What does it mean to be a foundation member?
My personal response is that it’s a recognition of the time and effort I have put into GNOME related projects, whether it be helping out at LinuxWorld, administrating art.gnome.org, or writing patches for gnome-theme-manager and helping to maintain the gtk-engines, gnome-themes and gnome-backgrounds modules.
I have a feeling my original reason for wanting to become a foundation member wasn’t quite so honourable. I needed a gnome.org mailing address to use for the frequent communication I was doing on behalf of my administration work on art.gnome.org. Since then it has grown to mean more to me, in terms of acceptance and appreciation. I can’t believe it’s been just over two years since then, and I’m still here, even more active and involved than before.
It would be interesting to find out other people’s reasons for becoming foundation members, and even how they got involved in the first place. I spent some time asking people this at Guadec, and it was quite enlightening on the subject of how to encourage people to get involved. One of my conclusions based on the experiences I have had, is that no matter how hard you encourage someone, they will not become committed unless they have enough self motivation. Free and Open Source development is all about doing things to make your own life better. If it’s not for this reason that you get involved, then I doubt you will ever find satisfaction in what you work on in any Free Software project. Maybe we should focus less on trying to encourage developers, but more on trying not to discourage them. If they’re good open source type people, then they won’t need much encouragement, but they certainly don’t need discouragement.