I've had a couple of people ask me why I did not reapply for membership in the XSF, so I thought I might post a bit about it here. I joined the XSF about 2 years ago not really knowing what was involved in membership. No one seemed to be able to tell me anything that being a member did aside from voting on the council, or other members. In the time I spent on XSF, that is literally all I did. It seemed like all of the "important discussions" had better places to be discussed at, like the council list, the standards list, and even a few more. I think it boiled down to, what's left to talk about or even do? I don't have any interest in being a member of something just so I can say I'm a member of it, so I chose not to rejoin this year.
If there was something to being a member in the XSF that I was missing out on, please, speak up and help me understand. =) And I certainly don't have any ill feelings towards the membership, so please don't take this as a "bash". ;)
Daniel, you've not left the XSF, just its membership. ;-) And it's completely OK with that, since as you've said there's not many decisive reasons to be a member. You'll reapply when we'll have T-shirts and stickers! ;-)
This again shows that the XSF need to have its meetings at all the beautiful places of the world. Not just in a silly chatroom. *joking*
Oh yes, you're right, we have to write a XEP for MUC background landscapes pictures...
As I've explained before, the XSF is a membership organization, but the membership merely provides legal scaffolding for the organization's standards work. The whole point is to work in the open, not on some closed lists for members only.
By "legal scaffolding" I mean that in order to maintain our legal status as a corporation, we need members (because we are defined as a membership organization). But we do all our real work in the open, mainly on the standards@xmpp.org list. You don't need to be an elected member to contribute to the standards conversation, you don't need to work for a sponsoring company to contribute to the conversation. That's how many closed consortia do their standards work (e.g., the W3C), but we work in the open. Yes we have a closed list (publicly archived) for members, but we don't do our work there (we maintain that list mostly for coordination of voting periods, discussion about changes to the bylaws, and other such organizational topics). Perhaps that's confusing to XSF members or perhaps we could tap into the membership more productively. If you have thoughts about that, feel free to send them along. :)
No worries. Thanks for the post. I've poked the members@xmpp.org list about the topic to see if anyone has input there (secret conversations!). See http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/members/2008-November/004767.html for the message.
Hahahah that's awesome! I think that would be exceptionally cute actually. ;)
But yes, just because I "left the XSF" doesn't mean I'm no longer going to contribute to XMPP and such. ;)
And T-Shirts would be nice. lol
Legal Scaffolding? Is the theory that if you aren't a member you can't do certain things? It is just something that exists because it has to and serves no real purpose? But yes, that's more or less the point, why even have the "closed list" so to speak.
Interesting. =) But if I had ideas on how to improve the "members list" or anything, I would have piped up about them before. ;) And it certainly was not my intention to say that the members list is pointless or anything, just like I said, a lot of people kept asking me why I didn't reapply so I figured I'd just go ahead and post why. =D