[Members] Strengthening the Foundation Membership?

[Egbert Eich]

Matthew Rubenstein writes:
 > 	Each time the Foundation has an election, immediately beforehand
 > there's a scramble to register new voting members, including this time.
 > The Foundation also has some problems bridging the administrative
 > functions to the development functions, often having to choose between
 > doing only one or the other, or sometimes doing less of each than the
 > community might need. Broader, more active Foundation membership could
 > solve both problems, and of course many others, making the Foundation
 > more productive and effective.
 > 
 > 	Candidates: do you agree? If not, do you have an alternative solution,
 > or can you explain how those are not problems? If you agree, how will
 > you help improve the foundation's membership?

Hi Matthew!

Definitely!
This organization definitely needs more invovlement from 
the members. This however would require that the organization
is able to identify issues that can be delegated and go out
to ask for help. 
This has not happened in the past. Members always seemed to
be an anonymouns crowd. Do to a bad decision early on the list
of members was kept confidential and was only known to the
Secretary who also was the only person in charge of handling
Membership applications.
This lack of transparency did not only affect our contributors
(who they were was pretty obvious) but also the Members themselves
including the Board.
Therefore it didn't seem to be a promising idea to ask our
members for help.
Later - after the Foundation did no longer receive services
from The Open Group - the organization had to build its own 
infrastructure. However without such infrastructure there 
was no way to ask the Members for help.
So parts of the infrastructure had been defunct for a while.

So yes, I agree with you! But this is a two way street, the
Board needs to get better at delegating things and asking for
help. 
The work of the Foundation and the Board needs to become more 
transparent and it needs to be communicated better. The only 
attempts in this direction where the summaries of Board meetings 
which I published:
        http://wiki.x.org/wiki/BodMinutes.(*)
The summaries of the last calls are missing as I'm still waiting
for feedback from other Board Members.

I'm myself surprised to see how discussions are beginning to 
pick up amoung Members. I hope that this will not die down 
after the elections are over but that also non-developers become
engaged in the activeties of the organization.

Cheers,
	Egbert.



(*) Please note that these are summaries, not minutes. The page
should get renamed.