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Ask questions to the candidates running for the GNOME Foundation elections

Submitted by vuntz on Mon, 2003-11-03 16:43. Gnome Foundation
Gnome Foundation

We want the GNOME community to be involved in the GNOME Foundation, and one way to involve you is to allow you to ask questions to the candidates running for the GNOME Foundation elections. Here's your chance to know what the candidates think about what is concerning you.

Please ask one question per post (and no more). Telsa will select the 10 best questions and we'll send them to the candidates.You may want to look at last year's questions.

Update: Note that you'll still be able to directly ask questions to the candidates by posting on foundation-list.Being on the board of the GNOME Foundation is not a technical job, so please try to avoid posting questions about developement and other hacking type stuff. The GNOME Foundation charter might also be of some interest.

Re: Ask questions to the candidates running for the GNOME Founda

Submitted by vuntz on Fri, 2003-11-07 07:47.

There's not many questions about the membership, so here I come :-)

I'd like to know what do you think of the current membership guidelines. Are you satisfied with them?

There may be some problems. E.g., I know of one case where someone asks for membership one month after his first contribution and he was accepted (with the current guidelines, it's nearly not possible to deny someone who has contributed). As a member, he asked for an e-mail address @gnome.org. Since then he didn't contribute anything else. I do feel that this should not happen.

So I have a proposition to solve such problems and solve the 'flame the membership committee when someone's application is not accepted' problem too. Imagine we have three classes of members (I should find better names, but I'm lazy):

  • new contributor
  • active contributor
  • past contributor

When someone applies, if he has contributed anything, then he becomes a "new contributor". The new contributor has restricted rights (he can not vote, he can not ask for a @gnome.org address, etc.) but he is a member of the Foundation.

After six months, the new contributor application will be reevaluated and he will be accepted as an active contributor if he's still active or he will lose his membership.

Now, for the difference between an active contributor and a past contributor: we want the Foundation to be driven by people who are active *now*, and not 2 years ago (well, that's what I want, but I think everybody should agree on that). So we could add coefficients to the voting stuff: vote from an active contributor counts as two votes, while vote from a past contributor count for one vote.

Someone who has become an active contributor will always be a member of the Foundation: if he's not active, he will become a past contributor. And if a past contributor becomes active again, he can come back as an 'active contributor'.

Hrm. Ok, I suppose now that makes a second question in my post... What do you think of this proposition?

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