Re: foundation application..

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 12:44:19PM +0000, Magdalen Berns wrote:
> This is something I believe could happen if an amendment were to be
> proposed with compelling evidence to support it so we are able to take an
> informed vote on it. At the moment the issue is that a decision which
> overrides the bylaws has already been made in the establishment of this
> policy, which means members are put in a position where we have to defend
> the bylaws but that the policy decision somehow doesn't seem to have to be
> defended with compelling evidence - which is the wrong way round.

I believe the bylaws are followed. As such, I don't think any amendment
is needed. Further, it seems though there should be improvement, it is
quite clear. Andrea showed the bit where bylaws state that actual
discretion is for membership committee.

For various things the foundation delegates responsibility to the
various teams. These teams have then additional rules in place. That
these are in the bylaws or not is not IMO unimportant. I think the rules
per team (delegated area) should be clear.

> IMO if there's a valid concern then it really
> > doesn't matter to spend so much time on if they're allowed or not.
>
> Therein lies the core difference in how we perceive this: I believe the
> concern may be valid enough to investigate, but I do not believe the
> "problem" has been quantified and therefore I do not believe the argument
> for this policy is substantiated and hence I do not believe it is a waste
> of time to spend so much time on if they're allowed to act on the
> assumptions that have been made about it. Moreover, we have no idea whether
> this approach is actually causing more harm than good. It could actually be
> making more interns unwelcome and unappreciated and deterring them from
> continuing to contribute to the project. We are generally acting on an
> awful lot of assumptions by taking action to address a perceived problem
> which we really haven't analysed concrete data for.

The problem was highlighted many years ago on various occasions: Mentors
spend a lot of time, to only have the person vanish after the period.
This partly due to wrong perception. You're not going to have 100% of
the people stay. IMO 1 in 5 is more realistic. I guess we should track
these people.

I forgot when GNOME started participating in GSoC. Wikipedia shows this
started in 2005. The discussions around this are nothing new.

In another message regarding this I noticed people are mostly talking
about the outreach program. I know little about that. I'm mostly talking
about GSoC.

I have noticed way more people whose names I don't recognize at all, but
doing cool things. Unfortunately no clue where they're from.

> > Those following, might have noticed that this was done in the opening part
> > > of the discussion and it seemed to be generally agreed that some interns
> > do
> > > make non-trivial contributions. At least, nobody seems to have disagreed
> > > with that idea, anyway.
> >
> > Most interns seem to vanish quite quickly after their internship is
> > over. Maybe not true at all anymore, there are a few exceptions, but
> > that has been a topic of discussion for various years.
>
> The question is not just about whether they most of them vanish, although I
> agree that's clearly part of it. We need to be able to compare their
> behaviour to other kinds of contributors statistically, accounting for all
> our sources of error, before we can begin to make any assumptions
> or predictions about this model. Let's see the raw data and analyse it
> first.

For the various programs out there (I mostly followed GSoC) people not
staying with GNOME is IMO something was clearly a problem. If it still
is, no clue.

Doing investigations, cool. But IMO there was enough concern regarding
this.

Anyway, this is too much theoretical talk so I'm going to switch to a
proposal instead. Getting more concrete:
  I think in the "guidelines" for applying, there should be a mention
  that membership committee has seen that interns (GSoC, etc) often
  leave so it is highly preferred that the intern waits two months
  before applying. At the same time, it should clearly state that 1) the
  participation was already enough 2) it is not encouraged, but they can
  apply anyway.


Above makes it clear that it is something soft. At the same time, you
cannot guarantee that their membership would be accepted, but IMO it
should state that it is highly likely it will. IMO this addresses all
concerns: amount of participation needed, ability to become a member
immediately for those who feel very strongly, avoiding impression of not
being welcome, plus handling concern if people stay or not.

There's still maybe that there is no concern at all anymore. I think
that takes more time to figure out.

If the people who have a concern here see my proposal as acceptable, we
can get membership committee to agree, etc (one step at a time).

-- 
Regards,
Olav