[Foundation] membership, money, and meritocracy

[Shawn Wilton]

Matt Tucker wrote:

> 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. 


Using member fees to purchase drinks for those that can **afford** to go 
to major conferences is the lamest idea I have ever heard of.  I 
sincerely hope that was a joke, which I'm sure it was.  In which case I 
apologize for this rant.

>
>
>> 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: 

I'm not going to apply for membership again.  If I get booted then I'm 
certain I can find a good number of developers to create a *new* foundation.

>
>
>  * 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
>
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