[Members] Strengthening the Foundation Membership?

[Daniel Stone]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 09:55:11AM -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> 	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,
I definitely agree.  Our current membership needs to be strongly
broadened, not only in terms of pure numbers of members, but to the
people that have a day-to-day influence on the technology.  I would like
to see all current active contributors involved in the Foundation, if
only as members.

I also think we're not doing quite enough to reach out to the companies
that are actually involved in pushing the technology forward.  I would
like to see companies such as Red Hat (who hire a few active developers,
including our esteemed release manager), Canonical (who are looking to
hire a developer, I believe), Novell (a couple of active developers),
Nokia (the Nokia 770 uses X), and other companies pushing X on the
desktop, for large deployments, in consumer devices, and whatnot.

One of the things I'd try to organise is to make developer-level
approaches to these companies to try to arrange closer ties with them;
often, we want to hear from these companies at conferences, and
certainly having them support the Foundation can't hurt.

Cheers,
Daniel
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://foundation.x.org/pipermail/members/attachments/20061017/a993e72e/attachment-0002.pgp