Bugzilla – Bug 430603
www.o.o use term 'Member' wrongly
Last modified: 2018-05-27 12:07:14 UTC
www.opensuse.org/en/ and www.opensuse.org/How_to_Participate contain this or similar text: "Join a forum to get help or help others with openSUSE, find and report bugs, review the documentation, send your wish list for new packages and features, create and submit patches, or find other creative ways to contribute. Whatever you do, take a few minutes to discuss openSUSE with other users and become an active member of the openSUSE communities. Would you like to know more?" The footer disclaimer contains: "The content on this and other wiki pages is posted by community members who are not acting for or on behalf of Novell, ..." Searching for 'member' also reveals 'de facto member' or 'Hardcore member' All these usage of the term member are not consistent with the definition of member as presented in the newly created page www.opensuse.org/Members . My impression is that two distinct concepts use the same terms: a) one is a community member (in the traditional sense), as soon as one gets involved in one of the opensuse related activities. b) OpenSUSE Membership is the result of a formal approval process that has a) as a prerequisite.
You are right. It's not really clear what member means, because it's also a generic word. I'm not sure what i should do with this bug, imho this should be discussed on opensuse-project
Do not use a term as a general term, if it is also a well defined term. I'd suggest to rephrase all webpages that mention member as a general term.
discussion started on opensuse-project [opensuse-project] Who are the "members of openSUSE community"? on Friday 10.10
hi,any update for this bug?Or can it be closed?Thank you for your reply.
I do not believe that this can be solved by ad hoc discussion. This needs a properly defined Terminology first, then it can be approved by a forum.
I wonder what the value is. Do you think it confuses people so much? imho we'll survive without fixing this everywhere. Frankly, yes, the openSUSE 'membership' is a weird term but I lack ideas on how to solve it... And I don't think it hurts that much. If you have any (anecdotal or otherwise) evidence to the contrary, let me know and we can solve this. However, IF we do that, I'd rather not discuss it on -project but talk to some marketing ppl, come up with a better way to distinguish the two and fix the text. No need for further bike shedding on -project.
Time heals wounds. Everybody should know by now that the members of opensuse are a small subset of all opensuse community members. A 3 years old anecdote: I know of at least one enthusiastic member-to-be, who was turned away by this unexpected confusion of member and member. Instead of warm "Welcome (community) member", we offered him: "No, you are not yet worthy to become a (openSUSE) member". Yes, marketing could help to get those expectations straight.
I had a look at a few wiki pages, and frankly, I'm at a loss here. This wording issue is really hard to solve. Members or members - you'd have to explain what exactly you talk about each time you mention them which makes it all much harder to read. However, there is good news on the horizon. With the introduction of the Foundation we can give the membership a new name. We should talk about "Foundation members" and "openSUSE members", where openSUSE members just means anyone involved in openSUSE but not necessarily a member of the Foundation. That solves the problem quite elegantly and clearly and I'd be more than happy to ensure the wiki gets fixed. I'll keep this in mind when working with others on the Foundation :D
That is an elegant solution, indeed! However the horizon used to be a distant place with all kinds of carrots hanging out there. Do we have a 'when'?
We unfortunately don't. As became clear from the last board meeting, we're still at the point where we need to hire a lawyer to start drafting a good proposal of the bylaws. A decision was close with the previous management but after the takeover we kind'a have to start the process of talking to management again. It'll take a while but we still have the ambition to have a foundation at the openSUSE conference. I'm not convinced we can make that deadline but at least, let's aim for this year :D
I don't see this being related to LO (OO).
discussed during the wiki workshop at oSC18 about using or changing the words "continued and substantial contributions" on https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Members to be reflective of the current state.