[Foundation] membership, money, and meritocracy

[Matt Tucker]

Peter,

> I now think that collecting money from members is not the answer (even
> from those who are representatives of commercial entities).

Fair enough, although I still think that a membership fee with an 
exclusion program isn't necessarily a bad thing. :) The fees could be 
used for improving the coherence between members as well as for general 
JSF needs. For example, new members could be given t-shirts when 
joining, or fees could be used to buy rounds of drinks for member 
meetings at major conferences. The fees are one of the less important 
parts of this whole discussion, though.

> Part of the
> answer (and again, I provide this as a suggestion) may be that there are
> no members except those who are working on a specific JSF team. Right
> now there are three teams: the Jabber Council (effectively the protocol
> team), the Marketing Team, and the Compliance Team. It may be that there
> should be other teams for things like infrastructure, interoperability,
> community relations, and finance. I'm thinking right now that there
> should be no members except those who are on one of the teams, i.e., no
> general members.

That sounds like a fair requirement. However, one problem I have is that 
trying to setup standards by which people lose membership seems pretty 
tricky. I have a feeling that it would just cause continual bickering 
and ill-will among those members being asked to leave. So, why not have 
membership terms instead? If a person is only a member for something 
like a 1 or 2 year term, at which point they need to re-apply for 
membership, that means:

  * There don't need to be any hard rules for why a member would get 
kicked out (maybe just a clause which says a member can be removed 
anytime if a certain percentage of the total membership votes to remove 
them).
  * Members are strongly encouraged to be active members of teams and to 
help the JSF in general so that they'll build up enough credibility to 
get re-elected to membership for another term.

Regards,
Matt