Apply for your GNOME membership!

1:37 am Uncategorized

Many of you have probably already seen Alberto’s post that Planet GNOME will only include members going forward.

I wanted to take the time to urge all of you who have been putting it off or have been unsure – now’s the time to apply for membership!. It may seem intimidating (I actually put off applying for membership myself until I was already Executive Director – shameful!) but all kinds of contributions to GNOME can count towards membership and you don’t need to be a maintainer or super hacker. The rules say:

Any person who has made non-trivial contributions to the GNOME project and who submits a proper application to the Membership Committee will be approved for membership. A non-trivial contribution is any activity which contributes to the development of the project at a level significantly above that expected of a normal user or fan of GNOME.

Examples of non-trivial contributions include hacking, bugfixing, extensive testing, design, documentation, translation, administration or maintenance of project-wide resources, giving GNOME talks at conferences and community coordination such as bugzilla or release management. Any activity, such as advocacy or submitting bug reports, must substantially exceed the level of contribution expected of an ordinary user or fan of the project to qualify an individual for membership in the Foundation.

Not sure if you’ve contributed enough to get your membership already? Let’s have a mini membership hackfest! Email me or find me in IRC (I’m karenesq on GIMPNet) and I’ll try to help come up with good tasks you can work on in the next few weeks. We really have a lot going on right now that we can use help with. For example, we’re working to put together our annual report and could really use more articles and other content to make it good, which probably doesn’t require a large learning curve to get started. Being a member of the Foundation is important – not only do you get a say in who’s on the board, keep your blog on the planet, qualify for travel sponsorships and get a great @gnome.org email address, but you are showing your support for a great organization that’s making the world a better place.

3 Responses

  1. Phil W Says:

    I would be disappointed to lose Dave Richards as a Planet Gnome contributor. As a significant blogger about a large municipal deployment, he has a lot to offer in the way of feedback to the gnome community. Let’s expand the scope of community contributors rather than push people away.

    – Let’s Gnome!

  2. AC Says:

    Why should Dave Richards have to jump through hoops?

    He adds more value to planet gnome that vice verse, I suspect.

    A good step toward making Planet GNOME irrelevant.

    I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, it mirrors the moves of the GNOME team with gnome-shell.

  3. karen Says:

    Folks that have already contributed to GNOME merely need to apply for membership – and the application process is really simple. It only takes a couple of minutes. The GNOME membership committee has worked hard to streamline the whole thing, and I think that’s paid off. This will help keep Planet GNOME by and for folks that care about GNOME and will cut down on posts that aren’t as relevant. I really hope that those that are elligible for membership and who are part of the Planet make it official – it’s easy to do and comes with all of those great benefits!

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