New GNOME Foundation Member
Hello everyone, I'm Ahmad Haris (mostly known as princeofgiri) from Indonesia. I never contribute directly to GNOME. Recently, I'm a part of BlankOn http://blankonlinux.or.id Developer (local linux distribution) and have experience in many different team such as Artwork, Packaging, Public Relation and Project Manager. Today, I also supporting Local Organizer to make GNOME.ASIA 2015 come true. ^_^ I'm interesting to promoting GNOME desktop for everyone. Thank's for approval. Haris ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation application..
On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 12:44:19PM +, Magdalen Berns wrote: This is something I believe could happen if an amendment were to be proposed with compelling evidence to support it so we are able to take an informed vote on it. At the moment the issue is that a decision which overrides the bylaws has already been made in the establishment of this policy, which means members are put in a position where we have to defend the bylaws but that the policy decision somehow doesn't seem to have to be defended with compelling evidence - which is the wrong way round. I believe the bylaws are followed. As such, I don't think any amendment is needed. Further, it seems though there should be improvement, it is quite clear. Andrea showed the bit where bylaws state that actual discretion is for membership committee. For various things the foundation delegates responsibility to the various teams. These teams have then additional rules in place. That these are in the bylaws or not is not IMO unimportant. I think the rules per team (delegated area) should be clear. IMO if there's a valid concern then it really doesn't matter to spend so much time on if they're allowed or not. Therein lies the core difference in how we perceive this: I believe the concern may be valid enough to investigate, but I do not believe the problem has been quantified and therefore I do not believe the argument for this policy is substantiated and hence I do not believe it is a waste of time to spend so much time on if they're allowed to act on the assumptions that have been made about it. Moreover, we have no idea whether this approach is actually causing more harm than good. It could actually be making more interns unwelcome and unappreciated and deterring them from continuing to contribute to the project. We are generally acting on an awful lot of assumptions by taking action to address a perceived problem which we really haven't analysed concrete data for. The problem was highlighted many years ago on various occasions: Mentors spend a lot of time, to only have the person vanish after the period. This partly due to wrong perception. You're not going to have 100% of the people stay. IMO 1 in 5 is more realistic. I guess we should track these people. I forgot when GNOME started participating in GSoC. Wikipedia shows this started in 2005. The discussions around this are nothing new. In another message regarding this I noticed people are mostly talking about the outreach program. I know little about that. I'm mostly talking about GSoC. I have noticed way more people whose names I don't recognize at all, but doing cool things. Unfortunately no clue where they're from. Those following, might have noticed that this was done in the opening part of the discussion and it seemed to be generally agreed that some interns do make non-trivial contributions. At least, nobody seems to have disagreed with that idea, anyway. Most interns seem to vanish quite quickly after their internship is over. Maybe not true at all anymore, there are a few exceptions, but that has been a topic of discussion for various years. The question is not just about whether they most of them vanish, although I agree that's clearly part of it. We need to be able to compare their behaviour to other kinds of contributors statistically, accounting for all our sources of error, before we can begin to make any assumptions or predictions about this model. Let's see the raw data and analyse it first. For the various programs out there (I mostly followed GSoC) people not staying with GNOME is IMO something was clearly a problem. If it still is, no clue. Doing investigations, cool. But IMO there was enough concern regarding this. Anyway, this is too much theoretical talk so I'm going to switch to a proposal instead. Getting more concrete: I think in the guidelines for applying, there should be a mention that membership committee has seen that interns (GSoC, etc) often leave so it is highly preferred that the intern waits two months before applying. At the same time, it should clearly state that 1) the participation was already enough 2) it is not encouraged, but they can apply anyway. Above makes it clear that it is something soft. At the same time, you cannot guarantee that their membership would be accepted, but IMO it should state that it is highly likely it will. IMO this addresses all concerns: amount of participation needed, ability to become a member immediately for those who feel very strongly, avoiding impression of not being welcome, plus handling concern if people stay or not. There's still maybe that there is no concern at all anymore. I think that takes more time to figure out. If the people who have a concern here see my proposal as acceptable, we can get membership committee to agree, etc (one step at a time). -- Regards, Olav ___ foundation-list mailing list
Re: foundation application..
If you have a concrete reason why it does help to continue to ignore bylaws that are inconvenient for whatever is more convenient, then you are free to make a case for that. California law probably would probably override that idea, though. I tried to nicest way to let you see a different point of view, taking into account the previous failure to have any discussion with you. It seems you're not open in understanding what I mean. This is not a complicated process, it is fairly clear and transparent (especially when compared with the alternative). What is the problem with using It? Yeah, just focus on whatever the bylaws might or not might take. Did you read my email? Did you make any effort to grasp what I'm trying to say? Your questions indicate you did not. The effort I made was to I ask what you were on about and that is still not very clear. I'll try in a different way: - there's apparently a different criteria being applied - you seem to focus on what the bylaws state This IMO skips an important part of trying to figure out why a different criteria is being applied. For instance, you mention that according to the bylaws it is not allowed to make a distinction. Yes. Most of the arguments for why this is not a big deal, are based around the assumption that the argument for applying a different criteria is strong - a no brainer, even. I imagine it would be hard to understand where I am coming from unless you are able to concede that the evidence to support the need to applying a different criteria is being applied, is actually very questionable. Further, it is not allowed by some court. I don't think you're right in asserting that. All organisations have to obey the law and bylaws are the laws which govern the organisation and I am right in asserting that. Would it ever actually go to court? Unlikely. Would we be able to defend our conduct in court? Unlikely and that's the point. So I am guessing you mean right in the ethical sense? I have actually never come across a non-profit organisation as loosely regulated as GNOME with so few rules and published policy, so personally I have to admit I find it a bit of a culture shock to see that following the relatively very few rules we have established is seen as such a great challenge to a few members. The handful of bylaws which have been established to ensure contributors are treated fairly and members have a democratic influence, have relevance to the how GNOME is run and its membership though. So, I think it's the right thing to do by the people who are adversely affected by this policy to ensure we treat them fairly by observing the membership and amendment bylaws and it's the right thing thing for the community as a whole to ensure GNOME is representative of it's contributing members by not making decisions like this, lightly. I believe it is ethical for us to observe our duty to honour the rules which regulate this organisation and part of that duty is proposing amendments to the rules to seek consent to modify those which which we collectively do not agree with. This process gives us an opportunity to ensure there is compelling evidence to support our proposals so we are not just basing our actions, which affect other people, on our own preconceived ideas about what motivates those people. I might totally agree with you that having the distinction is wrong, but regarding this point I don't see it the same way. Especially regarding assumptions on what a judge would rule and so on. There's more to it than just bylaws. IMO you have too much of a programmers view on this. You could be right there, however I think it comes back to the point about whether I/you/we are able to concede that the assumptions informing applying a different criteria are weak, or not. I am able to concede that they are weak which is why I have been keen we take this problem back to first principles. Could even be that standard practice trumps bylaws. I'm not sure what you mean here, could you clarify? IMO it is better to first focus on *why* a different criteria is applied and then figure out what to do, rather than ignoring the why and going for *if* they can do that. This is something I believe could happen if an amendment were to be proposed with compelling evidence to support it so we are able to take an informed vote on it. At the moment the issue is that a decision which overrides the bylaws has already been made in the establishment of this policy, which means members are put in a position where we have to defend the bylaws but that the policy decision somehow doesn't seem to have to be defended with compelling evidence - which is the wrong way round. IMO if there's a valid concern then it really doesn't matter to spend so much time on if they're allowed or not. Therein lies the core difference in how we perceive this: I believe the concern may be valid
Re: foundation application..
On Thu, 2015-02-19 at 15:13 +, Magdalen Berns wrote: [...] It seems proportionate to try to seek compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that this is a problem but also that the suggested solution will address that problem in a representative way. Please, go ahead, collect the evidence and present it here. Saying the same over and over without anything actionable, and rejecting everything that everybody else says, does not conduct to anything. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation application..
On Thu, 2015-02-19 at 16:20 +, Magdalen Berns wrote: [...] It seems proportionate to try to seek compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that this is a problem but also that the suggested solution will address that problem in a representative way. Please, go ahead, collect the evidence and present it here. I am going to need cooperation with getting access to all the relevant data, but I am happy to proceed on the basis that I get that. This can be taken forward, as far as I am concerned. What is the relevant data that is not already public? The list of interns is interns is public, the same as the period of internships, commit logs, bug reports, mailing list discussions. People who stayed involved should have activity after their internship finished it. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation application..
[...] It seems proportionate to try to seek compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that this is a problem but also that the suggested solution will address that problem in a representative way. Please, go ahead, collect the evidence and present it here. I am going to need cooperation with getting access to all the relevant data, but I am happy to proceed on the basis that I get that. This can be taken forward, as far as I am concerned. Saying the same over and over without anything actionable, and rejecting everything that everybody else says, does not conduct to anything. There are plenty of comments on here which I have agreed with so who is everyone, to you? Magdalen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation application..
I feel like everything about this has been stated twice, can we please stop with that thread? On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 6:05 PM, Magdalen Berns m.be...@thismagpie.com wrote: [...] It seems proportionate to try to seek compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that this is a problem but also that the suggested solution will address that problem in a representative way. Please, go ahead, collect the evidence and present it here. I am going to need cooperation with getting access to all the relevant data, but I am happy to proceed on the basis that I get that. This can be taken forward, as far as I am concerned. What is the relevant data that is not already public? The list of interns is interns is public, the same as the period of internships, commit logs, bug reports, mailing list discussions. People who stayed involved should have activity after their internship finished it. Looking at that alone would bias the result. Off the top of my head, these data would need to be compared to the data of sponsored/paid employees contributing to GNOME since 2005 and that data assessed against how foundation applications have been handled each year and member engagement post acceptance/rejection of foundation memberships too. Taking all the associated errors into account and doing this should help give a fairly comprehensive overview of the situation and help us determine whether our assumptions on perceived differences between the motivations of those who are paid for shorter period of time than those who are paid for longer periods of time, are justified. At the moment we have no reason to assume that all volunteers and sponsored contributors alike will have a 100% commitment rate and there is certainly no reason to assume that any paid contributor is any more likely than any other paid contributor to stay committed to GNOME contributing once there is no financial incentive to do that, without evidence to support that theory. In other words, an early objective would be to determine whether interns are more likely to lose interest than other kinds of contributors when they are no longer being offered a financial incentive by comparing contribution behaviours between interns and other kinds of contributors. Magdalen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADEC 2015 when?
+1 [1] 1 http://www.gnome.org/news/2015/02/guadec-2015-to-happen-from-august-7-9-in-gothenburg-sweden/ On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 5:55 PM, Ekaterina Gerasimova kittykat3...@gmail.com wrote: On 23/01/2015, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 06:14:16PM +0100, Andreas Nilsson wrote: We've been planning to run the conference between August 7-9, with a flexible hackfest schedule after that. That might changedepending on the final venue, but hopefully it helps with planning! Thanks for the update! I cannot take vacation after 9 August, so hopefully no delays. Ideally one week earlier, but alas. In case you haven't heard, the dates are 7-9th August for the conference, with hackfests most likely afterwards. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- -mvh Oliver Propst ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: New GNOME Foundation Member
On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 3:13 AM, ahmad haris princeofg...@di.blankon.in wrote: Hello everyone, I'm Ahmad Haris (mostly known as princeofgiri) from Indonesia. I never contribute directly to GNOME. HI Ahmad!! Recently, I'm a part of BlankOn Developer (local linux distribution) and have experience in many different team such as Artwork, Packaging, Public Relation and Project Manager. Very nice! Today, I also supporting Local Organizer to make GNOME.ASIA 2015 come true. ^_^ Oh wow, thank you for all your upcoming hard work on GNOME ASIA! I took a look at the city and it look so lovely! I'm interesting to promoting GNOME desktop for everyone. Thanks for joining the GNOME Foundation! We expect great things from you! ^_^ sri Thank's for approval. Haris ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation application..
This is something I believe could happen if an amendment were to be proposed with compelling evidence to support it so we are able to take an informed vote on it. At the moment the issue is that a decision which overrides the bylaws has already been made in the establishment of this policy, which means members are put in a position where we have to defend the bylaws but that the policy decision somehow doesn't seem to have to be defended with compelling evidence - which is the wrong way round. I believe the bylaws are followed. As such, I don't think any amendment is needed. Further, it seems though there should be improvement, it is quite clear. Andrea showed the bit where bylaws state that actual discretion is for membership committee. This only holds true if the membership committee are viewing applications on a case by case basis, it does not mean they can decide to apply a new blanket exception to a group of illegible contributors which excludes those people from applying in the first place. For various things the foundation delegates responsibility to the various teams. These teams have then additional rules in place. That these are in the bylaws or not is not IMO unimportant. I think the rules per team (delegated area) should be clear. Absolutely, but committee policies still should take steps to avoid overriding the bylaws otherwise the rules they make are unclear as well as being invalid. IMO if there's a valid concern then it really doesn't matter to spend so much time on if they're allowed or not. Therein lies the core difference in how we perceive this: I believe the concern may be valid enough to investigate, but I do not believe the problem has been quantified and therefore I do not believe the argument for this policy is substantiated and hence I do not believe it is a waste of time to spend so much time on if they're allowed to act on the assumptions that have been made about it. Moreover, we have no idea whether this approach is actually causing more harm than good. It could actually be making more interns unwelcome and unappreciated and deterring them from continuing to contribute to the project. We are generally acting on an awful lot of assumptions by taking action to address a perceived problem which we really haven't analysed concrete data for. The problem was highlighted many years ago on various occasions: Mentors spend a lot of time, to only have the person vanish after the period. This partly due to wrong perception. You're not going to have 100% of the people stay. IMO 1 in 5 is more realistic. I guess we should track these people. I forgot when GNOME started participating in GSoC. Wikipedia shows this started in 2005. The discussions around this are nothing new. In another message regarding this I noticed people are mostly talking about the outreach program. I know little about that. I'm mostly talking about GSoC. Yes, as mentioned this has raised some questions for me, too. Thanks for clarifying your own position. I have noticed way more people whose names I don't recognize at all, but doing cool things. Unfortunately no clue where they're from. This is another problem which arises from not assessing this quantitatively. We just don't get the full picture when we solely rely on anecdotes and our own myriad personal experiences which are different to one another's. Those following, might have noticed that this was done in the opening part of the discussion and it seemed to be generally agreed that some interns do make non-trivial contributions. At least, nobody seems to have disagreed with that idea, anyway. Most interns seem to vanish quite quickly after their internship is over. Maybe not true at all anymore, there are a few exceptions, but that has been a topic of discussion for various years. The question is not just about whether they most of them vanish, although I agree that's clearly part of it. We need to be able to compare their behaviour to other kinds of contributors statistically, accounting for all our sources of error, before we can begin to make any assumptions or predictions about this model. Let's see the raw data and analyse it first. For the various programs out there (I mostly followed GSoC) people not staying with GNOME is IMO something was clearly a problem. If it still is, no clue. As you indicate, this perceived problem has been discussed a lot over the years. It seems like that's another compelling reason to explore it scientifically and determine the merits of any proposed solutions using a strategic, evidenced-based and impartial approach. Doing investigations, cool. But IMO there was enough concern regarding this. As far as I can tell, the concern comes from the membership committee wanting to reduce applications from interns who may not end up using their membership and in any case, none of the concerns raised
Re: Privacy campaign funds
On 18/02/2015, Magdalen Berns m.be...@thismagpie.com wrote: A while back we ran a $20K privacy campaign. A while later there was a discussion about what to do with the funds. Did we ever decide what to do with these? Nope. I proposed to fund interns to work on security and privacy related projects but the idea was rejected. This seems like a nice idea. Why was it rejected? It was not rejected, it was accepted. The vote to use some of the money for an OPW intern passed on the 11th November 2014. At the end, it didn't matter because Marina was able to find an external sponsor for that intern. I don't want to speak for Tobias but I think it is fair to assume in this case that he was suggesting that accepting his idea would have involved agreeing to spend at least some the money on interns - which seems like a nice idea! What are the other ideas on how to spend this money? Yes, it was agreed for some of the privacy funds to be spent on a specific intern, but other funds became available instead. It would have been silly to waste the newly found funds by not using them. I mistakenly said that Marina found those funds in my previous email, but it was in fact Karen who did that. As per my first email in this thread, the privacy funds are being spent on bounties for bug fixes in various areas of GNOME. I reported to the board on the progress at the last board meeting, the minutes from which should be published soon. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GUADEC 2015 when?
On 23/01/2015, Olav Vitters o...@vitters.nl wrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 06:14:16PM +0100, Andreas Nilsson wrote: We've been planning to run the conference between August 7-9, with a flexible hackfest schedule after that. That might changedepending on the final venue, but hopefully it helps with planning! Thanks for the update! I cannot take vacation after 9 August, so hopefully no delays. Ideally one week earlier, but alas. In case you haven't heard, the dates are 7-9th August for the conference, with hackfests most likely afterwards. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation application..
[...] It seems proportionate to try to seek compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that this is a problem but also that the suggested solution will address that problem in a representative way. Please, go ahead, collect the evidence and present it here. I am going to need cooperation with getting access to all the relevant data, but I am happy to proceed on the basis that I get that. This can be taken forward, as far as I am concerned. What is the relevant data that is not already public? The list of interns is interns is public, the same as the period of internships, commit logs, bug reports, mailing list discussions. People who stayed involved should have activity after their internship finished it. Looking at that alone would bias the result. Off the top of my head, these data would need to be compared to the data of sponsored/paid employees contributing to GNOME since 2005 and that data assessed against how foundation applications have been handled each year and member engagement post acceptance/rejection of foundation memberships too. Taking all the associated errors into account and doing this should help give a fairly comprehensive overview of the situation and help us determine whether our assumptions on perceived differences between the motivations of those who are paid for shorter period of time than those who are paid for longer periods of time, are justified. At the moment we have no reason to assume that all volunteers and sponsored contributors alike will have a 100% commitment rate and there is certainly no reason to assume that any paid contributor is any more likely than any other paid contributor to stay committed to GNOME contributing once there is no financial incentive to do that, without evidence to support that theory. In other words, an early objective would be to determine whether interns are more likely to lose interest than other kinds of contributors when they are no longer being offered a financial incentive by comparing contribution behaviours between interns and other kinds of contributors. Magdalen ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: foundation application..
On Thu, 2015-02-19 at 17:05 +, Magdalen Berns wrote: [...] It seems proportionate to try to seek compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that this is a problem but also that the suggested solution will address that problem in a representative way. Please, go ahead, collect the evidence and present it here. I am going to need cooperation with getting access to all the relevant data, but I am happy to proceed on the basis that I get that. This can be taken forward, as far as I am concerned. What is the relevant data that is not already public? The list of interns is interns is public, the same as the period of internships, commit logs, bug reports, mailing list discussions. People who stayed involved should have activity after their internship finished it. Looking at that alone would bias the result. Off the top of my head, these data would need to be compared to the data of sponsored/paid employees contributing to GNOME since 2005 and that data assessed against how foundation applications have been handled each year and member engagement post acceptance/rejection of foundation memberships too. Taking all the associated errors into account and doing this should help give a fairly comprehensive overview of the situation and help us determine whether our assumptions on perceived differences between the motivations of those who are paid for shorter period of time than those who are paid for longer periods of time, are justified. Keep it simple. The point is to check whether asking for 2 extra months of involvement to internship is based on solid ground, no only perception or anecdotes, as you claimed it is done. The archives with the decisions are public as well. -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
