[IAEP] What is a member?

[David Farning]

I have been hand waving around this issue for the last couple of posts
in the hope that we could reach consensus on the structural issues
before facing this potentially emotional issue.

The membership question has three axis: depth, breadth, and time. How
extensive should a persons contributions be to earn membership? How
broadly do we define contributing to the project? How long does it take
to earn membership? How long are membership terms.

At the end of the day, the question distills down to, “What is the
cost/benefit ratio in terms of governance, recognition, fund raising,
and defense of being inclusionary or exclusionary with regard to
membership across the three axis of depth, breadth and time. 

     1. Depth. There examples of successful projects at both ends of the
        depth of membership criteria. At one end , Fedora[1] has settled
        on a very inclusive mechanism where everyone who applies becomes
        a member. On the other end, the apache foundation[2] has a more
        exclusive membership policy.  New members must be nominated and
        voted on by the current membership.
     2. Breadth. Successful projects exist at both ends of the breadth
        continuum. At Debian membership is earn through the 'Debian
        Developer Process[3]' as a result, the membership is very
        developer centric. At Ubuntu[4] , a member is 'someone who's
        made a substantial contribution to the Ubuntu community -- of
        any type --'. This results in a very broad community.
     3. Time. I was unable to find any large FOSS projects which set
        term limits on membership. Many project's periodically request
        that members in good standing renew their membership or are
        dropped from the rolls.

As always, questions, comments, and discussion is welcome. I will try to
have rough draft membership guidelines ready to submit to SLOB by
Friday.

thanks
dfarning

1 http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board

2 http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html

3 http://www.debian.org/devel/

4 http://www.ubuntu.com/community/processes/newmember