Membership process
Tue, 2007-07-31 17:35 — Ken Coar
How would one become a member of OSI?
- Just by saying 'I want to be a member'
- Paying some sort of registration fee or dues
- Having demonstrable participation in one or more open source projects
- Being nominated/voted on by the OSI Board
- Being nominated/voted on by the existing OSI membership
[The last one obviously wouldn't apply until there was an existing membership.]
Voting people in, particularly at the scale we're talking about here, is likely to get awkward. How often would it happen? Would there be objective criteria for a 'yea' vote?
Secondary but related question: Should there be tiers of membership?
- No; everyone the same, regardless of involvement or dedication
- Yes; a non-voting level which anyone can join and a level (or levels) which enfranchise but have stricter entrance requirements (being voted in, dues, et cetera)
- Some other model or models
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Membership questions
If OSI is to be representative of open source, I think that there needs to be an attempt to bring in as many serious open source contributors as possible while establishing some sort of criterial for membership.
I think that voting should be restricted to indiviuals who have shown serious involvement in the open source community (one or more projects, perhaps over at least three months, and contributions must be either numerous or substantial).
I also think that people who are interested in open source but do not qualify should be granted some form of participation. This may or may not be a formal membership and could simply be access to a number of public resources.
However, I also think OSI should avoid the tragic situation of SPI and avoid being dominated by a single large project.
Two levels: a non-voting
Two levels: a non-voting level which anyone can join and a level which enfranchise, and for which one have to pay and satisfy one of these criteria:
# Having demonstrable participation in one or more open source projects
# Being nominated by OSI Board OR at least on organizational member OR some reasonable percentage of individual members, and then voted by OSI Board (or some special council consisted of representatives of OSI Board and organizational and individual members).
Individual members are important - without them there would be no FOSS in the first place.
Bojan Sudarevic