openSUSE Members retirement

Hi,

I sent following mail on Monday, but something is broken in my setup so
it never arrived. As discussions are still ongoing, resending.

> Hi everybody,
> 
> as you all know, we have a group of contributors that are eligible to
> participate in elections, have @opensuse.org mail and other perks - yes I'm
> talking about openSUSE Members. We have now about 600 of them, but as you can
> see[1] in last openSUSE Board elections only 150 of them voted.
> 
> This could mean two things - either most of the members are not interested in
> elections or plenty of them are simply no longer around. I guess the truth is
> somewhere in middle. But it would be nice to know. At some point we might need
> to take some project wide decisions and it would be great to know at that point
> how many of the still active members voted.
> 
> We discussed this topic at not so recent openSUSE Board Face to Face meeting
> and touched it on oSC 15 during project meeting. Also taking under
> consideration the responses that were provided to a similar topic approximately
> 2 years ago, we (in the board) think it would be a good idea to
> implement something to help with that. Automatically monitor openSUSE
> Members activity on mailing lists, OBS, bugzilla, maybe more.  Remember
> when we last saw openSUSE Member on any of those channels and if he
> doesn't show for for example one year, we can send him e-mail asking
> whether he still wants to be a member with a link to click to create
> artificial activity for the automat. And if he doesn't click on it in
> let's say month, we will retire him - he will be moved to openSUSE
> retired geekos group. If he comes back and want to be member again or if
> he was retired by accident, he can be made member again by just clicking
> on the link from the mail or by asking membership committee and they
> will approve him without any additional questions.
> 
> What do you think? As it will affect whole project some feedback would be
> appreciated. If it goes well, I would put it for project wide vote to let the
> project members decide.
> 
> To answer some of the obvious questions:
> 
> Q: Shouldn't we retire inactive members anyway and measure their activity?
> 
> A: No, it's too hard, too subjective and it could bother people that we cannot
>    measure automatically. Automatic measurement is just an indicator that those
>    people are no longer interested, but they might be just working on project
>    aspects we cannot measure.
> 
> Q: Wouldn't it offend active contributors if they will be falsely accused of
>    not being interested?
> 
> A: I hope not. If period will be long enough (1 year) and if we monitor even
>    mailing lists, people will usually show up somewhere...
> 
> Q: Doesn't it change the meaning of the openSUSE Member?
> 
> A: Kind of yes. So far once you got a membership status, it was forever.  Now
>    it would be forever as long as you are interested. No big change, but still
>    a little difference.
> 
> Q: What if mail with warning gets lost?
> 
> A: If you loose your membership by accident by loosing an e-mail, you can still
>    contact membership committee and as a retired member you will be reinstated
>    immediately without voting/verification that takes time. And you should fix
>    your e-mail in connect in that case ;-)
> 
> [1] https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/polls/read/RBrownSUSE/463...
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