On 06/01/2010 12:36 PM, José Cruz wrote:
Hi! I'm agree with Jon about the differents classes of membership. We are a small company (just two persons) in the graphic design world, using only libre software, and I think it is interesting to bring more professionals (wich are intensive users) to FLOSS.
In the vein of discussions about either insufficient or excessive "power" that might come about from various schemes of membership, we can consider that there can be some kind of whole-cloth membership for all those interested as individuals, then we can have the association also consist inside as a number of Sections, each of which could pertain to a subgroup, eg, artists/designers, as opposed to another section of developers, and others.
The reason for suggesting this is to find a way around simply recreating within the organization the same thing we have in the outside world, where non-programmer users complain that the developers won't listen to their needs/requests, and developers complain that users don't understand the constraints of the development process.
This isn't to suggest that a User Section could not have within it some developers or that a Developer Section could not have users -- if nothing else, there are those who could legitimately claim both kinds of activities, as we saw at this year's LGM. Furthermore, one might be a member of more than one section.
A section of users might discuss among themselves various feature requests or user operability issues so that the best, most coherent final requests might be presented to the Developer Section and projects. Developers might discuss the feedback from users and the direction individual projects are taking to propose improved interoperability, then solicit feedback from the User Section to see if these seem worth pursuing.
This might also enhance future LGMs by naturally leading to some planned BOF-like meetings for individual sections, so that fewer things take place in such an ad hoc way.
Greg _______________________________________________ CREATE mailing list CREATE@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create
