Hi all, Italo Vignoli wrote on 04/09/2020 16:44: > On 9/4/20 4:26 PM, Michael Meeks wrote: > >> Sorry for that. The essence of the question is simple - if you >> want to grow the membership there are at least these two approaches: > >> + encourage more people to contribute more to meet >> the criteria >> or >> + lower the criteria for membership > > There is a third solution: convince more contributors to apply for > membership, as many of them do not even know that it is possible to > become TDF members by contributing to LibreOffice. > > For instance, we have over 4K people registered on weblate, or 20 times > as many TDF members.
This is a very interesting point. 4k people in Weblate, so that would be 350 persons or so on average for every language that LibreOffice supports? > Of course, many of them would not qualify as their > contribution is marginal, but many would. We could ask the MC their experience with reaching out, what is marginal and not. I know we reached out in the past, and thus attracted more members. And reading the replies from MC members, that is still the case. Also I remember that different people, had a different appreciation of the work the did/do for LibreOffice. But.. having more members is positive as this reflects support, and since members are likely to help spreading the word about LibreOffice. However then there regularly was - and I assume it is similar nowadays - the situation that people feel they contribute so little, that they are only weakly connected and membership is not reasonable. And that makes sense. Because membership also comes with the power, and thus responsibility, to help setting the goals in steering the community. In the past I've been stating regularly that it is important that developers have enough understanding of the needs of the people doing e.g. QA and l10n. But the same can happen the other way round. The recent discussion about the marketing approach, with all related items, in the board and in the full community, reveals that for many it is not natural to understand the situation of commercial entities in the community. This comes with the clear risk that one of the major pillars under LibreOffice's success - professional developers - is seriously weakened. Details can be read in the recent discussion. And I don't want to blame anybody for that. It is only natural that many people, at larger distance to the core group, have a different understanding of the situation. > I think that a solution to this issue is to reach out to native language > communities, especially outside Europe, where the relationship with the > core group is less strong. I think we have to recognize that the number of 4k people there is very high. Even if say 10% would contribute (...) it is unrealistic to expect that their membership will help with a balanced, strong governance of the foundation. Yet, having them on our side showing support, spreading the word, is important. And the same applies in the area of e.g. marketing and design. We do want to value the support also from people that help on a booth or do a local presentation 2, 3 times a year and have them engaged. Is it necessary to try to make them all member? Growing membership is not a goal of the community. More important is that the board of trustees is composed in a way, that this supports that people who are doing the hard and essential work of development will also be leading their own work. We cannot afford that the meritocracy disappears; this is undesired. Michael Meeks wrote on 04/09/2020 13:17: > ... >> * Do you believe we should have a half-way house / badge >> between membership and non-membership that encourages >> a person, and gives the a path via more contribution to >> achieve full membership ? Investigating in that direction possibly brings the best of two worlds together. Cheers, Cor -- Cor Nouws, member Board of Directors The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint GPD key ID: 0xB13480A6 - 591A 30A7 36A0 CE3C 3D28 A038 E49D 7365 B134 80A6 mobile : +31 (0)6 25 20 7001 skype : cornouws blog : cor4office-nl.blogspot.com jabber : cor4off...@jabber.org -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
